We all know that trains are far from the safest places for women in Japan, so full of would-be gropers the train companies have had to introduce women-only carriages in recent years. Well, now you can add buses to your list of danger zones. Why? Because police arrested a middle-aged bus driver for trying to kiss a female passenger. The 54-year-old Kunihiko Nakanishi apparently attempt to plant a smooch on the forehead of a teenaged girl in March this year. Nakanishi is alleged to have stopped the bus he was driving mid-route while there were no other passengers on board except ...

     Read More     

Japan has been shocked and amused by a scandal in the popular world of ice skating. Daisuke Takahashi, the 28-year-old male figure skating star and much loved by female fans as a heartthrob as well as Olympian, has been sexually assaulted (kind of) by his old boss, a 49-year-old Seiko Hashimoto, a former skater herself and now politician. Takahashi has long been rumored to be in a relationship with Japan's other most famous figure skater, Mao Asada. However, it seems that at least at a drunken party in February after the end of the Sochi Olympics, Asada had a rival in an unlikely ...

     Read More     

In desperate need of a smooch? No girl around for a good kiss when you want one? Have this in your pocket for such situations! Gashapon capsule toys are one of the most famous kinds of Japanese vending machines and come in all shapes and sizes. Saying that, they are usually something to do with an anime character. But the new Smart Kiss series by Bandai, which went on sale at the vending machines in mid-October, is a bit different. It's a series of "lips," seven of them girls' and one modeled on a man's mouth. The stickers are meant for your smartphone, though we're not ...

     Read More     

Imagine you are a young Japanese girl. You are on a train. You sit down. You put on some earphones and listen to music. You close your eyes. Probably you are tired and just want some rest on the way home. You have made a fatal mistake. That's what one Japanese girl in her twenties found out on a train in Saitama on April 25th. She was rudely awakened from her semi-slumber to find that a stranger's lips were locked around hers. While her eyes had been closed, a man, Toshimitsu Ishibashi (49), had decided to kiss her. The man was from Saitama's Kasukabeshi and worked as a ...

     Read More     

An otaku engineer has devised a system so that his lust for idols will not be hampered by the constraints of the 2D. Now he has created a poster that can respond to being "kissed", perfect for reenacting his fantasies of making out with his favorite fantasy girls. We love how the young guy who developed the poster is so flagrant about his motivations: I'm a big fan of pop idols, and I have posters of them in my room. It bugged me that the posters didn't move at all. We built this system because we thought, if a poster could move to match people's movements, that would be interactive ...

     Read More     

Let the otakus start salivating now. AKB48 and their taskmasters have demonstrated that, yes, there are further depths to be plumbed with their new TV ad for Puccho candy. The ads feature the ladies passing candy to each other from, yes, from each other's mouth! I can hardly type this I can so excited by the prospect of fake lesbian kissing from child-like idols. Or not, as the case may ...

     Read More     

If you buy a bottle of Zima you can kiss a Japanese idol...for free! The idol world has been rocked of late by scandals involving prostitution allegations and perhaps this is only a step away. The campaign “KISS A-ZIMA: Zima’s taste is kissing taste” attaches silicone casts of celebrity lips with each bottle of Zima. Stick the lips onto the neck of the bottle -- you can feel like you are smooching your favorite idol! You might look a bit foolish doing this in a bar so I recommend you get one from a store and take it home! For the guys out there who bend both ways there are two ...

     Read More