Earlier this month, the naked body of 23-year-old Rina Arano was found tied to a tree. Her body showed no obvious sign of injury and the cause of death is still unclear.
A 33-year-old man has been arrested for confining her against her will in his vacation home in Hitachiota, Ibaraki, which is located around a kilometer from where Arano's body was found.
Arano apparently met the Hiroyuki Sanpei, a 33-year-old company employee in Minamiashigara, Kanagawa, for the first time in February or March. It is unclear exactly why she and Sanpei went to his villa in the rural district -- or what took ...
People have arrested the CEO of famous Japanese secondhand book store chain Mandarake as well as four employees in connection with the sale of obscene material.
Best known for manga but also offering collectibles, doujinshi, and anime toys, Mandarake was selling so-called "vinyl books," a term referring to pornographic photo books from the 1970s and 1980s that showed genitalia. (The "vinyl" part means the plastic that was used to cover the books.)
As regular readers will know, Japan's strange obscenity laws mean it is nominally illegal to show actual genitalia, hence adult video is ...
A few years ago, various shops began to appear in places like Akihabara offering services like hugs, ear-cleaning, "snuggling," massages, and "reflexology." However, like how massage parlors may provide more than just a massage, some of the "cuddle cafe" (soine-ten) establishments merely used these services as fronts for forms of prostitution. A police crackdown ensued and we actually thought there were very few, if any, left.
It seems that such places are still around and up to their old tricks, operating under the guise of rifure-ten (reflexology shops).
A rifure-ten chain, Rapunzel ...
We fondly remember the days when it was relatively easy to visit happening bars. Sadly, those times when such establishments were widely known and could be frequented in central areas like Shinjuku or Shibuya now feel distant, largely due to a police crackdown that closed many down or scared others off.
Further proof that the police won't tolerate businesses that allow members of the public to have sex with each other appeared this month.
Media reported on May 9 that police had busted a Shibuya happening bar called Sleeping Beauty.
An incredible eleven separate police districts as well ...
A 40-year-old political candidate has allegedly fathered a child with a junior high school second grader.
Masayuki Hiratsuka, who is the head of the Popular Sovereignty Party and advocates not wearing masks (quite something in a culture like Japan where wearing masks is already ingrained, especially during flu or pollen allergy seasons) and not getting the Covid vaccine, ran for governor of Tokyo in the July 2020 election with a striking campaign declaring that the "coronavirus is just a cold."
Though he attracted a mere 0.15% of the vote, he has continued to campaign online on his YouTube ...
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police's chikan (molesting) app Digi Police (Digital Police) has won plaudits for recently leading to the arrest of a man in his fifties, who was allegedly groping the body of a young girl on a crowded train.
The incident happened on the morning of April 15 on a train running between Saitama and Tokyo. A girl in her teens used the app to notify that she was being groped.
Chikan is a notoriously serious problem on public transport in Japan. Frequently, trains are so crowded that a victim of chikan cannot move and is unable to identify who is molesting them. In this ...
Here's a peculiar case.
As reported in Bengo4, a woman is suing her employer in Japan for enabling sexual harassment.
Her company failed to act after it was alleged the woman's section chief sent her around 150 pornographic images. They were sent to her at the company address over three occasions between January and April 2020, with the third batch alone containing 100 photos and an adult toy. The woman in her thirties is seeking ¥4.4 million in damages in the lawsuit that began at Tokyo District Court on March 30.
The man in his fifties sent them to her by private post anonymously. She ...
When does an orgy become a crime? If it's group sex among consenting adults, there should be no issue, right?
That's today's legal conundrum.
One man in Japan found himself arrested for hosting an orgy (in Japanese, ranko party). So what was his crime? Strangely enough, it was fraud.
He had booked a hotel room in Fukuoka for two people, but then ended up with eleven guests (eight men, three women) in the room in January.
He should have paid for eleven guests to stay, but only paid for two, hence his arrest. The man recruited participants in the orgy online.
There was the possibility ...
Be careful what that young lady offers you: it probably is too good to be true.
When the fiftysomething man from Ibaraki met the 28-year-old Chiharu Yamaguchi through a fuzoku (brothel) service three years ago, he thought all his Christmases had come at once. They started exchanging messages via LINE and he came to believe they were a couple.
She promised she would be with him till death. Thinking she would marry him, the man agreed to her requests for money that she said she needed to pay back her student loan or her mother's operations. She is alleged to have tricked the unnamed man out ...
A 24-year-old woman was arrested on January 22 after a 82-year-old man was found dead in a love hotel in Ikebukuro, Tokyo.
The man, Katsuzo Imano, was found in the room on the night of January 21, covered in blood and with box-cutter wounds on his chest. The money in his wallet was gone.
The suspect, Haruka Fujii, apparently called a former boyfriend immediately after the crime and then attempted to flee. Fujii, the ex-boyfriend, and his younger brother were apprehended at Nishi-Hachioji Station, just outside Tokyo, the following morning.
The image above shows Fujii shortly before she ...
