Many moons ago, we had the misfortune to live in a "gaijin house" -- one of those sordid guest houses that cater specifically to foreign residents of Tokyo. It wasn't as bad as some of the horror stories we have heard about such places, but the walls were decidedly thin.
One weekend morning, we woke to hear sounds from across the hall (through at least two doors/walls). Our young American neighbor was clearly balls deep in his Sunday breakfast. We could hear his partner (at least, the one he had snagged that week, since he always had several on the go) groaning how "kimochi ii" (good) it ...
Last week, we wrote about the Politician Girls 48 Party (aka Political Party Girls 48), the latest incarnation of an anti-NHK fringe right-wing populist party. The candidates are all female and feature many former idols, models, and minor celebrities.
Now, as the party fields candidates in various upcoming local elections, more details have emerged about its prospective lawmakers.
In April, Hasumin Yoshikawa is standing for a seat in the Setagaya City Assembly election. Setagaya, incidentally, is where the Tokyo Kinky offices are located. It's a large, mostly residential part of Tokyo known ...
Once one of the most famous idols in Japan, Mariko Shinoda has divorced her husband of four years. The 37-year-old announced the news on Instagram.
A former AKB48 singer who later branched out into acting, Shinoda married an entrepreneur three years her junior in 2019 and gave birth to a daughter in 2020.
As reported on this blog, rumors emerged last year that her marriage was on the rocks due to her alleged adultery. Her husband apparently took their child away from her for a time.
The divorce follows a mediation process due to the alleged infidelity. In Japan, the aggrieved spouse can ...
Ah, springtime. A season for the sakura cherry blossom. For those debauched hanami picnics in parks that are great opportunities for hooking up and meeting friends of friends who become lovers.
Well, the bloom has come a little early this year in Tokyo but it looks like the peak will be spoiled by rain anyway.
So much for going outdoors and enjoying what promised to be the first true post-Covid hanami season (during the waves of the pandemic, the authorities made rather redundant gestures toward social distancing by closing off parts of parks, which generally just meant that determined ...
In the current issue of Weekly Playboy, busty Japanese model, cosplayer, YouTuber, and plastic model maker Umi Shinonome discusses how she got into gravure.
When in her third year at university, she was invited to do a shoot with some otaku photographer friends. She says she found the experience enjoyable, not just the shoot itself but the costumes, the location scouting, and the whole process of putting the results together.
Shinonome then started using social media to recruit photographers to shoot her.
After about a year, her management agency spotted and scouted her. She made her ...
The travails of the Michibata family are set to continue, it seems.
After Angelica Michibata's husband was arrested for extortion, her career and reputation were left in tatters (not least because her involvement in the crime was also suggested). She later divorced her husband and made a comeback with a nude photo book in her mid-thirties.
The latest scandal to hit the glamorous Argentine-Japanese model family affects the most famous of the sisters, Jessica.
According to police announcement on March 20, the 38-year-old Jessica Michibata (one-time wife of F1 driver Jenson Button) was ...
Kazusa Okuyama is one of the top gravure idols in Japan right now, though she went quiet for a while from the end of last year with few social media updates. The last major gravure-related thing she did was release a 2023 calendar and hold an exhibition with top gravure photographer Chikashi Kasai (both in December 2022).
Her absence was essentially explained on February 14 (yes, Valentine's Day), when there came the shock announcement that one of the most eligible ladies in the land had got married.
This typically would mean the end of a gravure career. (She also does occasional acting. In ...
You would think that a company as large and successful as Soft on Demand would have an army of lawyers and legal advisors on retainer, and that they would consult them carefully when launching a major and costly new project. Or perhaps they did and their team simply wasn't doing their job right.
Either way, our proverbial jaw hit the floor when we read this news.
On March 16, it was announced by Tokyo Metropolitan Police that the 40-year-old CEO of SOD -- the biggest porn producer in Japan -- has been arrested for violation of the fuzoku law. You might presume this is related to ...
People bemoan the lack of women in Japanese politics but we suspect this is not the solution.
The NHK Party, a fringe people whose aim is to "protect" the Japanese population again the titular public broadcaster, has gone through its umpteenth name change, now becoming the Seijika Joshi 48 To, or the Politician Girls 48 Party.
No prizes for guessing, the name (abbreviated to SJJ49) is a cheeky reference to AKB48, and yes, the candidates are all female.
Note our neutral vocabulary -- though the party itself has used joshi, or "girl," meaning the wannabe lawmakers are very young woman (and ...
The beautiful Akari Fukunaga (福永朱梨) is a relatively unknown, 28-year-old Japanese actress whose credits include The Real Thing (2019) and She Is Alone (2021).
In 2022, she had a starring role in the film Hand, a pink movie in Nikkatsu's revived Roman Porno series (made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the series), though based on a literary source (a novel by a prize-winning female writer, Nao-Cola Yamazaki).
Fukunaga plays 25-year-old Sawako, who has a thing for watching and photographing older men, but starts an affair with a young coworker nonetheless. She must slowly learn ...
