It's common enough to read reports about male celebrities dating women a decade or more their junior. What about the ladies?
The actress Chiharu Niiyama is now 41. She married a famous baseball coach in 2004, gave birth to a daughter in 2006, and then divorced in 2014. Along with small acting roles, she has continued to maintain a public profile, most recently through social media.
Last year, to mark her fortieth birthday and twenty-fifth year as an actor, she did a swimsuit gravure shoot for the first time in two decades. The results were jaw-dropping, as we wrote at the time.
No doubt ...
Is it the miso, the seaweed, the tofu, or the fish? Theories abound, but one thing is certain: Japan is a nation with a high life expectancy. The average lifespan is 84 years, several years longer than Western nations.
Now a cardiovascular physiologist has cut through the rhetoric to propose that the secret to longevity is actually sex.
As described in an essay for aeon, Denis Noble looks at ancient Chinese poems and scrolls kept at the National Museum in Tokyo. The Ishinho set of 30 scrolls contain remedies that are exclusively herbal, nutritional, or sexual.
Noble begins speculating on ...
They say that everything is small in Japan. Small cars. Small homes. Small food portions. Small people. Only kidding about that last one.
Sometimes it seems that there really are capsule toys and model kits for everything.
In the latest evidence of this, renowned plastic model kit maker Hasegawa is set to release another miniature "retro vending machine" this July. And the fifth iteration (FA13) of the series of kits, following versions for ramen and udon noodles, is a porn vending machine.
It's not explicitly stated as such, but the weirdly anonymous-looking design and the conspicuous, ...
Here's a peculiar case.
As reported in Bengo4, a woman is suing her employer in Japan for enabling sexual harassment.
Her company failed to act after it was alleged the woman's section chief sent her around 150 pornographic images. They were sent to her at the company address over three occasions between January and April 2020, with the third batch alone containing 100 photos and an adult toy. The woman in her thirties is seeking ¥4.4 million in damages in the lawsuit that began at Tokyo District Court on March 30.
The man in his fifties sent them to her by private post anonymously. She ...
Skinship is big in Japan: a concept of bodily intimacy via contact through the skin, such as by sleeping on neighboring futon or, most obviously, bathing together.
So while your mom or bestie might not hug you as much, you will bathe with your immediate relatives, such as your kids, siblings, or partner, and it doesn't cease to be a thing even if you only have one of those square bathtubs hardly large enough to fit an average Westerner's body. People just sort of clamber in and sit on top of each other in the bath.
Of course, communal bathing culture extends to bathhouses and hot springs, ...
Tenga is, as regular readers will know, one of Japan's leading adult toy brands, and surely the one that has the most success overseas, helped by its very clean and universal design (a far cry from the kind of highly Japanese style of hentai illustrations you find on box art on releases by Tama Toys, Toy's Heart, and so on).
A Tenga-related topic we often like to discuss here on this blog are the various marketing campaigns that the company does, such as the rocket it launched into space or its hat for dispensing tissues.
In addition, Tenga also does serious research related to sex and ...
She teased. The mainstream media lapped it up. She delivered. Now the publisher is looking to see the impact on the sales figures.
The former top fashion model Yukina Kinoshita has attempted her comeback with a page straight out of Angelica Michibata's book: when in doubt, take off your clothes.
As we continue to revel in a wave of nostalgia with recent gravure comebacks by the likes of Shizuka Nakamura and Ai Shinozaki -- likewise, nude or semi-nude -- we were intrigued by this slightly different case, in which the model Kinoshita, after being dropped by her agency over the celebrity's ...
When does an orgy become a crime? If it's group sex among consenting adults, there should be no issue, right?
That's today's legal conundrum.
One man in Japan found himself arrested for hosting an orgy (in Japanese, ranko party). So what was his crime? Strangely enough, it was fraud.
He had booked a hotel room in Fukuoka for two people, but then ended up with eleven guests (eight men, three women) in the room in January.
He should have paid for eleven guests to stay, but only paid for two, hence his arrest. The man recruited participants in the orgy online.
There was the possibility ...
April marks the start of the 2022 fiscal and academic years in Japan. It also brings with a major change for young people: the age of adulthood will come down from 20 to 18.
Eighteen- and 19-year-olds can already vote, so this change has already been in the works for a while. One of the major consequences of this is regards contracts (somewhat strangely, the age for smoking, drinking, and gambling -- all the good things about being an adult -- will remain 20). In the past, they needed parental consent to sign a commercial contract until they reached the age of majority.
Given that a lot of ...
We love a good comeback story.
After some time quietly doing her own thing on YouTube and Instagram, Yukina Kinoshita (木下優樹菜) has returned to the mainstream entertainment world.
As a kind of de facto apology for her recent scandals, the 34-year-old mother of two is releasing a nude photo book.
"CORRECT" is published by Futabasha and released on March 17. It's being publicized heavily as "nude," though the preview images we have seen so far are only semi-nude (in the classic "hand bra" pose, or tebura). We will update with more pictures when they become available. Hopefully this ...
