Meanwhile, in Japan… (or: The Land of the Rising Men’s Bra)

A Bra for Dudes

Back when I worked at Shopify, I racked my brains trying to think up an idea for an online store, but couldn’t come up with one that hadn’t already been done by hundreds of other vendors with a considerable head start. I once joked with my co-worker Edward that I should sell “manties” — panties for men into that sort of kink — and now I know that I wasn’t that far off from the next big thing in online shopping:

Japan, still at the vanguard of exporting high weirdness to the rest of the world, is the home of the online shop Rakuten, which boasts page after page of dudes’ over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders. Here’s a screenshot:

Rakuten’s customers come from all over the world. According to Rocket News 24 (my go-to site for all sorts of Asian WTF), a satisfied customer from England says that wearing a men’s bra makes him feel “relieved and protected”. Another from Italy talked about the back-support benefits of the male brassiere. Other men say it feels like a sort of security blanket.

Before these guys discovered the “BROssiere’s” benefits, they had to have some reason to try them on first. Rocket News 24 reports a couple of reasons, including losing a bet, an excuse that sounds as lame as explaining to the folks at the emergency room that you just happened to be at home in the nude, fell over backwards, and that is the perfectly innocent explanation why you now have a beer bottle up your ass.

If any of you can read Japanese, could you please tell me what’s this ad says? I like Topless Robot’s interpretation of its text as “Halo of Awesome”, but I’m sure that’s not an accurate translation:

Ironically, for all the feelings of safety, support, and security that the male bra provides its wearers, it’s also a source of great anxiety. In the world of men, where an effective insult is “You know what we calls guys like you? Chicks!“, I’m sure a male bra wearer, like a Nickelback fan, secret furry or Surface RT owner, lives in perpetual shame and fear of being found out.

The “Male Bra” Segment from The World of Golden Eggs

How did I not know of the existence of the anime series The World of Golden Eggs? It’s every little bit as twisted as you’d imagine a Japanese comedy series set in a midwestern rural American high school could be. It’s so very, very wrong.

Here’s a segment from The World of Golden Eggs in which one bodybuilding jock asks another why he’s wearing a bra. “It’s not a bra! It’s a supporter for my pecs!” replies the other, in this sequence in which they beat a joke to death much better than Family Guy ever has: