Terry Prone: Japanese women protesting leg hair harassment are way ahead of us

Japanese women are revolting at the sight of their male colleagues' hairy uncovered limbs. Foot-phobic Terry Prone is entirely on board with their campaign 

A man prepared to come to work in his shorts is not that far away from wearing sandals or flip-flops into the bargain.

The heat of the last few weeks has led to a curious outbreak of magical thinking, whereby people who have found it miserably hot for far too long have been kind of afraid to say it, in case we never get another half-warm day.

In fact, our 30 Celsius summer is nothing on what the Japanese have been experiencing. They’ve been up there in the 40s and their Meteorological Agency have even invented a new meteorological category called “kokushobi.” Kokushobi means any day where the temperature is higher than 40, and literally means “a brutally hot day.” 

In the face of this unprecedented but probably permanent phenomenon, the Japanese government has taken action, telling its people to strip, more or less. The advice is that for the duration of these brutally hot days, men, for example, should abandon the usual formal dress code where they work, and lash into shortsleeved polo shirts and shorts. That proposal, as might be expected, went down well with the lads. Less so with the girls. Looking at the physical consequences of this new clothing trend, Japanese women didn’t like it one bit. They thought, at the very least, that it made their male colleagues look untidy.

But that was just the beginning. Some women at work took the shorts personally. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they took the consequences of the shorts personally. Not prepared to let their Meteorological Agency own the franchise on inventing innovative terms, women at work came up with a new offence. “Leg hair harassment” is what they called the icky experience of surveying the uncovered lower limbs of men with whom they work.

Now, you can shrug this off as excessive. You can further say that many of the male persuasion have legs that, if not as smooth as if they’d recently taken a little pink razor to it, are certainly no more than respectably hirsute. But, in truth, each one of us, from even the most cursory experience with shorts, carries the memory of at least one guy whose legs made them looked like a permed bear.

The thing is that a man prepared to come to work in his shorts is not that far away from wearing sandals or flip-flops into the bargain. And a bear-permed leg man is overwhelmingly likely to have furry tops to his feet and even spurts of hair on each individual toe. There’s no getting around the awfulness of that. People mock and deride men who wear socks with sandals, but at least those socks prevent the rest of us being assaulted by hairiness that would otherwise be decently concealed. A recent New Yorker cartoon showed a woman looking glumly at a man’s feet, naked in their sandals, and muttering “I never agreed to an open-toed relationship.” 

 It has to be admitted that baring the male leg has positive health implications. I know of two guys who had melanomas on their lower limbs identified by unqualified amateurs whose notions were supported by subsequent medical tests. I should admit that this is an area of unfulfilled and probably unfulfillable ambition on my part, me having always wanted to be the one to tell a friend — or even a stranger — what ails them. 

Shamingly, I once acted on this yearning by contacting a politician I didn’t know from a hole in the ground, to suggest she have a mole checked out. Bless her, not only did she good-humouredly respond to this privacy invasion but told me four other people had also contacted her after a recent TV appearance, and she had subjected the mole to forensic examination which revealed that it was healthy out. This was mortifying, not just because of being in the wrong, which is the story of my life, but because of being in the wrong with a bunch of other people. That experience was like when a guest tells a radio presenter “everybody asks me that question”, which implies that the presenter has never had an original thought in their life, which, in fairness, is often the case.

Growth of tattoos

In addition to hairiness, innocent by-standers, here and in Japan, are increasingly subjected to tattoos, with curlicues going everywhere. You can’t exactly walk around a guy to check where his curlicues go, but tattoos are performative in nature. Even the women who think an ankle tattoo of a bluebird is cute want you to notice it. But what do you do if the big lump of muscle at the back of a guy’s leg reads “Mammy”? Pretend you didn’t see it, ask if his mother appreciates her permanent position on his person or wonder about what his life partner thinks about it?

Once baby feet have morphed into real feet, they should be covered up.

All of which might be assumed to be sexist and anti-man on my part, were it not for the fact that my hatred of naked feet applies to all genders and most ages. 

Once baby feet have morphed into real feet, concealment should be the order of the day but never is. On the contrary, as witnessed by the number of people now making their living out of handling the feet of others, not to mention the fish. Those fish being the ones in some beauty salons where they lie in wait in their tank for the arrival of a foot or two, at which point they start nibbling away at dead skin.

If faced with a career change choice, I would rather pick up dog poop, catch rats or clean out sewers on a daily basis than be a chiropodist or a pedicurist. People’s naked feet are so horrible. Especially their big toes. There’s a kind of big toe that has a small waist and then a big fat bit where the nail sits and it has such a self-satisfied smug look to it, it’s a miracle that pedicurists don’t baulk at the prospect of prettifying it/them. But pedicurists either have limited career choices or boundless commitment, because going out of doors these last few weeks have exposed the unwary to feet with nails professionally painted in the most exotic patterns, sometimes accessorized with toe-rings and ankle-bracelets.

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All of which are bad enough, but then the feet — mostly the female version — get stuffed into strappy sandals where the toes work around the straps with such difficulty, you can see nascent corns forming. Because they are so painful, the sandal-wearers, whether on public transport or in cafes, can’t wait to kick them off, which they do without apology as if it were not the most anti-social behaviour that isn’t illegal. You can’t call the guards to protect you against naked feet, but you should be able to.

The Japanese are way ahead of us. The women protesting against leg hair harassment are looking down the barrel of climate change and see the summers stretching ahead, filled with “kokushobi” days which produce bear-perm male legs on all sides.

Right across the world, we need a total ban on them. 

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