Is Japan's naughty knotty BDSM scene too dangerous?
This was the question asked recently by Jake Adelstein, the Tokyo-based reporter who has made a career out of being the foreign media's go-to guy for yakuza stories and gossip.
Adelstein's article for the Daily Beast website is an interview with Golden-san, aka Golden Rule S.M. or Doctor Golden, who is calling for a "gentler, wiser, and kinder BDSM."
Doctor Golden, who is an S&M practitioner and also a chiropractor, has been taking care of people, mainly women, injured in the pursuit of their pleasure for over two decades. Next ...
Every few months along comes another one: a sensationalist English-language news wire article about Japanese sex dolls that appears everywhere, eager for clicks and comments.
This time it's an article with the very sensitively headline "Silicone Sally: Japanese men find true love with sex dolls". It comes courtesy of AFP, about physiotherapist Masayuki Ozaki turning to a silicone sex doll, Mayu, when romance in his marriage dried up.
Lonely guy buys sex doll. Hardly news. Goodness knows how AFP found this story or if it's even true. We are naturally somewhat suspicious of someone who ...
Once again we have been trawling some of Japan's postwar history for insights about the sexual development of the nation. Here are some awesome vintage images of classic love hotels.
Fans of love hotels and this blog will immediately spot that this one is the Meguro Emperor, a pioneering love hotel from the 1970s that has since re-opened.
The other two are, apparently, the Ichinomiya London and Olympia hotels.
It was around this time that love hotels started to become very elaborate, adding castle-style "battlements" and turrets. The results are bizarre, lurid and wacky, ...
This video by i-D features interviews with young people who identity as genderless.
The makers say that this "hypnotic youth movement are [sic] rejecting ideas of fashion defining sexuality" and call it "Tokyo's most boundary-pushing scene". The interviews are with four people -- Yutaro, Muyua, Yoshiaki, and Satsuki Nakayama (pictured below) -- who all have quite large followings on social media.
Genderless identity has particularly risen to the fore in the Japanese media recently with the popularity of the model and television personality Ryucheru.
"When I first wore a skirt, my ...
Shocking. Fluorescent. Gaudy. Loud. Vular. Neon. Flashy. Tacky.
There's a lot of epithets that can be applied to this new cosplay style that is like body art on psychedelic drugs, though none of them quite capture it.
Inspired by strange characters from anime, cinema and video games, behold the new Japanese subculture of ishoku-hada.
Certain sections of the Interweb are currently abuzz with breathless talk of this bizarre body painting and cosplay niche, which literally means "unique skin" or "unusual skin".
Like an "alien" version of gyaru, ganguro or yamanba trends, women dress ...
Love her or loathe her, one thing can't be denied about the tarento and model Rola: she has staying power.
While many other minor celebrities and idols have come and gone, she has continued to dominate TV and advertising, despite only having one real shtick -- that of being a haafu and playing stupid.
She has already survived one scandal when her foreign father was arrested for fraud a few years ago.
Can she survive this one? (Spoiler: we think so.)
She recently posted a video of herself to her popular Instagram account. Nothing unusual about that. Rola has a huge following on ...
Combing the archives, we found these leaked images of some slutty Japanese ladies taking a girls' trip out to the countryside that got very dirty, very quickly.
It was clearly summer (and apparently 2011), given what they are wearing, but they weren't keen on keeping their clothes on for long.
These girls were happy to strip off for some very provocative and playful poses in a remote corner of Japan.
They show off their lovely butts and one girl even seems to take out her tampon from her pussy. Want to see some bush? Yes, two of the ladies are happy to ...
Remember the Virgin Killer Sweater?
As we wrote before, this all-in-one, insanely revealing item of clothing shot to fame when it was modelled by Jun Amaki and quickly acquired the moniker of "virgin-killing" because it was so damned hot, a virgin would melt at the sight!
But this is the first time we've seen the Virgin Killer Sweater in the wild, so to speak, though sadly it wasn't with our own eyes -- though perhaps that's for the best because we may not have been able to control ourselves.
It was spotted worn by a bold young lady sitting on the platform of the Mita Line of the ...
What do AV actresses do on their days off? This is a question we often ponder. How many of the hot ladies wandering around Shinjuku and Shibuya are actually minor porn stars doing some shopping?
We've searched the archives a bit and found this revealing gem, which offers a tantalizing hint about what some of the more adventurous ladies get up to.
In April 2015, porn performer Sara Shinomiya spent her day off having her lovely body coated in cream and other sweet things -- all for her friends to slowly lick off.
They also used some sort of sweet topping to write insults on her legs in ...
Have Japanese breasts reached a tipping point?
That's what underwear brand Triumph is suggesting in its latest Lingerie White Paper, which indicates a continuing trend towards larger busts.
Sales for its A-cup bras have fallen from 58.6% in 1980 to just 4.1% in 2016
The results for the last two years are tallied below:
A-cup sales (2015): 4.7%
A-cup sales (2016): 4.1%
B-cup sales (2015): 19.5%
B-cup sales (2016): 19%
C-cup sales (2015): 26.1%
C-cup sales (2016): 25.6%
D-cup sales (2015): 24.8%
D-cup sales (2016): 25%
E-cup sales (2015): 16.7%
E-cup sales (2016): ...
