Panchira

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Panchira" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Panchira (パンチラ) is a Japanese word referring to a brief glimpse of a woman's underwear. The term carries risqué connotations, similar to the word upskirt in English.

In anime and manga, panchira usually refers to a panty-shot, a visual convention used by Japanese artists and animators since the early 1960s. According to Japanese sources, the convention probably started with Machiko Hasegawa's popular manga Sazae-san, whose character designs for Wakame Isono incorporated an improbably brief hemline.^[1] The practice was later transferred to animation when Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy was adapted for television in 1963. Confined mainly to harmless children's series throughout the remainder of the decade, panchira took on more overtly fetishistic elements during the early seventies.^[2] From that point on, panchira became linked with sexual humor such as the kind found in many comedy-oriented shōnen manga.^[3]

The word is a portmanteau of "panty" (パンティー, pantī) and chira, the Japanese sound symbolism representing a glance or glimpse.^[4][5] It differs from the more general term "upskirt" in that panchira specifies the presence of underpants (the absence of which would more accurately be described as ノーパン; nōpan).