"How does it feel?" the Dylan song in a current Japanese car ad intones.

This is a fitting analytic position to take vis-a-vis Japanese television advertising.

For, historically Japanese ads have relied on the deep-seated cultural value of feeling ("kimochi") to assist in delivering message.

Until recently, though, it was emotional feeling that dominated ad text.

Thus were sound, color, setting, and non-tactile human action invoked to provide the sought effect.

Of late, though, a different sort of feeling has coursed through ads: feelings expressed by means of tactile contact.

Via fingers and lips, through clutched hands and interlocked limbs, in the guise of hugs, pats and kisses, human touch is now all over the Japanese ad screen.

This was once a behavioral province inhabited exclusively by foreigners;

now, however, Japanese are getting physical.

This sea change in sexuality is not gender-specific.

Men and women both engage in acts of congress.

At the same time, seldom are men initiators and even less often do they physically contact other men.

Women, by contrast, are most often depicted as sexual aggressors-even predators-and are relatively unrestrained in their contact with other women.

The overwhelming directionality of intimacy and sexuality is: female to male, or female to female.

To support these claims, I draw on thousands of commercials systematically culled and qualitatively content analyzed over the past decade.

The analysis presents numerous categories of intimacy and gender-based representation that have emerged.

The results are both clear and revealing about various aspects of Japanese social organization and culture.

They enable us to paraphrase another Dylan song: "you know something is happening herec and you know just what it isc"

It is the whys of this phenomenon, however, that leave us in quandary.

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