It must be the season. Just as Tokyo is getting pounded by typhoons on a weekly basis, so is the foreign media taking an interest in reporting about "nerdy" Japan.
First we had the respected newspaper the Guardian cherry-pick some statistics to produce the dubious conclusion that young people aren't having sex anymore.
Now the BBC has an article about "the Japanese men who prefer virtual girlfriends to sex". Well, my first response was -- you've just found out about this now?!
Secondly, of course, it tars us Japanese guys with the same brush as the otaku. Much as we love otaku ...
There's been a lot of media attention about stalking recently, not least due to the sad case of 18-year-old Saaya Suzuki, murdered by a stalker earlier this month.
Now comes another odd twist on the situation.
The National Police Agency (NPA) has reported a 3.8 increase on incidents of stalking by citizens over 60 over the last decade.
So much for the golden years.
Apparently stalking is on the increase in general, though the rise is much more notable for pensioners.
Stalkers in their sixties jumped from 383 in 2003 to 1,329 in 2012, plus there was an increase from 90 to 505 of guys in ...
A long article in the Guardian has been published that purports to be sociological and serious, but is actually perpetuating the usual myths we read about our great country -- everyone is unhappy, everyone only works, no one has sex.
The sexes, especially in Japan's giant cities, are "spiralling away from each other". Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to what [a sex therapist] terms "Pot Noodle love" -- easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality "girlfriends", anime cartoons. ...
What were we saying yesterday about the police?
Well, now they've turned their attention to someone who has been delighting Tokyo in recent months.
Twitter has been abuzz with images snapped of an old guy wandering the city dressed in sailor school uniform cosplay and very happy to pose for pictures.
He has companions who dress up with him!
He even went to France dressed like that.
The "seeraa fuku ojisan" (sailor school uniform old guy) is actually Hideaki Kobayashi, aged around 50.
His cult has grown to the extent that he's been interviewed by the ...
Mobile phone games can be addictive. One cop found this out to his cost.
The 44-year-old Takahiro Ueyama from Hyogo has just got an 18-month sentence for using his position to keep up with his mobile phone game debt, which had apparently reached as high as ¥500,000 ($5,000). That is some addiction!
What was the game? An ero game? No, much more mainstream: Rage of Bahamut (Shingeki No Bahamuto). But it seems Ueyama couldn't stop playing.
When he got a particularly large phone bill he drove over to the home of a woman he had stopped the previous month for "suspicious behavior" in her car. ...
Megumi, Kazuki, Tadashi and I like to scour the streets looking for new adventures in Tokyo. But we also make time to read. Obviously, with the amount of crime and dirty antics we report on in this blog, we need to keep a close eye on the weekly tabloids.
But we also like to read serious books. One I've been perusing recently is The Inland Sea (1971) by the late, great Donald Richie.
Richie was a famous Japan observer, a writer based her from just after the war and who did a lot to promote Japanese cinema in particular.
In the early 1960's he took a long trip around the Seto Inland ...
Our image of the pimp is typically a young wannabe gangster, flashy clothes with sunshades and a toothpick in his teeth.
Beware an old man in a hurry, as the saying has it. The elderly chap in spectacles might just be rushing around arranging sexual encounters for his fellow older acquaintances.
Such was the case in Tokyo where the 70-year-old Kiyohide Kuroda was arrested for organizing meet-ups between older men and women in coffee shops, which would then lead onto some more vigorous encounters.
Kuroda's arrest stems specifically from a meeting he arranged between a male 67-year-old ...
Otaku of the world, rejoice. Your dreams have come true at last.
Virtual idol Hatsune Miku is now "fully" interactive.
We already can see and hear her, but now an app allows you to touch and smell her -- and, best of all, to sleep with her.
The Sleep With Her app started when an engineer thought that visiting a place like the Soine-ya bed-sharing "snuggle" cafe was too expensive. He developed this way to sleep beside Hatsune Miku as an alternative.
You wear it like a big eye pad and it allows you to see your sweet partner dozing beside you.
And with some "extras" ...
No, of course not.
But this is too tempting.
Kyary Pamyu Pamyu may well have a reputation for wacky Harajuku fashions but is she also moonlighting as an JAV star?
Sora Harumiya is a brand new starlet who looks set for fame primarily for her looks partially similar to the pop and fashion icon. A mere 19 years old, she no doubt has a long career ahead of her.
What do you think? Is Sora similar? And anyway, are you interested in a kawaii porn star?
There are actually several JAV actresses whose career has risen due to their resemblance to an idol.
For example, ...
Be careful what is being poked into your genitals. You might just be losing your life blood... literally.
Though Kyoto might have a reputation for being the sophisticated old capital of Japan, there's plenty of kinkiness under the surface.
One of these is needle play. Tokyo Reporter had a nice, intriguing report on a recent episode involving a Kyoto bondage mistress.
Between June and September, Yuka Fujisawa, 43, is alleged to have used needles and syringes to take blood from the genitals of three male customers, including a 52-year-old office worker from Hyogo Prefecture, while ...
