The Japanese summer is long and brutal: once the cooler, somewhat sticky rainy season ends in July, the weather is scorching through September, coupled with intense humidity.
The temperatures mean that people dress lightly, which means more young female flesh on display if you are wandering the streets of a big city.
If you're anything like us, this gets you horny. (All the amazing photo books with full-frontal nudity coming out don't help either.) But squeezing one out -- let alone full sex -- in such conditions is not always a pleasant experience, even with the air conditioning on full ...
The photo book market in Japan can sometimes seem like a tame one. Sure, we harp on about the latest semi-nude shoots featuring various music idols, actresses, models, and so on, but, as lovely those are, we are ultimately making hay out of thin material.
Gone are the glory days of the photo book when we could be really surprised by a provocative new release.
We are talking about, of course, the "hair nude" full-frontal shoot.
Back in the 1990s, when the hair nude was at its peak, it was popular for established stars or even up-and-coming models. Far from a last resort for a faded star or ...
There are blasts from the past, and then there are blasts from the past.
If you are long-term fan of gravure, then you will know of Yinling (Yan Yinling), a major force in the industry in the late 1990s and 2000s.
She moved to Japan at the age of 10 and enjoyed a successful career as a female wrester, race queen, singer, and gravure model, but got married in 2008 to a Japanese man and effectively retired from the industry, moving back to Taiwan in 2011.
Now aged 47 and the mother of three children, the Taiwanese-born model also known as Yinling of Joy is making a comeback with her first ...
We recently wrote about ex-AKB48 idol Satomi Kaneko's retirement, noting how she had carved out quite a striking career as a sexploitation actress and nude model after her brief stint with the group.
In general, after leaving one of the AKB or Sakamichi groups, or any idol group for that matter, the surest way to cement your status is to do more provocative shoots in gravure magazines, release photo books, and branch out into fashion modeling and TV gigs, either acting or presenting.
Only a lucky few land "serious" acting roles (perhaps only Atsuko Maeda and Yuko Oshima spring to mind), but ...
Last month, we reported on the controversy over a new gravure idol who was supposedly AI-generated but seemed to be just a slightly different version of a flesh-and-blood gradol. The publisher eventually withdrew its much-hyped photo book featuring Ai Satsuki.
As we noted in a follow-up post, artificial intelligence has major implications for gravure, making it possible to churn out cheap photo books with almost now overheads (no expensive photo shoots, no model fees, etc.). It has meant the market is currently flooded with cheap or even free photo books.
The issue of AI and gravure has ...
Over four years ago, the media in Japan and globally went bananas about a Japanese man who "married" a virtual character.
These stories are catnip to editors who love "sexless Japan" and "wacky Japan" content. The tale of Akihiko Kondo and his love for popular Vocaloid idol Hatsune Miku was too much to resist, and the world lapped it up.
For little discernible reason, Kondo (who is now 40) is back in the news.
The Mainichi Shimbun sat down for a fresh interview with him and find out how his "marriage" is going. (The newspaper also published a follow-up story in January 2022.) Apparently, ...
Japan's obscenity laws about not showing genitalia apply to you, even if you are supposedly an amateur and not a professional porn production company churning out DVDs and streaming releases.
On June 30, Japanese media showed police giving 21-year-old Yukino Kimura the perp walk.
Her crime? She had sold unedited videos on Twitter to people who sent her a message on the platform. Her account was apparently reinya3_, which is still active at the time of writing but has not been updated since early June.
The cutie worked by day as a company employee in Kyoto but had a Twitter account ...
We recently wrote about AKB48 idol Mion Mukaichi's somewhat surprising decision to do a semi-nude photo book while still a member of the supergroup.
As we mentioned in our post, most music idols wait until graduating before posing semi-nude or nude. And in fact, they are often forced to do something like that to build any sort of career in a crowded marketplace.
A case in point is the ravishing Satomi Kaneko, who carved out a name for herself as a provocative, sensual model after a brief stint in AKB48 in 2007.
She started doing gravure in 2014 after an acting role in a sexploitation movie ...
Everything changes, except the avant-garde, or so the saying goes. Now in Japan, perhaps it's rather nothing changes, except for sexual mores.
For years, Japan seemed to lag behind other major nations in the Global North in terms of access to emergency birth control or even use of contraception.
Basically, people just don't use condoms, inspired by the Fuji-sized mountains of porn they consume in which condoms are never seen (but generally are used), leading to lots of shotgun weddings (it seems like most celebrities seem to marry this way) and a STDs/STIs crisis, especially syphilis -- in ...
With music sales down, fewer meet-and-greet events like before, and far less general public interest in its current members (which means fewer TV appearances and fewer lucrative advertising campaign contracts), AKB48 is in, well, perhaps not quite a state of decline but certainly a period of less prominence in popular culture compared to the glory days of the early 2010s.
Is this why its members are doing semi-nude photo shoots even before graduating the group? The AKB overlords used to be very exact about how much flesh the members could show, determined to keep things tantalizing and ...
