Late last year, we showcased the ageless miracle that is Fumie Nakajima, who looks amazing in swimwear even in her mid-fifties.
As they mature, Japanese improve with age like a fine wine. A couple of cases in point: Yoko Kumada and Sayaka Isoyama, who both look stunning in their forties.
If further proof was needed, here's another example.
Making her debut way back in 1994, the gravure idol Yuka Sawachi (沢地優佳) has managed to survived in a competitive industry in which idols are often discarded after a few months of shoots for the weeklies. She actually retired in 2007 and then ...
Haruka Ayase is one of the most famous models and actors in Japan.
Before she made the transition into mainstream acting and modeling, and seemed to appear in almost every TV commercial or brand campaign, Ayase was briefly a gravure idol. She's got the looks for it: a cute, girl-next-door face, slim body, and (by most Japanese standards) large breasts.
This shoot in which she stands alluringly against a window, her body on display except for skimpy swimwear, is one of our all-time favorite gravure pics.
She even once shot some sort of video in a bath, and you can find nude grainy ...
Misato Maeda (前田美里), a former face of Nippon TV, is to make her porn debut on Soft on Demand.
She will now be performing as Ema Yano (矢埜愛茉) and her first release (1stars984) was announced officially today and is scheduled for release on February 8.
The 27-year-old from Tokyo has already made a nude photo book, released by Kodansha in September.
Here are some highlights (which first appeared in the weekly Friday in August), showing off her D-cup breasts and her curvy body.
Here are some pics from a semi-nude shoot she did for Flash to ...
Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama has died at the age of 83.
As regular readers will know, Shinoyama is regarded as the king of the hair nude (full-frontal nude), and is largely responsible for establishing it as a publishing genre in the early 1990s with his photo books of Rie Miyazawa (Santa Fe) and Kanoko Higuchi (Water Fruit), though Shinoyama and others had already done nudes in the previous decade (notably, a lovely shoot with Aki Mizusawa).
Others quickly dropped their clothes in front of the camera (not least, Yoko Shimada and Saki Takaoka), hoping to replicate Miyazawa ...
2023 was another busy year for us, publishing an article almost every weekday. We hope you enjoyed reading our content.
With just a few days of 2023 left, let's look back on the year through some of the major developments in the gravure industry.
In January, Ichika Miri announced her retirement (though since she's just 24 years old, we hope she might return under a different name and new management).
One-time top gravure princess Anri Sugihara released her first photo book in over six years. She is now a charmingly mature 41 years old.
In March, Memo Oba retired. Gravure is brutally ...
As the year draws to a close, it's natural to look back on the past months and get a little nostalgic.
Present-day Japanese gravure idols dressed up and photographed in the style of vintage pinup models? Yes, please!
That's the basic concept behind a new photo book called Pin-Up Girls Selection, which is attempting to conjure up the image of "American porn from 100 years ago," according to the promo spiel.
There are nine participating models: Rin Takahashi, ENA, Hinano Ayakawa, Miku Oshima, Miyako Sono, Miyu Nakagawa, Aya Hazuki, Haruka Bando, and Saki Yanase.
Bando and Oshima are ...
It's Christmas in Tokyo, which means . . . what exactly? Well, not really Christmas in the traditional sense.
Christmas in Japan is, of course, not a holiday per se (and falling on a Monday this year, everyone will be working as normal, including yours truly), but Santa cosplay is very popular, as are "Christmas cakes" (which rarely resemble what a European might expect), German-style Christmas markets, and going on dates on Christmas Eve.
In fact, Christmas is basically just a romantic day for couples, and one of the busiest times of year for love hotels.
Gravure idols and models often ...
A retiring actress has complained that the mainstream media is ignoring the open secret that is the casting couch in the entertainment industry.
Though the sexual abuse that took place at Johnny's has now received the media attention it deserves after decades of silence, Misa Hayashi (林美佐) has said that there are still major issues of abuse in the industry.
In an interview with Daily Shincho, Hayashi relates how she was told to sleep with people when her DVD sales were poor. This was when she was working as a gravure idol in her twenties.
As we have noted in the past, the casting ...
Around this time of year, a lot of celebrities, music idols, and models release photo books and calendars. But something that might surprise people outside Japan, where streaming has become so dominant, is that gravure DVDs (or what used to known as image videos) are also still a lucrative market.
Yesterday saw the release of a new DVD by one of our favorite gradols, Eimi Matsushima. The Saitama native who is tall and busty has put out a new 105-minute DVD called special thanks to... and, as the title suggests, it is meant to be her final gravure DVD.
Though we haven't seen anything ...
The top Japanese porn star Minamo has appeared in an advertising campaign for leading Japanese lingerie brand Ravijour.
She is modeling various holidays-themed underwear items that are now available from Ravijour stores and online. She is also holding a promotional meet-and-greet event for the brand in Shinjuku in January, where you even get a signed Minamo-Ravijour mug.
We adore Minamo and she looks ravishing in the Ravijour lingerie, which comes in an erotic red. In keeping with the "holiday collection" theme, the lingerie is festively colored. A Christmas campaign for a ...
