Here’s a little Valentine’s Day treat for all you lonely boys out there! I Want Chu (”chu” meaning “kiss”) is an interactive Flash site starring a feast of succulent female lips.
Scroll through the ladies’ mouth-watering assets and vote for which ones you think are the most kissable. But the best thing — the lips move! That’s right, they wobble as you select their image, and you can further “interact” with them (i.e. jiggle, poke and manipulate them) using your cursor. It’s actually pretty addictive…and saucy! But be warned — you only get five votes!
Hang on a minute. What’s this all about? Okay, it’s actually a campaign for ROHTO’s Oil Moist Lips product. Applicants were collected from all over Japan and their photos put online for your salivation. You can vote up to March 7 and the winner’s lips get featured in an ad.
For a pharmaceutical corporation, ROHTO takes a very progressive attitude towards its web presence. We previously blogged about the Marumaru Love campaign that took advantage of a Web CM and Twitter aggregate site.
ROHTO also seems to have a thing for kissing. Alongside I Want Chu it launched a website last year teaching you how to smooch!
[Via Kokoku Kaigi.]
William is Editor of JapanTrends.com and a Project Manager at 
Actually “Chu” is the sound effect for a kiss. although obviously its used to stand in for “you” and Want You sounds like “wan chu” as well :-D
William, thanks for bringing this to our attention. Could you write a bit about what the stereotypical “beautiful woman” is like in Japan? I wrote an article here http://tinyurl.com/yl2pxv9 a while back that looks at the different standard of beauty in China, but I do not know much about the Japanese market.
@Dillon Font You’re right, thanks for that. Clearly I should spend more time learning about Japanese kissing!
@Joel Wow, that’s a really, really BIG question. The concept of “beauty women” (美人 or “bijin”) is a huge topic that I couldn’t hope to cover here or even in a whole blog post. There are some pretty obvious archetypes that often appear in advertising, though: the doll-like “kawaii” (cute) girl; “pure” and traditional-looking woman; foreign-looking and sexy. Certainly a glance at advertising by Shiseido, Kirin, and Suntory would be a good place to start. Some models/actresses who appear in a lot of commercials include Yukie Nakama, Becky, Namie Amuro, Aya Ueto, Yuri Ebihara…this list could get very long!
William, thanks for taking the time to respond. You’re definitely right – it would probably take an entire blog on “beauty in Japan” to do the topic justice, but I think you did a great job in the paragraph above. I don’t speak any Japanese myself, but am pleased when the Japanese kanji and Chinese characters hold the same meaning, such as this case with 美人 (Chinese pronounced “Mei Ren”).
I noticed the popularity of the “kawaii”" phenomenon in Taiwan when I was there three years ago. It wasn’t extremely surprising as much of pop-culture there comes from Japan and South Korea. However, more and more I am seeing the growing popularity of “kawaii” on the mainland. I am curious if cultural trends that begin in Japan like this one have to make their way to Hong Kong and Taiwan first, before being accepted by mainland Chinese. You were very right in your answer to my last comment – the China-Japan dynamic is certainly a complex relationship.