Kathmandu: After a decade of guerrilla war, they made news by returning to Parliament and pledging to lock up their arms. And now, Nepal’s Maoist rebels will hit the headlines again, in a very different way.
Come March and they will appear in a place unusual for guerrillas — the Playboy magazine.
The communist insurgents have very conservative notions about sex and nudity, will appear in the Japanese version of the Playboy, a much more serious edition brought out by Shueisha, a leading Tokyo-based publisher. Around 1990, when Nepal was going through a pro-democracy movement that opposed the ban on political parties and absolute power usurped by monarchy, a Japanese journalist, Kiyoko Ogura, came to Nepal and fell under its spell.
This month, her second book on the Maoist movement, written in Japanese and published by Japan’s NHK, hit the bookstores. Interested by the book, Japanese Playboy approached her to do an article on the Maoists. The six-page feature is scheduled to appear in the March issue.