“I was a bit shy at first,” admits a 26-year-old freeter who strips by night. Women want to appeal sexually to crowds of men. “In the past,” psychologist Takashi Tomita tells the magazine, “women who got naked did it purely for money. “Everybody’s attention fixed on my privates, and I’m thinking, ‘That’s raw male instinct.’ And I was hooked.” “The customers’ response is interesting,” muses a 22-year-old student whose professors probably don’t know how she moonlights. Strip clubs, too, whatever other problems they may have, will apparently never go out of business for want of strippers. At first I was thinking just of the photographs, but the click of the shutter, the flare of the flash… I got so excited I couldn’t restrain myself.” The photographer made no effort to restrain her, and “I’d never been so wild before. “I paid a photographer 30,000 yen, and we went to a hotel. “I wanted some beautiful nudes of myself while I’m still young,” explains a 26-year-old OL. “I love it when men praise my nude body.” What reasons? “I just happen to think my body is extraordinarily beautiful,” says a 21-year-old fourth-year university student. Ninety percent of them, editors say, are of amateurs – not porn stars, not models or even aspiring models, just ordinary women stretching the conventional boundaries for reasons of their own.

To say nothing of men’s magazines, which claim to be deluged with photos submitted for publication. By Shukan Gendai’s reckoning, that would mean one woman in 500 has appeared in an AV. Plainest of all is the fact that Japan is awash in nude photos and videos – the so-called “adult videos” (AVs), produced at a rate of some 10,000 a year. Does that prove it’s a universal taste? Maybe not, but other facts at least suggest it, in the magazine view. Well, a photographer would naturally encounter women inclined that way. They say they’re embarrassed, but that’s just words.” “I’ve been photographing amateur female nudes for more than 20 years,” says photographer Jiro Wada, “and my feeling is that women really love being photographed naked.

Shukan Gendai (Nov 27) poses an intriguing question: “Why are Japanese women so eager to bare themselves?”

Freeter japan