Bra maker boosts voter turnout with a different kind of ballot box stuffing

[Anchorman]

A women's undergarment company has come up with a surefire way to help voters keep abreast of national politics ahead of July's House of Councilors vote -- an election bra!

With voter turnouts in the doldrums over the past few years, Shukan Taishu (6/11) says bra maker Triumph International is aiming to use the lingerie to raise the profile of Japanese elections.

"While increasing interest in getting people to vote, we also developed a bra that would dramatically raise the national interest in the bust," a Triumph International spokesman tells Shukan Taishu.

Triumph's Election Bra is made of a sparkling silver, metallic fabric modeled on a ballot box. A band beneath the bra contains a slit filled with tags that look like voting slips and are actually made using the same type of paper. The voting slips are sewed into the band, while a tiny waist pouch can also be used to store writing equipment used to fill out votes.

Each bra apparently costs about 60,000 yen to make, but the Election Bra will not be put up for sale.

Triumph decked out a few models in the Election Bra and got them to walk around the trendy Tokyo district of Shibuya to promote the product and drum up awareness of the upcoming ballot.

Bras first arrived in Japan in the mid-1920s. Though "lifts and raises" was almost selected as one of the terms of the year a few years back when a lingerie maker used it as copy in an ad campaign, attitudes toward the undergarment have changed considerably here since the undergarment was first introduced to the market.

"Perfect for any woman no matter how much breast milk she leaks," Shukan Taishu quotes the copy from an early Japanese bra ad, then adds another example of the changing times. "Regardless of how ample or buxom a woman may be, this brassiere will shape the bosom so that it becomes invisible and makes anyone look delicate." (By Ryann Connell)