In mid-January, we wrote about the pleasant surprise that was actress and model Haruka Ayase's return to gravure.
Well, this seems to be a bit of a trend right now: actresses and models who were huge in the 2000s and 2010s are going back to their gravure roots.
Aya Ueto has done a cover shoot for the February 27 issue of Flash, which is now on sale. Though she made her debut as an actress in the year 2000, Ueto worked in gravure before she became a big mainstream star, including as a junior idol.
Ueto now has three children, having giving birth to her most recent one last year, and while ...
Of all the points of entry into gravure, we are well used to women side-stepping into the industry from other jobs like music idols, fashion models, ring girls, race queens, and convention booth companions.
But geisha?!
Rino (莉乃) is a 22-year-old from Shizuoka who moved to Kyoto at 16 to become a maiko, or apprentice geisha. She worked in the old capital as a maiko in the Miyagawacho district until the age of 20.
She has now made her debut in the rather less glamorous but more modern world of gravure with a shoot for Weekly Friday. And in a very competitive industry in which new idols ...
We always like to welcome back old friends at Tokyo Kinky. Haruka Ayase's return to gravure, while quite modest, recently put a big smile on our faces.
And so it is with a little squeal of glee that we greet the gravure comeback of Miwako Kakei.
The Terrace House alum was a big gravure idol in the mid-2010s but has been content to plow a trade as a regular model, celebrity, and actress in more recent times. (Her acting gigs have particularly picked up in the past few years, especially for TV dramas.)
For whatever the reason, she has gone back to what she was originally good at, and is ...
Haruka Ayase is one of the most famous models and actors in Japan.
Before she made the transition into mainstream acting and modeling, and seemed to appear in almost every TV commercial or brand campaign, Ayase was briefly a gravure idol. She's got the looks for it: a cute, girl-next-door face, slim body, and (by most Japanese standards) large breasts.
This shoot in which she stands alluringly against a window, her body on display except for skimpy swimwear, is one of our all-time favorite gravure pics.
She even once shot some sort of video in a bath, and you can find nude grainy ...
2023 was another busy year for us, publishing an article almost every weekday. We hope you enjoyed reading our content.
With just a few days of 2023 left, let's look back on the year through some of the major developments in the gravure industry.
In January, Ichika Miri announced her retirement (though since she's just 24 years old, we hope she might return under a different name and new management).
One-time top gravure princess Anri Sugihara released her first photo book in over six years. She is now a charmingly mature 41 years old.
In March, Memo Oba retired. Gravure is brutally ...
As the year draws to a close, it's natural to look back on the past months and get a little nostalgic.
Present-day Japanese gravure idols dressed up and photographed in the style of vintage pinup models? Yes, please!
That's the basic concept behind a new photo book called Pin-Up Girls Selection, which is attempting to conjure up the image of "American porn from 100 years ago," according to the promo spiel.
There are nine participating models: Rin Takahashi, ENA, Hinano Ayakawa, Miku Oshima, Miyako Sono, Miyu Nakagawa, Aya Hazuki, Haruka Bando, and Saki Yanase.
Bando and Oshima are ...
It's Christmas in Tokyo, which means . . . what exactly? Well, not really Christmas in the traditional sense.
Christmas in Japan is, of course, not a holiday per se (and falling on a Monday this year, everyone will be working as normal, including yours truly), but Santa cosplay is very popular, as are "Christmas cakes" (which rarely resemble what a European might expect), German-style Christmas markets, and going on dates on Christmas Eve.
In fact, Christmas is basically just a romantic day for couples, and one of the busiest times of year for love hotels.
Gravure idols and models often ...
A retiring actress has complained that the mainstream media is ignoring the open secret that is the casting couch in the entertainment industry.
Though the sexual abuse that took place at Johnny's has now received the media attention it deserves after decades of silence, Misa Hayashi (林美佐) has said that there are still major issues of abuse in the industry.
In an interview with Daily Shincho, Hayashi relates how she was told to sleep with people when her DVD sales were poor. This was when she was working as a gravure idol in her twenties.
As we have noted in the past, the casting ...
Around this time of year, a lot of celebrities, music idols, and models release photo books and calendars. But something that might surprise people outside Japan, where streaming has become so dominant, is that gravure DVDs (or what used to known as image videos) are also still a lucrative market.
Yesterday saw the release of a new DVD by one of our favorite gradols, Eimi Matsushima. The Saitama native who is tall and busty has put out a new 105-minute DVD called special thanks to... and, as the title suggests, it is meant to be her final gravure DVD.
Though we haven't seen anything ...
Earlier in the week, we sang the praises of TV announcer Kasumi Mori, loving her sultry looks and intelligence.
Now comes the gravure debut of someone who definitely has brains.
Asa Kamiya (神谷明采) has done her first swimwear gravure shoot, which appears in the current issue (December 22) of Weekly Friday. Has Christmas come early this year?
She is a fourth-year student in the economics faculty at the University of Tokyo, regarded as the most elite college in Japan. She won the Miss Todai beauty contest in 2020 and was Miss of Miss 2021, essentially crowning her as the most ...
