your comment, like so many other prudish comments in this forum, baffle me.

i can appreciate a need to censor vulgar nudity and explicit sexuality, but this video was hardly either of those. it was simply a happy, crappy japanese dance video with an artful emphasis of the naked body.

Please look at this high resolution photo and tell me they are not body suits:
http://www.japanprobe.com/2007/01/bbb/11676034784583afc.jpg

By the way, their “packages” are mushrooms. Think of it in the way westerners think of little leaves covering up naked people.

I guess you wouldn’t mind your mother topless bouncing around with a clown because that wouldn’t be “obscene”. Right? You should have no problem with that.

Great show I wish there was anything on worth watching last night. 500 channels and nothing on.

Keep up the good work

As for whether or not NHK knew this was going to happen, according to one of the numerous articles which appeared on Yahoo Japan New Years morning, NHK said they didn’t know about the body suit stunt since in the final dress rehearsal a few hours before the televised performance, the dancers appeared in bikini outfits (and so the producers thought that was how the performance would go off). Knowing how NHK prefers to err on the side of conservatism on programs like Kouhaku, this explanation doesn’t sound too far fetched. Of course, they probably should have known to expect something when they invited him.

OZMA more than likely pulled a fast one and the realistic body suits ended up catching many off guard since from afar (at NHK Hall) and on standard def TV, it would have been easy to mistake it as real (on the high def still captures I saw, it was easy to tell they were body suits). So I guess Yukie Nakama’s surprised reaction was authentic since it probably looked real from where she was standing. I bet the old folks in the hall had some priceless looks on their face.

The most hilarious thing about this is where nudity is expected in Japan (like on some tv shows, in some daily magazines and manga, public sento’s, onsen, etc), most nihonjin wouldn’t care but since this was Kouhaku on NHK, the nudity even if fake was just unacceptable resulting in a greater knee jerk reaction by some viewers.

NHK’s conservatism doesn’t always mean they shy away from real nudity either as they’ve had documentaries and other programs which included some. There was a documentary about an artist and it had a mother and her daughter both totally naked who were painted and wrapped in paper to create the artwork the artist wanted, another with the usual onsen visits with plenty of naked men walking around oblivious to the camera crew. I also remember one of the “educational” drama’s NHK aired last summer about one young school boy’s insecurity with his penis size and how the show had so many implied references including one scene where a small group of boys are standing in a circle comparing and another scene after swimming class where he is day dreaming it grew large so he proudly stood on a desk and dropped his shorts (including a brief shot of part of his bare ass) so a few of his classmates (which included one shirtless girl) could take a gander at it. So it is not like Japanese are prudes when it comes to this stuff but when it happens (even if it turns out to be fake) where it isn’t supposed to like Kouhaku, all hell breaks loose. Too funny (but this kind of dichotomy is what makes Japan daily life enjoyable at times).

English sounds “cool.” It’s hard to find a Japanese pop song that doesn’t contain English words…

If NHK knew about this it is sad for them. Much like Janet Jackson and that other nobody who had to pull a skin stunt on TV to compensate for poor music ability, DJ Ozuma resorts to the same thing. Sadly, NHK went along. It shoes that the children have taken over the studio.

Especially now when Japanese music has a chance to break into the American market as a quality alternative (Yoshida Brothers music is featured on the Wii commercials here), this stunt will set Japanese music back to the “bubblegum pop” days.

Its especially bad because the show highlighted some good new talent and saw a return of Dreams Come True with her excellent vocals. Oh well.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/zsvlos

I wonder if we’ll see more gaijins willing to pay the license fee now?

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