Following the high-profile cancellation of the latest "Futomomo" thighs fetish exhibition, another exhibition has run afoul of Ikebukuro Marui department store this month.
Mixing photography and illustration, the annual Girls' Love (yuri) (as opposed to Boys' Love) fetish exhibition was set to run from March 17th to March 25th at the Ikebukuro branch of Marui. The "Yuri Exhibition" event has now been cancelled for reasons that are not yet fully clear. The organizers (who include subculture store Village Vanguard) claim that it has now become "difficult" for the exhibitors to display and ...
The latest edition of the immensely successful "Futomomo" series of exhibitions has been cancelled amid allegations of underage models.
These exhibitions by the photographer Yuria have showcased Japanese female thighs in all manner of poses and settings, and have some 35,000 fans since the first event in July 2015. Last year there was even a spin-off cafe.
But the most recent exhibition, which was set to run at Ikebukuro Marui department store from March 9th to March 26th, has been cancelled over allegations that the models may be legally minors and that the photography was promoting ...
And so it begins.
It started in Chiba and Osaka, where convenience stores began covering up adult magazines to "protect" minors from seeing the sexual images.
The clampdown continues anew as Tokyo attempts to "clean up" ahead of the 2020 Olympic Games in the city and the ongoing inbound tourism boom.
Now the Ministop convenience store chain has announced that it will no longer sell pornographic magazines.
Such magazines are a staple of every konbini in Japan, usually tucked away in their own corner.
We hate to say "We told you so" but we actually predicted this way back in ...
We've written before about the growing speculation on the fate of Japanese convenience store's typically ample selection of adult magazines. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics fast approaching, some have noted the possible demise or at least temporary concealment of this corner of liberty in a straitened society.
Schemes are underway to make this a reality, though with mixed success.
Chiba City attempted to carry out a test with convenience stores, asking them to cover up their porn mags with covers and see what happened to sales. Unfortunately the 12 brands of 7-Eleven that the city had ...
The "hair nude" is a curious Japanese-English term. It refers not just to naked flesh; it's naked flesh specifically with genital hair.
What is "shocking" here is the display of pubic hair, the line by which art and entertainment is usually fettered in Japan. It is fine to have plenty of nudity in films and print publications, but to avoid the century-old ambiguous obscenity laws, people censored or did not show actual pubic hair.
The hair nude set out to deliberately show this bush taboo was something to be challenged, both legally and artistically.
While the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki ...
So-called "vagina artist" Rokudenashiko has been found guilty and convicted of a charge of obscenity, and ordered to pay a fee of ¥400,000 (around $3,700).
Rokudenashiko ("good-for-nothing girl"), whose real name is Megumi Igarashi and whose first manga book has just been released in English, was first arrested in July 2014 for distributing data that enabled recipients to make 3D prints of her vagina.
She was arrested again in December of that year for making a plaster mold of a kayak based on her genitals, which was displayed at an adult shop.
Her defence argues that her work ...
Something that shocks some visitors to Japan is the volume of porn, soft-core porn or other adult magazines lining the shelves of convenience stores. It is placed in a certain section marked as "adult" but not on a top shelf like in other countries. And the covers make it very clear what is inside, awaiting the horny reader.
There has been talk about "cleaning this up" as we get closer to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, but no concrete developments.
Until now. In what may be the first salvo against the freedom for pornographers to push their wares in open, a local mayor has taken the ...
The BBC occasionally likes to weigh in on adult Japan matters, not always with success.
It recently profiled Keiko Takemiya, "the godmother of manga sex in Japan". This time they go the extra mile and get some reasonable background and interviews, but some of their assertions are off -- not least the headline.
Takemiya was just 26 when she started Kaze to Kino Uta (The Poem of Wind and Trees).
It opens with two naked teenage boys in a 19th-century French boarding school lying on top of each other, post-coital. The series centres on one of those boys and another new boy. ...
Be warned. Be careful what you have in your drawer or on your phone, hard drive or cloud.
While the government was pressured by mangaka and animators to exclude comic book and drawn images from the new pornography laws passed in 2014, it seems the courts do not agree.
The Tokyo District Court has found an artist "guilty of violating the child pornography law by creating and selling realistic computer graphic images of a naked girl," reports the Asahi Shimbun.
The court on March 15 sentenced Akashi Takahashi, a 55-year-old computer graphic designer from Gifu city, to a one-year ...
We blogged last autumn about the Rokudenashiko's upcoming first English-language book, What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good For Nothing Artist and her Pussy.
Now the Canada-based Koyama Press has released more details and images ahead of its release in May.
The book is written by "vagina artist" Rokudenashiko (the artist name of Megumi Igarashi), translated by Anne Ishii, and edited by Anne Ishii and Graham Kolbeins. The cover is by the famous designer Chip Kidd.
Rokudenashiko has been arrested twice for "obscenity" for making and distributing artworks based on her ...
