Election broadcasts are a bit of a circus in Japan. Legally, the public broadcaster NHK is obliged to show them and this is why so many fringe and wacky candidates ultimately pay to stand for election, because it means they’re guaranteed several minutes of fame.
This year is particularly strange with the July election for Tokyo governor, since there are so many candidates (but only two or three serious ones). Already, the “poster hijacks” by the NHK Party, which has sold its candidates’ slots to anyone willing to pay, have generated lots of attention, as have the nude images of a woman on Yusuke Kawai’s posters that police ordered to be removed.
Kawai dressed up as the Joker and laughed his way through his recent broadcast.
One of the best things about these NHK broadcasts is watching the sign language interpreter behind them trying their best to replicate the weirdness from the candidate.
But how do you interpret Airi Uchino’s broadcast, in which the wannabe governor of Tokyo stripped naked?!
In the end, though she took her shirt off, Airi Uchino’s modesty was protected by the name plate on the table and by the strapless clothing she was wearing underneath, so this was arguably false advertising (from a politician! Shocking!) or bait and switch.
Uchino is standing as a candidate for the Watch My Cute Political Speech Broadcast Party and, well, the name says it all. (She’s also affiliated with, you guessed it, the NHK Party.)
This is not the first instance of nudity in such an election broadcast. Perennial candidate Teruki Goto did it in 2020 too, though even he was wearing a loincloth.
