There’s been a lot of hoo-haa recently over nip-nips, hasn’t there? On the western internets, ladies are in a huff that their female nubbins are being covered up by the online censors, but in Japan it’s male nurples that are getting on everyone’s nerves.

Turns out that Japanese ladies can’t stand the sight of male chesty-buds, and in this hot weather, lots of businessmen are going out and about without undershirts on. The result? A barrage of constant eye-trauma for the ladies who say that the men who are flaunting their areolas at them are committing sexual harassment! Oh my!

If you’ve ever worked in local government in Japan as I have, or in any company that strictly adheres to Japan’s “Cool Biz” initiative, you’ll feel the pain of enduring summer sweatiness during the entire workday. “Cool Biz” is a government initiative that advises keeping thermostats at a balmy 28 degrees centigrade (82.4 degrees fahrenheit). This saves on energy big-time, but the side-effect is that workers have to spend the whole day (after a sweaty commute) baking at their desks. To make things slightly less hellish, Cool Biz also dictates that workers can dispense with long shirt sleeves and ties in order to stay fractionally cooler.

One unexpected side effect of Cool Biz, however, is apparently sexual assault in the form of nipple exposure! While almost every Japanese man wears a white undershirt underneath his shirt for modesty reasons, Cool Biz has been driving people to fling away the undershirts and just walk around in a one-layer wai-shatsu, or white shirt. Unfortunately, most summer shirts aren’t thick enough to disguise the male nips underneath, meaning they’ve been shining through in all their glory!

▼ Sometimes you just gotta air ’em out!

Flickr – Kyknoord

Japan’s OLs (“office ladies”) and other female members of the workforce have been taking to the internet to express their ire at all this uncensored man flesh. We reported once before how male nubbins make Japanese ladies squirm with disgust, and it seems they don’t even make concessions for the poor fellas during this sauna-like weather!

Television station Nihon Terebi recently ran a section on discussion panel show “ZIP!” polling 100 men on undershirts. Ten percent of participants responded that they dispense with undershirts during hot weather, and since small-scale polls are TOTALLY indicative of widespread trends, we can extrapolate that to mean that 10 percent of the Japanese male population is currently walking around with visible nips – imagine that!

According to the guys, their reasons for such blatant nipple-flashing boiled down to “It’s hot and I don’t care”, which you can probably understand if you’ve endured Japanese Cool Biz before and have any compassion for your fellow humans. Unfortunately, the ladies who commented were pretty ruthless in their condemnation of this lackadaisical attitude to flesh-flashing.

Apparently, women found it difficult to look such men in the eye, and in some cases even reported a feeling of being sexually harassed. Others reported that with all the nipples everywhere, they found it difficult to concentrate on their work, with many falling behind and failing to hit quotas as a result!

Personally, we feel like maybe, just maybe, some ladies are being a little TOO squeamish about all this. Are nip-nips really such a big deal? What do you think?

Source: Niconico News via Hachima Kikou
Main Image: Flickr – SnippyHolloW