Back in 2019, we lamented the (fortunately temporary) closure of Osaka's red-light district Tobita Shinchi in a bid to stave off a crackdown by the authorities ahead of the G-20 summit. (Because the 2020 Olympics ended up being held in 2021 and with basically no visitors, the Tokyo Games ultimately did not involve as much of a crackdown on porn and sex services as expected.
There's nothing we hate more than hypocrisy and trying to hide what society is truly like, but Osaka is at it again.
With next year's expo fast approaching, Osaka police have raided a strip club called the Toyo Show ...
The founder of Japanese video hosting site FC2, Riyo Takahashi, once ran unsuccessfully for election in Japan's upper house.
His campaign platform was to "crush mosaic censorship," referring to the pixellation that covers genitalia in Japanese porn to protect producers and retailers from prosecution under Japan's obscenity law, which is usually interpreted as drawing the line at showing a penis or vagina. (This same logic is applied to nudity in mainstream movies too.)
Now Takahashi has been arrested by police in Japan when he returned to the country. The 51-year-old was arrested on ...
A candidate for the upcoming Tokyo governor election is using a naked female model on his campaign posters.
Yusuke Kawai's schtick is cosplaying as the Joker and doing provocative stuff, though this might be the most extreme of all his stunts to date.
The model is Miu Sakurai, a gyaru model, music idol (with the group Devilsis), and race queen who has appeared in beauty contests and who appears to have Filipino roots. She describes herself as the "world's top will-do-anything gyaru" and has also been helping Kawai put up the posters of her naked body on boards around Tokyo.
Various ...
Famous (or possibly infamous) Japanese entrepreneur Takafumi Horie, aka Horiemon, has weighed in on the issue of adult video censorship.
Japanese adult video, despite being possibly the biggest porn industry in the world, is censored: no genitals are shown. This is a strange workaround to avoid prosecution under the obscenity law that was introduced to Japan in the Meiji era. The same policy is used in softcore porn and mainstream cinema, even if the nudity is not in a sex scene.
In a Japanese movie, the makers will simply shoot in a way to avoid genitals. If it's a foreign film, they will ...
Last month, we wrote about the controversy that threatened to wreck one of the conventions of the Japanese summer: swimwear gravure photo events where fans go to see and take pictures of models and idols.
These are often held in public lidos (outdoor pools), and are popular events that attract large numbers of fans.
After local Japanese Communist Party politicians complained about the commercial use of prefectural parks and the "lewd" nature of the poses, though, authorities stepped in to ask organizers to call off some events in June.
This was then criticized as censorship and ...
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've said it before and we'll say it again: we think shunga, erotic woodblock prints, are one of the most impressive and significant parts of Japanese historical culture, and that the government should be singing its praises from the rooftops, instead of trying to hide them and keep people from seeing them under threat of prosecution.
Fortunately, we are no longer alone. Shunga has achieved global success, not least in the form of a very successful art exhibition in Britain in 2013, which belatedly came to Japan in 2015 and attracted huge crowds.
Money talks. Organizers now can point to ...
The ex-porn star Kaho Shibuya is suing a production company for ¥7.4 million (about $55,000) for mental distress, infringement of privacy, and harm to her reputation after it neglected to handle unedited data properly, resulting in a leak of footage.
In January 2022, Shibuya ascertained that two of her adult video releases made in September 2016 and released in 2017 had been uploaded to a video site in an unedited (uncensored) format not available commercially. In other words, the genitals on the content were not blurred out in the usual Japanese way (known as "mosaic," a custom in porn as ...
In one of our (sadly) increasingly rare trips to the movie theater, especially the arthouse cinemas known as "mini theaters" in Japan, we saw a trailer for this movie that deals with a subject very close to our hearts.
Goodbye, Bad Magazines is about the impact of the removable of adult magazines from convenience stores, as one of the ways in which Tokyo tried to clean up its image ahead of the 2020 Olympics. As we know, it was all for naught since the Olympics were delayed by a year and then held without spectators, and at a time in which almost no one except citizens could even enter the ...
Back in May, we reported on the arrests of the head of Japanese secondhand book store chain Mandarake and four of its employees over the sale of sexually explicit old photo books, which the chain apparently sold online and at two of its stores.
Though "hair nude" photo books with full-frontal nudity have been produced and sold by mainstream publishers for decades, the books in question here were so-called "vinyl books," which are older and more obscure -- and less regulated. They constitute a kind of gray zone in terms of adult publications in Japan: hair nude books are "celebrity books" or ...
