Above here you can see the underground station of Shinjuku, Tokyo – one of the busiest gateways to the city, with 3.6 million travelers using it every day. Stumbling into crowds there is normal, but the situation has recently worsened.
As a matter of fact, if you look closer you’ll notice the hundreds of girls amassed right on the edge of the platform, preventing citizens to get on and off the trains… yet standing clear of the main passage. The real subject in the photo is in fact the giant billboard, capable of arousing the following kind of reaction:
Yup. Those girls (and a boy, apparently) are passionately licking the privates of the guys on the wall, who are the members of a boy band called Arashi. These overenthusiastic exhibitions of worship are reported to be the norm there – at least since the start of an advertising campaign involving daily-changed posters showing the “idols”. Quotation marks are obligatory, given that the band was created by a producer who chose its components… from a model agency catalog.
What I really wanted to point out, however, was how Japanese society is notoriously shy about public shows of affection – and clearly even more about these erotic pantomimes. Such behavior is then even more surprising, but it demonstrates how easy sexual preferences can be influenced, even breaking deep-seated social norms. Now ask yourself: what part of your erotic tastes is really “yours”, and how much the result of the media pressure we are all subjected to every day?