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 ...

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The actor Issei Ishida has claimed to dated a total of a thousand woman. He made the extraordinary, surely grossly exaggerated statement on a NTV show on January 29. Of that massive number, our middle-aged Japanese Casanova said that 60 were "celebrities." Pressed further as to which of those are women that anyone on the street would have heard of, he claimed seven. His Instagram is full of pictures with women. In December 2021, Ishida announced he had got divorced for the third time (from a woman over 20 years his junior). In November last year, he claimed that he then had six ...

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Hot on the heels of the revelations over Mariko Shinoda's marital problems, allegedly caused by her infidelity, comes news of the nuptial dilemmas of another former AKB48 idol. Kana Kobayashi is now aged 31 and seemed to have it all. Last March, she announced that she had married a famous investor and given birth to a child. But then on January 16, she announced on social media that she was already divorced. In fact, her husband had "another wife." If that wasn't bad enough, he was arrested in October on charges of investment fraud, sparking an online backlash against her. Her husband ...

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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 ...

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Private detectives are something of a cottage industry in Japan: they derive much of their clientele from men or women (but especially women) who suspect their spouses of adultery. Catching them in the act or at least gathering concrete evidence of adultery will lead to a better payout in a divorce. Many such services specialize in discreet teams of female agents with hidden cameras. One recent story seems to start off in the usual manner. A wife suspected her husband (not pictured) of adultery and hired an agency to snoop around. The warning signs were there. Her husband would disappear ...

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OK, our headline is a bit deceptive, but the gist is essentially true. It's been years in the offing and it might finally be happening: the law forbidding women from remarrying after a divorce is going to change. Currently, a woman in Japan is legally unable to remarry straight after a divorce. She has to wait 100 days. Her ex-husband, though, is free to marry someone new without waiting. The law was ostensibly introduced in the 19th century to the civil code to avoid disputes over a child's father. The "cooling-off" period, which was six months until 2016, was put in place in case the ...

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Papakatsu, the buzzword that refers to compensated dating for sugar daddies, is in the news again. Takeru Yoshikawa, a politician with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, has been accused of drinking with an 18-year-old girl. House of Representatives member Yoshikawa, who is 40 but frankly looks a but older (perhaps it's the jowls), has a wife and two daughters. He was photographed arriving with the girl at a high-end hotel in the Odaiba bay district of Tokyo in late May. According to the scoop in News Post Seven (that includes 46 pictures!), he and the girl arrived, checked in, and then ...

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Our post yesterday featuring the confessions of a foreign female about compensated dating in Tokyo led us to this case study (from early 2021) on legal website Bengo4, which sets out to answer a curious question: What happens to your assets if you divorce your wife for compensated dating? According to the author (a lawyer), an aggrieved husband consulted him about divorcing his wife, who had been caught doing compensated dating. Apparently, starting from around the time they got married, his wife was meeting another man around two times a month and having sex with him. For these dates, she ...

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She teased. The mainstream media lapped it up. She delivered. Now the publisher is looking to see the impact on the sales figures. The former top fashion model Yukina Kinoshita has attempted her comeback with a page straight out of Angelica Michibata's book: when in doubt, take off your clothes. As we continue to revel in a wave of nostalgia with recent gravure comebacks by the likes of Shizuka Nakamura and Ai Shinozaki -- likewise, nude or semi-nude -- we were intrigued by this slightly different case, in which the model Kinoshita, after being dropped by her agency over the celebrity's ...

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We love a good comeback story. After some time quietly doing her own thing on YouTube and Instagram, Yukina Kinoshita (木下優樹菜) has returned to the mainstream entertainment world. As a kind of de facto apology for her recent scandals, the 34-year-old mother of two is releasing a nude photo book. "CORRECT" is published by Futabasha and released on March 17. It's being publicized heavily as "nude," though the preview images we have seen so far are only semi-nude (in the classic "hand bra" pose, or tebura). We will update with more pictures when they become available. Hopefully this ...

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