Tea Friends is a new Japanese film about sex services for the elderly.
A former sex worker called Mana (Rei Okamoto) runs the eponymous service, which she considers more like a community of "tea girls" who sleep with older men.
The clients answer vague ads asking for "tea friends" and this is how they meet the women involved with the service, who tend to be mature too. If this sounds twee, it's actually realistic -- we wrote about a similar service before.
Inevitably, their encounters involves trips to love hotels but the film suggests there's more to this than just sex. Also inevitably, ...
This is a story that's been bubbling along in the background for a while and has now come more fully to light.
Mariko Shinoda, the celebrity once one of the big original stars of AKB48, is locked in a legal battle with her estranged husband over the custody rights to their child.
Shinoda graduated AKB48 in 2013 and got married in autumn 2019 to a man she had been dating for just a few months. In April 2020, she gave birth. She became something of a model of motherhood, devoting her Instagram to pictures of her parenting. This all seemed to stop in summer this year amid a tranche of ...
Hong Kong have cracked down on foreign sex workers, arresting numerous women on October 17.
According to local news reports, they included the former Japanese porn star Noa Aizawa (愛沢のあ), who has been working as a prostitute from a hotel in the city.
Police have targeted a prostitution ring that was promoting Aizawa's services as a sex worker on social media by using her past adult videos as promotional material. Along with Aizawa, another woman arrested at the hotel was from Thailand. They both entered Hong Kong on travel visas.
In all, 16 women were arrested in a series of ...
Following its recent interview with pink film softcore porn star Chisa Hasegawa, the awesome Substack blog-newsletter Tokyo Calling has put out another cracker -- and we are very jealous. We don't know how Gianni Simone pulled it off but he managed to land an interview with a genuine soapland worker, and it's a sensitive and enlightening read.
Accompanied by photos by Eric Rechsteiner, the intrepid Simone pays a visit to one of the many soaplands (a kind of bathhouse-style brothel) in Senzoku, the Tokyo area formerly known as Yoshiwara -- the city's most popular and renowned red-light ...
Elections bring out the eccentrics, with plenty of novelty candidates reliably popping up to keep us amused. Past examples include the wannabe politician who wore government-supplied face masks as a bra or the regular appearances of Teruki Goto -- including once nude on his campaign poster.
With the recent passing of the controversial new law regulating the porn industry, how are candidates responding to the current situation?
We found two intriguing examples among candidates for the upcoming Upper House election.
Riyo Takahashi, the 48-year-old founder of the Japanese video hosting site ...
After the government and media demonized mizu-shobai (host and hostess clubs, and similar businesses) as Covid superspreaders, the industry reacted by working with officials to spread information about how to avoid affection.
Others, though, fought back. A member of the sex industry sued the government for its refusal to provide handouts to adult businesses, despite giving such funds to private citizens and small businesses in "respectable" industries. As we wrote when legal proceedings began at Tokyo District Court in autumn 2020, the woman who filed the suit argued this was in violation of ...
A Japanese married couple has pleaded guilty to forcing a 25-year-old single mom into prostitution.
The single mother was staying with them. As payment for laundry and other costs, they made her work as a prostitute, according to media reports of the trial at Tokyo District Court, which began in May.
There were 334 acts of alleged prostitution in six months. The mother was apparently brainwashed by the couple and sent out into the local area to pick up clients.
Prosecutors are seeking a custodial sentence of 2.5 years for the couple.
The single mother was working as a hostess and giving ...
Parco, a leading department store chain in Japan, has issued an apology after it used a "sex booth" to promote an event.
The installation was decked out in the style of the "free information" kiosks (muryo annaijo) that are found in certain city districts for providing listings, referrals, and recommendations about various forms of sex services (fuzoku), including blowjob parlors, delivery health, and soaplands, and also hostess clubs and girls bars.
Though less common as they were in the days before everyone had access to the internet on their phones, such adult booths are still found in ...
We stumbled upon this confessional post on Amina du Jean's Substack, billed as "a digital temple for positive femininity." The title, "Crazy Sexy Tokyo," is provocative and sounds like another "wacky Japan" story at first, but we were especially intrigued to read the author's insights into compensated dating (enjo kosai).
Writing about her personal experiences of participating in this social "custom" of young women, in which they go on dates with (older) men and receive monetary "compensation" for their troubles, the author is very candid and doesn't resort to the more obvious ...
A few years ago, various shops began to appear in places like Akihabara offering services like hugs, ear-cleaning, "snuggling," massages, and "reflexology." However, like how massage parlors may provide more than just a massage, some of the "cuddle cafe" (soine-ten) establishments merely used these services as fronts for forms of prostitution. A police crackdown ensued and we actually thought there were very few, if any, left.
It seems that such places are still around and up to their old tricks, operating under the guise of rifure-ten (reflexology shops).
A rifure-ten chain, Rapunzel ...
