Sunday, August 06, 2006

Stripping back to bare facts and naked truths about neo-nudism in Japan


Leave it to Japan to be promote the nudist lifestyle as enhancing productivity.
Yasuyo works from home as an IT consultant, going out only when she has to give a presentation or attend a meeting. She punctuates her work with some vacuuming, cleaning and preparing meals. It's a life like any other woman, except as AERA (8/7) notes, Yasuyo does everything in the nude.

Yasuyo is one of Japan's growing throng of neo-nudists, or newdists, if you will. The nudist boom is being buffered by more celebrities revealing they spend much of their private lives in their birthday suits, the emergence of Ekoda-chan, a popular manga character whose entire family goes naked to save on energy costs, and the mixi SNS, which has over 1,000 members of its "naked families" group.

"I take off my panties and strip fully nude, which unconsciously seems to bring me closer to what I'm really feeling, which in turn makes me feel like I'm going to come up with productive thoughts," Yasuyo tells AERA.

Earlier this year, a Californian IT company conducted a worldwide survey, finding that about 10 percent of men and women who worked from home did so while naked. And Japanese nudists are catching on, like Satoshi, who runs an IT company.

"I'm more creative when I'm naked," he says. "When work is really pressuring me, I head out naked onto my verandah and gaze out into the distance while I think. Nakedness gives you a liberating feeling you couldn't possibly expect to find in a corporate atmosphere and I think there have been many occasions when it has directed me toward arriving at a decent business plan."

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