If you need a picture of a young woman blowing a conch shell or watching the end of the world, you’ll find them here.
One of the most interesting aspects of business is the concept of niche marketing. The idea of finding a small but viable section of the market and making something that perfectly fits its needs has an almost romantic appeal to it, as it represents a deep and unique meeting of the minds.
The newly launched Japanese website Sukima Nurse is reaching out to some of the more unusual minds out there. On the surface, it seems like Sukima Nurse would have a pretty broad appeal. The website is a collection of free-to-use photos of a nurse and patient taken in and around a hospital, which would ordinarily present a variety of possible business, public awareness, and online publishing applications.
The fact that the first nurse model featured on the site is a young woman with a nice smile also seems like it would help draw in a large number of users.
However, Sukima Nurse isn’t any ordinary photo collection. As stated on the website’s front page:
This is a free-use nurse photo website designed to meet the needs of the maniac one percent of the population which has a demand for this sort of thing. The lineup of photos will satisfy users who have been unimpressed with other photo collection sites! If you’re able to make use of these photos, please do so.
That unconfident self-introduction might sound like Sukima Nurse is selling itself short, but honestly, it’s got a point. For example, how many people out there were desperately searching for a photo of a nurse standing in a concrete-sided river holding a katana?
▼ For anyone who raised their hand, your long quest is at an end.
Like the location, but not the bladed instrument you were looking for? No problem, because there’s also this shot of the same health-care professional eating a chunk of ham skewered on a knife.
Things only get stranger inside the hospital, where the currently available photos include “Nurse Blowing Into a Conch Shell…”
…”Nurse Surrounded by Plastic Bottles and Paralyzed with Fear…”
…and, perhaps the most disturbing shot in the collection, “Nurse Showing Off Her Nerves of Steel by Sticking Scissors in Her Mouth and Going Snip-Snip.”
▼ Do-it-yourself tonsillectomy?
There are a few interior scenes that seem like they have some practical use. This one, with the nurse holding up fans made of stacks of 10,000-yen (US$90) bills could be used for a scathing editorial about profit-motivated practices in the medical sector.
Meanwhile, “Nurse Imagining Herself Cooking Short Ribs” would be a good fit for a blog post about evaluating your job satisfaction, since daydreaming about skipping out on work to get some yakiniku is probably a sign that you’re not all that happy in your current position.
On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which anyone would need a photo of “Nurse Imagining Herself Imagining Herself Imagining Herself Cooking Short Ribs.”
There’s actually a surprising amount of food to be found on Sukima Nurse, whether it’s a snapshot of the star sneaking a pizza into a storm drain…
…or balancing two lumps of mentaiko (spicy cod roe) on her wrists on what must a very slow day at work.
Violence is also a recurring theme, such as when she’s crawling out from under a patient’s bed with an ax…
▼ Even if it’s sterilized, there’s no way that’s proper surgery equipment.
…or working with more modern death-dealing devices, as in “Nurse Casually Wondering Whether She Should Cut the Blue or Red Wire on a Time Bomb.”
▼ If she picks the wrong one, they’ll both be cooked like short ribs!
Of course, whether she’s able to defuse the bomb or not will become irrelevant once the events of “Nurse Watching the Collapse of the World from a Window” transpire.
▼ She looks oddly pleased with this situation.
Going from the scary to the surreal, we see the patient entering a room to find a pineapple and a bunch of bananas are also recuperating from some sort of medical procedure.
This suggests that foodstuffs have become sentient, which would explain why the patient and nurse later resort to chowing down on a swimming kickboard.
And finally, remember when we said the photo of the nurse sticking scissors down her throat only might be the most disturbing photo on the site? That’s because you could make an argument that title should instead go to the more subtly unsettling “Nurse Concerned About the White String-Like Thing Coming Out of Her Ear.”
All these and more can be found on the Sukima Nurse website, which can be found here. If you, or anyone you know, should happen to know a good use for them, please, let us know, because we’re pretty baffled by the whole thing.
Source: Sukima Nurse via IT Media
Top image: Sukima Nurse (1, 2) (edited by RocketNews24)
Insert images: Sukima Nurse (1, 2, 3, 4) (edited by RocketNews24)
Follow Casey on Twitter, where he might have pursued a career in the medical field if it had meant getting a free pineapple every day.