Thai mathematics textbook publisher accidentally uses Japanese porn star photo on cover

It can be hard to appeal to school kids, especially when you are trying to teach them a dry subject like mathematics.

So you can forgive someone when they resort to gimmicks to perk students’ interest. In the case of one publisher in Thailand, they used a picture of a hot woman on the cover of a textbook.

Okay, so not very subtle but it IS going to get the boys in the class interested.

There was only one problem.

Muang Thai Book sourced the image from the web — common in Thailand, apparently — and in fact it turned out to be a promo picture for a Japanese porn film.

Here is the original picture.

Sure, the image wasn’t particularly revealing but perhaps a good-looking woman who can make math more exciting for young boys was too good to be true.

The sultry “teacher” was in fact JAV star Mana Aoki. The film in question is supposedly a title released by DMM’s streaming services in April.

The publisher finally realized their error only after 3,000 copies had been printed. That’ll teach them for relying on Google Image Search for their cover pictures!

The story broke on September 10th in Thailand and then over here in Japan yesterday and today. There are some differing accounts out there. It may be that the students were actually the ones who recognized Mana and gave the game away (we find that unlikely as Mana is not such a big star), though the consensus is that textbooks hadn’t been distributed, alas.

Now being confronted with a Japanese porn star before getting stuck into some arithmetic — would that be off-putting or encouraging?!