Video about inertia and gravity garners baffled and mixed reactions.
As a country with a penchant for fashion and an unabashed love of breasts, Japan spends a lot of time thinking about cute and/or sexy lingerie. But while there’s definitely an aesthetic element to intimate apparel, the primary purpose of a bra is to support the wearer’s breasts, the importance of which is being driven home in a very unusual way in a new video.
The video opens with a women in a lab coat asking if we know the weight of a woman’s bust. She assumes we don’t, since the nature of videos means she can’t hear us, and thus begins a procession of otherwise topless mean wearing bras. But these are no ordinary bras, because their cups hold not breasts, but small animals.
According to the video, the breasts of a woman with an A-cup bust weigh as much as a pair of cockatoos. Other equivalents are Guinea pigs for B cups, hedgehogs for C cups, rabbits for D cups, and chickens for E cups.
With that explanation out of the way, the woman then asks us to consider what will happen to all that extra torso weight during vigorous exercise. So the men begin running, jumping rope, boxing, and playing tennis and volleyball. For each, slow-motion close-ups show the animals bouncing and swaying within the bra compartments as inertia wants them to stay in place as the men’s upper bodies twist and go through other sudden motions.
After examining a multi-dimensional representation of the cups’ movement and remarking on how extensive the jostling is, the researcher peels off her lab coat, revealing that she’s wearing an extra-supportive sports bra from Japanese lingerie-maker Wacoal.
The video definitely makes a dramatic point about the discomfort that women can experience from insufficient bra support. Some online commenters, though, are also concerned about how the animals in the ad felt. While the close-ups could mean there’s some sort of camera trickery going on here, if those are indeed real, live animals being bounced around like that, odds are they’re not too happy about it.
However, even if actual animals were used in the manner implied, Wacoal might be off the hook. The video doesn’t appear on the company’s website or official YouTube channel, and only attracted attention in Japan after a Twitter user shared screen captures and a link to the video on LiveLeak. There’s also the fact that while the woman in the video is speaking Japanese, and the large-font text that names the animals and sports is Japanese as well, the video’s hard subtitles are in Chinese.
As such, even though the video is touting the benefits of Wacoal’s sports bras, there’s a chance that it’s not actually a Wacoal advertisement, and is instead one of those outlandish concept videos that marketing firms sometimes create to show off their talents without actually being commissioned or endorsed by the company whose products are featured. If that’s the case, then as strange as the video is, Wacoal’s oddest marketing maneuver would still be the time they encouraged us all to buy panties for our moms, and the weirdest official breast weights the ones from this anime.
Sources: Twitter/@Kan_TORI, LiveLeak via Hachima Kiko
Top image: LiveLeak