Just yesterday we posted about the gang of eight thieves who allegedly beat and robbed a foreign man who had picked up a streetwalker. The issue of young streetwalkers, known as tachinbo in Japanese, in the Kabukicho area of Shinjuku, especially around Okubo Park, has become a huge social panic, with media reports and police crackdowns appearing almost weekly, along with the Toyoko kids delinquency problem. To help explain the tachinbo issue, the manga artist Sugimura (also known as Sugiyan) created a short comic in English as part of the This Is Japan! series. It was published online on ...

     Read More     

A gang has been arrested for robbing and assaulting a foreign man as he exited a love hotel with a prostitute he had picked up in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The eight people allegedly surrounded the man in his fifties, taunted him for his actions and threatened to tell others, and then beat and robbed him of the cash he was carrying -- ¥1.1 million -- in a rucksack. With that much cash on his person, he was either a bit naive or planning to have a lot of fun in Kabukicho. The incident took place back in February this year and the victim required a month to recover from his injuries. Earlier in ...

     Read More     

Former AKB48 idol Rina Hirata has announced that she will no longer release image videos. Her latest DVD, My Girl's Weird Sense of Distance, which came out on September 23. The DVD, her first in over a year, is an incredible 190 minutes and features Hirata barely clothed throughout. The tiny bikini she wears in the cover image is stretched to the max to cover her nipples and crotch. The 27-year-old Hirata was a member of AKB48 from 2011 to 2016. Among the legions of young women who have passed through the ranks of AKB48 and its sister groups over the years, Hirata stands out for at least ...

     Read More     

An article by former porn star Aya Takanashi (pictured below) in Maidona News recently reported on the Japanese version of the tang ping or "lying flat" trend that originated in China for rejecting overwork and the pressure to achieve. It is similar to the notion of "quiet quitting" or NEET, a sociological term for people not in full-time work or education/training that became popular as a label in Japan in the years after the bubble economy collapsed. The article focuses on the nightlife version of this phenomenon, claiming that such "lying flat" people account for 30 or 40 percent of ...

     Read More     

For spooky season, our good friends at Kanojo Toys are offering a 20% discount on any order of adult toys. To claim your discount, just use the code TRICK at the checkout. The campaign runs through Halloween, so you have about a week to shop and get the most of the offer. The Kanojo Toys team tells me that the code is valid even for multiple orders, so you can order something today and then again on October 31, and still get the discount. If you want an even better discount, we recommend subscribing to the Kanojo Toys newsletter for the latest deals. The heyday of the Shibuya Halloween ...

     Read More     

Saika Kawakita is one of the biggest porn stars in Japan and a probably familiar face to most readers of this blog. She has gained global fame more recently because a GIF from one of her porn productions inexplicably became a meme on social media in December 2024. According to a scoop by the tabloid Weekly Bunshun published this week, the 26-year-old Kawakita is having an affair with volleyball player Ran Takahashi. The 24-year-old Takahashi currently plays for the Suntory Sunbirds in Osaka, and has played on the Japanese national team. He is supposed to be in a relationship with the ...

     Read More     

Chisato Morishita's trajectory from gravure favorite of the late 2000s to mainstream politics is now complete. After the former model won her first election last October, the 44-year-old with the winning smile has now been appointed to new prime minister Sanae Takaichi's Cabinet as Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Environment. It's a junior role, of course, under the main environment minister (a man, of course -- though Takaichi is Japan's first female prime minister, her ministers are always all male), but it represents a major vote of confidence in the one-time race queen (grid girl), ...

     Read More     

The gravure idol Yumi Kureha has gone nude for the first time in an attempt to vamp up her career. She's now 33, so she will have to hurry before she shifts into the full jukujo stage of her life. That said, one of the unusual things about Kureha is that she didn't get her start in gravure in her late teens or early twenties, as is most common in the industry. Her first releases (image videos, digital photo books, etc.) were in 2021, when she was already in her late twenties. We think she made her gravure debut a little earlier, in 2019, but she was still a bit older than many of her ...

     Read More     

Bunshun Online has published a three-part interview with a 16-year-old Japanese sex worker who, she claims, has sold her body to over 50 men in Kabukicho. But unlike other similar tales, Kanae (not her real name) wasn't doing this because she was in debt or had run away from home. Her motive was simply to get money "to have fun." And it apparently paid off, literally: she earned ¥140,000 on her best days and had sex with over 50 men. "I don't remember exactly," she says, but estimates she earned at least ¥2 million during her time as a streetwalker. "A middle-aged man even asked me to ...

     Read More     

What happens to all those millions of yen that flow through the coffers of Japan's hostess clubs? A lot goes into the pockets of the hard-working hostesses, of course, plus plenty is spent the expensive decor and upkeep of the venue. Not very much goes to the taxman, it seems. At the end of September 2025, a high-end hostess club in Roppongi was found to have concealed approximately ¥500 million in income. In addition to Fabric Lounge Tokyo's owners reporting lower income and fabricating fictitious expenses, the National Tax Agency said that some of the top hostesses themselves had failed ...

     Read More