JR: “Naked Festival” Posters = Sexual Harassment
A 1,000-year-old “naked festival” in which men gather in loincloths to pray for good luck is under fire today because an advertisement poster created by the Iwate Prefecture town that hosts the event has been banned by Japan Railways for “sexual harassment.”
Mainichi has the story:
The Oshu Municipal Government had sought permission from the Morioka branch of JR East to display the posters advertising Kokuseki Temple’s Somin Festival at stations, but JR East said the posters could not be displayed unless the images were changed.
“As sexual harassment becomes more of a problem, the standards for displaying posters in public spaces are becoming stricter,” a representative of the Morioka branch of JR East explained. “It wasn’t just that it was out of line because there was nakedness; the pictures showed things that were particularly unpleasant for women, such as chest hair, and it was decided that showing them things they didn’t want to see was sexual harassment.”
FTV asked some random women about the poster, and most of them did not consider the poster to be sexual harassment:
ATV’s news segment selectively aired clips of younger women grossed out by the poster:
Most of those opposed to the poster focused their objections on the beard and body hair of the model. This indeed appears to be the biggest issue with the poster when you compare it to the 2006 poster for the same event, which had plenty of loincloths but didn’t get any complaints when JR East approved its placement in many stations:
The message seems pretty clear: beard + body hair = too manly. Unfortunately, the Oshu Municipal Government was not aware that their poster was overflowing with offensively hairy manliness, and they will now be unable to promote their festival as they had originally planned.
