Men's 'sexually harassing' hairy chests get under gals' skin

Once a symbol of virility, hairy chests now gross out enough Japanese to see their exposure judged as a form of sexual harassment, according to Sunday Mainichi (1/27).

Earlier this month, East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) banned the display of a poster advertising the 1,000-year-old Somin Festival because it featured a photo of a loincloth-clad man with a bare but hairy chest.

JR East said it couldn't let festival organizers display the poster because it was sexually harassing in that many women were likely to find it offensive.

Tourism officials in the Iwate Prefecture city of Oshu were less than pleased by the response generated by the ban.

"There were some complaints about the poster being gross, but when you're promoting a traditional event it's only natural you put some pictures on posters plugging it," a spokesman for the Oshu Tourism Association tells Sunday Mainichi. "Most of the comments we received about the poster were very supportive of it."

Nonetheless, attitudes toward hairy chests are changing in Japan, where hirsute types like Sean Connery and baseball star Shigeo Nagashima once set many women's heart aflutter by showing off their crops.

Still, attitudes haven't changed that much, with only 20 percent of women in their 30s finding chest hair a turn off, according to a poll by the weekly. And, given a choice between hair on the chest, legs or armpits, 70 percent of the surveyed women said that armpit hair on a man was the more repulsive choice.

Even JR East qualifies its ban on the controversial festival poster.

"We're not saying that nudity or hairy chests should all be banned," a spokesman for the railroad company says. "You've got to understand that when we saw the poster, it was still in its development stages and the bottom quarter of the image has since been taken up by a list of details of the event, which covered up the lower half of the pictured man's belly. We only asked for the belly to be covered. An unknown number of people could see the image and we didn't want to promote something that could cause offense."

Even if chest hair isn't quite putting lots of people ill at ease at the moment, there's no guarantee this will always be the case. Indeed, beauty salon chain TBC has found its chest hair removal plan for men gaining in popularity ever year since its 1999 inception.

"Most demand for chest hair removal peaks in the months from May to July, with many of the gentlemen worried about chest hair poking out of their shirts," a TBC spokesman tells Sunday Mainichi. "There aren't many people who have a positive image of chest hair and even if they are not particularly hirsute, there is still a strong demand to remove whatever unsightly hair they do have there."