Inada Chair - Cross-cultural confusion

So I'm paging through this last Sunday's New York Times magazine, and I stop: here's a full-page color ad (wonder what they cost? Probably $50,000, maybe more) for the Inada Chair.

The ad pictures a blonde babe wearing a silk blouse, with a blissful smile and her eyes closed, reclining in what looks like a padded torture/restraint chair, all black leather and stainless steel, the whole scene set in a sunlit, deep forest.

The ad introduces the new Manhattan showroom for the Inada Chair, "the world's first massage chair that adapts itself to the shape of your body."

No wonder she's smiling.

The thing's got all these wrist and ankle restraints,

that look really serious and industrial-strength scary.

I would bet this ad was created by someone from the Japanese headquarters or their Japan-based advertising agency.

Because in Japan there are no electric chairs, and execution is by hanging (yes, they still have capital punishment).

So the indelible images every American has seen by now, in the course of their education or what-have-you,

of "Old Sparky" and its ilk, are unknown to the Japanese marketers of this chair.

Had someone with an American sensibility been in a position to pass on this ad, it never would have seen the light of day.

$4,900 here.