Seitokai ni mo Ana wa Aru Sparks Controversy Over Ecchi Anime Ad

Well, here we are again with another pointless controversy involving the new ecchi anime of the season! Because, of course, we can’t go without one of these, right? Here we go again. This time, the target is Seitokai ni mo Ana wa Aru, an anime packed with ecchi content and suggestive scenes that’s currently airing.

What Happened?

With the premiere of Seitokai ni mo Ana wa Aru, promotional ads for the series have started popping up in various places, including train stations.

One of these ads was put up at Ikebukuro Station in Japan:

The poster features two girls and Komaro staring directly at passersby.

Then, a woman at the station spotted the poster promoting the manga and advertising the Seitokai ni mo Ana wa Aru anime and decided to complain about it.

She wrote:

“The level of weirdness and grossness at Ikebukuro Station is abnormal. And this is inside the station itself! 🤮”

Although the screenshot above shows around 120,000 views, the post has already surpassed 1 million views at the time of writing! And, naturally, more people have joined the complaints, while others have come to the ad’s defense.

Let’s check out some reactions to this “controversy”!

• I don’t think anything of it myself, but maybe some people stumble across it, get a boner, feel frustrated, and end up getting angry?
• The people who do things behind closed doors are often the same ones who are the strictest about ecchi content in public.
• Ikebukuro is pretty tolerant of this kind of thing.
• I always thought this kind of stuff used to be restricted to places like Akihabara.
• Come on, just let people enjoy things.
• I can’t relate to these free-speech warriors at all. You’re outdated. It’s time to surrender to political correctness.
• Ever since the promotion for I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, they’ve been getting way too full of themselves. They deserve to be heavily criticized. Don’t bring things that belong underground into the mainstream.
• So people point their phones at this, take pictures, and start tapping away? Yeah, that really is pretty gross.

• Whether it’s sexual or not, sometimes I get annoyed by the sheer number of characters plastered everywhere.
• Hmm, it’d be fine if it were at the north exit.
• Here comes another ridiculously tacky move from Kodansha.
• Well, this is advertising designed to stir up controversy and go viral.
• Maybe it’d be gross somewhere else, but Ikebukuro is already covered in ads designed to get fujoshi excited. I couldn’t care less.
• These are the same people who never complain about Genshin Impact or NIKKE.
• What a disgusting country. No wonder it’s in decline.
• Stop being jealous of a drawing and get a job, you useless women who contribute nothing.
• Why do you keep insisting on putting this stuff where everyone can see it?
• This kind of thing used to stay hidden, with people in the know gathering among themselves. They should’ve just kept doing that. Do they really expect society to accept them?
• Do you not understand what advertising is? Ads are meant to promote things to people who don’t know about them yet.
• I don’t think there are any school swimming pools visible from the street anymore. Places have stopped using fences like these.

• If you don’t like it, just don’t look. You people are seriously disgusting.
• The biggest problem is that this anime is boring as hell.
• In Akihabara, this would be so insignificant that it’d get buried under ads for Chinese games.
• If it were something vulgar but funny or entertaining, that’d be one thing. But this series is just boring. Who even reads it?
• I don’t understand what’s so gross about it. There’s no panty shot or huge boobs on display. She’s just wearing a regular school swimsuit, like the ones used in swimming competitions.
• Then stop broadcasting swimming competitions on TV if this is so disgusting. If this isn’t allowed, shouldn’t Medalist, the figure skating series, be banned too?
• It’s sad to see leftists constantly talking about human rights when they genuinely believe they have the right to remove anything they dislike from public spaces. More than ten years ago, I made the mistake of joining these people in criticizing Shinzo Abe and demanding that he read Ashibe’s commentary on the Constitution. It was one of the biggest regrets of my life. The very essence of Ashibe’s interpretation of the Constitution is the idea that public spaces are places where freedom of expression should exist…
• I get the impression that most of the people criticizing this are left-wing.
• That’s because the left always tries to change other people. They’re constantly complaining about erotic content, hate speech, and things like that. It’s as if they don’t know how to read the room or understand boundaries.
• Putting up an ad at a station and practically shouting, “LOOK! LOOK AT THE CROTCH OF THIS SCHOOL SWIMSUIT!” Come on. This kind of content should be kept in designated spaces.

• People should at least acknowledge that Japan’s attitude toward this stuff is exceptionally abnormal compared to the rest of the world.
• HENTAI flourishing at the center of the world.
• Now I understand why Pixiv is full of foreigners.
• But there’s demand for this stuff all over the world, right?
• Is this character part of a swimming club?
• The people calling this gross probably don’t even know whether she’s in a swimming club or not.
• Well, on my personal scale, this only gets me about 12 degrees of excitement. To me, it’s no different from looking at a landscape.
• Don’t put this kind of indecent stuff out in public! It should be regulated. The free-speech warriors argued during the debate over a law against desecrating the national flag that something could be regulated if the public found it offensive. So what now?
• Some people might find it gross, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s problematic.

• Is this any good? I got curious after seeing a scene where she pressed her boobs against a laptop.
• It’s hard to say. At the end of the day, it’s a manga focused on cute characters.
• Agreed. I read it because the female characters are cute, but without that, the series wouldn’t be any fun.
• I haven’t checked out the actual content, but it’s probably the usual crowd that hates women throwing a fit. Guaranteed outrage! lol
• I wouldn’t want my child to see this and get turned on by it, so I’d like this kind of thing to stop. Simply telling children they aren’t allowed to look at something only makes them more curious about it. I’d like advertisements for hosts and bikini photo shoots featuring artificial, sexualized imagery to be removed from public spaces. If something natural happens to come across as sexual, that’s unavoidable, and I actually see that as a positive thing.
• People are falling right into the controversy marketing trap.
• There’s nothing wrong with showing a girl in a swimsuit, but the anime itself contains content that would need to be censored with mosaic blurring. I don’t think it’s appropriate to display something like that openly in public, in broad daylight.

If it caused controversy, then the ad was a success!