have undies, the otakus will follow

Every Sunday, the street of akihabara is closed to vehicles to allow pedestrians the much needed breathing space to fully enjoy shopping and sight seeing in the famous ‘Electric Town’ of Tokyo. The empty space provided also gave certain people certain opportunities: cosplayers to show-off their latest anime costumes, wanna-be singers to promote their self-fund cds, street performers to show-off their skills, café attendants dressed in French maid costume to promote their café, and also gravure idols to show some skin for the sake of promoting their latest work.

And no gravure idol is as crazy as asuka sawamoto (沢本あすか), who has caused quite a stir in the otaku community when she went to the street, lift up her skirt and let hundreds of perverts took pictures of her undies. After the her outrageous 'performance', she climbed down the railings to give out flyers to promote her next gig.

Apparently, these perverts were called 'low-anglers' (ローアングラー), because they only took pictures from low angles; and it's the latest 'trend' in akihabara among fans of japanese 'small-time' idols. And all of this happened on a public road, and can be seen by everyone including children passing by.

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What a way to enflame a discussion about how far could freedom of expression and morality go along. Every time she did this, hundreds of low-anglers would flood the streets and with their mobile phones and some, expensive SLR cameras, took pictures of her in ‘funny’ positions and angles.

This being Japan, the police did nothing (because the police are also perverts); well at least until a tv program made a story about it. Eventually, she got caught and charged with public disturbance (迷惑防止条例違反) and to the dismay of her ‘fans’, it was revealed that she was actually 31 years old, 10 years older than what she told the press.

So now the underground Japanese bbs were filled with otaku jokes about how stupid they are, chasing a slutty obasan around with their mobile phones. More pics here .<--- click the link for a more detailed story (japanese).

Talking about such pervertness is always fun, but this time, it’s so over the top that I can’t even make one joke. Sometimes, akihabara is just too much. Remember, she was caught not because of her shameless performance, but of what she had encouraged: that is making huge crowds that disturbed other pedestrian and the flow of traffic.

Man, what a crazy place. Akihabara, enough is enough!