Experiment provides crucial information in the important field of panty shot research.
As we’ve seen before, anime and manga aren’t always completely honest with us. When depicting such everyday actions such as kissing, bathing, peeing, or sword fighting, it turns out that Japans animation and comic artists sometimes take liberties with how the natural world works.
But otaku are nothing if not optimistic, and just because certain scenarios don’t play out in anime and manga as they would in real life doesn’t mean that everything those media have shown us is a lie. So a team of Japanese comedians, including iconic duo Downtown, decided to run a series of experiments to confirm or deny the veracity of one of anime’s proudest visual traditions: a sudden gust of wind blowing up a schoolgirl’s skirt and revealing her panties for all to see.
The scholarly researchers decided to test three different methods. The first test begins at the video’s 0:45 mark, in which former Japanese national soccer team member Naoki Ihara lends his athletic prowess to the endeavor. Many anime feature a scene of the panicked protagonist sprinting past a schoolgirl and flipping up her skirt in the process, but will Ihara’s pro athlete-caliber speed of 30 kilometers (19 miles) per hour be enough to produce the desired result?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPjLr_h8-iA&feature=youtu.be
Following Ihara’s dash, the team also checks the effect of buzzing a schoolgirl with a scooter traveling 60 kilometers (37 miles) per hour at the 1:30 point of the video, and closes out the trials by speeding past a test mannequin in a Porsche doing 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour at 1:55.
If you’re not in a position to watch the video, we’ll summarize the results for you. Despite running full tilt past the schoolgirl, Ihara is only able to produce enough atmospheric disturbance to barely cause her hem to sway. The scooter is only slightly more effective, and even though the test subject’s short skirt means it wouldn’t have to be lifted much to settle the “Solid or striped?” question, the answer is still left to the judges’ imagination.
However, the Porsche passes the test with flying colors, creating a rising draft under the skirt that lifts it high and long enough for onlookers to clearly see what’s underneath.
So it turns out that driving a Porsche actually can be an effective way to find out what kind of lingerie a woman is wearing, although not in the way some German sports car-desiring would-be ladies’ men might envision. But before you go camping out by the side of the road in hope of seeing some panties, be aware that 110 kilometers per hour is far above even expressway speed limits in Japan, so this is a phenomena you’re unlikely to observe on the streets here. But in this one case, though, it looks like you really can trust what you see in anime and manga.
Casey loves a spirited drive as much as the next guy who goes driving in the mountains for fun at 3 a.m., but asks that you follow him on Twitter instead of almost running over schoolgirls in the name of “science.”
Source, top image: YouTube/綜藝頻道