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Every August, the streets of buttoned-down, uptight central Tokyo are invaded by the world's sexiest, coolest carnival and told to get funky. The result is a clash of civilisations to make even the least prudish blush to their roots.
Gorgeous, lushly upholstered women wearing little more than pink feathers and winning smiles file past legions of straight-laced office ladies and dazed salary-men, trailing behind them the razzamatazz and noise of a full-blown samba festival.
Some of the men never recover. Others remember to bring their cameras and spend more time training suspiciously long telephoto lenses at the eye-watering cleavages than watching the floats or listening to the glorious music, created by dancing teams of percussion and Latin groups.
Japan's version of the Rio Carnival has been dancing its way through the streets of Asakusa in Tokyo's shitamachi (downtown) area for a quarter of a century and has grown into one of the biggest samba festivals outside Brazil.
The carnival transforms the strip along Kaminarimon-dori and Umamichi-dori avenues into a weird and wonderful hybrid of two mismatched cultures. As one tourist site puts it: it's almost like being in Rio, except that the people don't look Latin.