Upskirt photos lead Japanese high school to redesign cheerleader uniforms

Ahead of Japan’s national baseball tournament, one school’s strategy sessions includes a plan to prevent peeping photography.

This year’s iteration of the annual Japanese High School Baseball Invitational Tournament, also known as the Spring Koshien tournament, will be starting soon. Among the 32 teams competing will be Takasaki University of Health and Welfare High School, representing Gunma Prefecture.

Though they’ve never won, this isn’t Takasaki’s first time in the tournament. 2024 will be their second year in a row to take part in the contest, and seventh overall. With the start of the tournament fast approaching, naturally the school is sifting through the experience it’s acquired over its previous Spring Koshiens and looking for ways to applying that knowledge to this year’s trip, and one change it’s making is to its cheerleaders’ uniforms: no more skirts.

During the 2023 tournament, Takasaki says that the its cheerleaders in the student section of the stands were the victims of upskirt photography. The problem had occurred in previous years as well, the school says, sometimes with voyeurs posing as media members covering the game in order to get into position to take the unscrupulous photos, taking advantage of the intense national sports news coverage that gets focused on the games during the roughly week-and-a-half tournament.

So Takasaki is making a change and redesigning its cheerleaders’ outfits. When the squad shows up at Koshien Stadium later this month, they’ll be wearing shorts instead of skirts, and their shirts will also match those of the baseball players’ uniforms. “Voyeuristic photos can potentially cause lifelong emotional damage to our students,” says Takasaki teacher Kohei Shiozawa regarding the redesign, adding that some students have also said that they’d like to cheer for the team in outfits that more closely resemble the players’ uniforms.

The tournament begins on March 18.

Source: NHK News Web
Top image: Pakutaso
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