Tokyo: Tokyo's subway authority will allow a station advertisement featuring a nude and pregnant Britney Spears, officials said today, dropping an earlier plan to censor the photo.
HB Japan, Inc, publisher of the Japanese edition of Harper's Bazaar, plans to rent ad space at the posh Omotesando station next week to promote its October issue with Spears posing naked on the cover.
The ad, in which Spears bares her belly but covers her breasts with her hands, is the same one used in the August issue of the American edition that hit US newsstands last month.
Tokyo Metro Co's obscenity screening team, however, initially raised objections to the nudity and asked HB Japan to modify the photograph during negotiations last month.
The publisher reluctantly agreed to blacken out the image from the waist down - covering most of the pop star's belly and thighs - but had planned to write in the black space: "in this place we are not allowed to exercise the same level of freedom of expression as the original Harper's Bazaar."
But today, Tokyo Metro said it would allow full presentation of the photo as an exception to its obscenity rule, saying it understood the publisher's intention was to portray a happy mother - not to be sexually explicit.
The magazine's deputy chief editor, Kayoko Higashino, welcomed the move. "I'm glad the subway officials understood the meaning of the photo," she said.
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