Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit that a title like Underwear and a cover page featuring a wide-eyed ingénue was a powerful hook to me. While I assure you that its appeal indicates nothing about my broader online inclinations, the program quickly moved to the top of my queue when I fired up my Japanese Netflix account in September.

Underwear tells the story of Mayuko Tokito, a young woman who grew up in the countryside on Japan’s Northernmost island of Hokkaido. After studying textiles at University, Mayuko begins her career at a high-end, custom lingerie atelier in Tokyo called Emotion. (Emotion is the actual name of the shop, and not an English translation of a Japanese word.) At first Mayuko’s devotion is focused only on textiles, as evidenced by her multiple poetic soliloquies on the topic. Over the first episodes, however, her passions expand to include lingerie.

The other central character in the series is Emotion’s Founder and President, Mayumi Nanjo, who is clearly modeled after American Vogue Editor, Anna Wintour, in both appearance and reputed character.

Initially, Nanjo has little patience for Mayuko’s country bumpkin ways. Yet affection develops between the two as Nanjo realizes her approach to the lingerie business must evolve to fit the modern-day marketplace. Forget that the shift from custom-made to ready-to-wear was pretty well complete by the mid 1900s. What’s that? Website, you ask? Emotion is not there yet. Underwear’s creators don’t sweat these anachronisms and the episodes roll on with this tension between the old way and the (not actually) new way underpinning the storyline.

Besides Mayuko and Nanjo, Emotion employs five others. Don’t trouble yourself pondering the implausibility of bankrolling the Tokyo livelihoods of seven people on one brassiere sale at a time. Just as Carrie Bradshaw never could have afforded that apartment, all those cosmos, and the Manolo Blahniks, Emotion’s financials don’t add up.

Roughly once an episode Nanjo, with a solemnity befitting the Gettysburg Address, finds an opportunity to lecture her staff on the power of lingerie and the supremacy of customer service. Aided by a crescendo of ethereal Enya-esque music, I’m meant to feel the gravitas as Nanjo’s teary-eyed minions, literally basking in the illumination of her imparted wisdom, watch her exit the room.

I was getting rather bored with Underwear’s histrionics when, finally, misfortune strikes and two employees quit Emotion to design a new, mass-produced line for a fictional Tokyo department store. Intrigue ensues and, just like that, the series grew more interesting. Nothing like a good swindle to liven things up. Hope restored; I kept tuning in to be rewarded with new secrets and more bad behavior.

In addition to theatrics, Underwear offers a window into the Japanese psyche. Nanjo abhors the idea of mass production as a threat to quality customer service, which she values above all else. A Spanish friend who lives in Japan but returns to Barcelona each summer recently told me she couldn’t wait to get back to Japan. Reason being: she was fed-up with bad customer service. It’s true. If a country exists on earth with better customer service than Japan, I have not yet visited it.

Examples from personal experience abound. I once asked a café barista for directions to the nearest subway stop. Feeling it was too confusing to give me directions, she walked me the ten minutes to the station. When there was a question about our lease car fitting into our garage, the agent took it upon himself to drive to our house one evening to take measurements. I’ve been at big box stores when the skies suddenly opened, dumping buckets of rain. Upon leaving, I found store employees armed with umbrellas stationed at the exits to usher unprepared customers to their cars. The Japanese devotion to customer service is something I witness every day and it really makes Japanese life so pleasant.

For a program about beautiful women designing lingerie, the show bizarrely lacks sexuality. In the world of Underwear, lingerie’s value seemingly has nothing to do with inciting desire. One customer buys a bra and panty set for her daughter to wear to her violin recital. Another customer feels that wearing an Emotion bra will give her the confidence to return to work after maternity leave. And yet another lady, a dog lover, falls into spasms of giggles when Mayuko finds a gold puppy charm to adorn her custom made brassiere. Not a single customer comes to Emotion looking for that smokin’ little number that will turn their man (or lady) into an animal. Even when a crush develops between two Emotion employees and it seemed like, “now the sexy will come.” No luck. The crush remains pure and never really moves beyond sweet text messages.

The divorce of sex from underwear is a paradox that’s difficult to imagine, but it may have its roots in Japan’s reality. Both Japanese men and women are rejecting rigidly defined gender roles that cast the man as breadwinner and the woman as mother and housewife. The roles are so institutionalized that, rather than fight them, some Japanese are choosing to simply opt out. Men don’t want the expense and burden that dating, sex and marriage entail. Women are choosing careers and independence over the messiness of romance and babies. What results is a recognized and studied phenomenon in Japan dubbed “celibacy syndrome.” Such an attitude toward sexuality among even a subset of society is a big problem in a country whose already declining population will likely drop a further one-third from present day by 2060. I can’t be certain that this phenomenon of societal sexual apathy is what Underwear captures. However, it does seem that a show about lingerie that lacks any steaminess is revealing something about a society.

Underwear’s message is that lingerie can divinely empower a woman to become her better, truer self. The shots of lingerie-clad mannequins beatified in sunlight say as much. I like that. However, jaded as I am, I’ll stay tuned ever hopeful that Underwear’s writers will put the sexy back into the lacy panties, as is only proper in this viewer’s eyes.

Underwear is a Netflix Japan Original Series that is not currently available to watch anywhere outside of Japan. Our apologies, but we hope you enjoyed the review nonetheless

Kristin Jordan currently lives in Nagoya, Japan where she also lived 12 years ago before smart phones, streaming and kids. She loved Japan the first time and finds it even better with all the extras.