BEIJING, Aug. 25 -- Tokyo's subway authority will allow a station advertisement featuring a nude and heavily pregnant Britney Spears, officials said Thursday, dropping an earlier plan to ban the photo.

Actress Britney Spears, six months pregnant, is shown on the cover of the August 2006 issue Harper's Bazaar. Photo Gallery >>>

    HB Japan Inc., publisher of the Japanese edition of Harper's Bazaar, plans to rent ad space at the posh Omotesando station next week to promote its October issue with Spears posing naked on the cover.

    The ad, in which Spears posed in the buff, but with her arms over her breasts and her legs crossed at the knees, is the same one used in the August issue of the magazine's U.S. edition. The 24-year-old pop star is pregnant with her second child.

    Tokyo Metro Co.'s obscenity screening team had initially raised objections to the nudity and asked HB Japan to modify the photograph, branding it "too stimulating" for young people.

    "We thought some of our customers would find it to be overly stimulating," a Tokyo Metro official explained.

    In principle, nudity is not accepted in ads in subway cars and stations, said Tokyo Metro spokesman Tatsuya Edakubo.

    "Our earlier request to cover the photo from the waist down was because of nudity, not because we had anything against pregnant women," he said, adding that officials later decided that censoring the photo would be inappropriate.

    The Omotesando display will include 50 posters for the fashion magazine, five of them of Spears.