After losing his wife, the former TV announcer Mao Kobayashi, to cancer in 2017, the top kabuki actor Ebizo Ichikawa was reinvented in the public imagination as a sympathetic figure bravely battling on as a single parent.
Ebizo, who had an image as a womanizer before he settled down with Mao Kobayashi, is apparently starting to date again. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the tabloids are relishing the details: namely that the 44-year-old star is dating more than one woman, judging from paparazzi shots, and they are much younger than him. Though one such report came out last autumn, ...
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 ...
The tabloid magazine Weekly Bunshun has published an interview with someone they give the alias Yuna Ishihara, who is apparently a 24-year-old student at Tokyo College of Music.
But she also appears in adult video and works at a soapland in Yoshiwara, Tokyo's long-established red-light district in the east of the city.
But due to the pandemic, her income of ¥900,000 (around $9,000) a month has massively decreased, leading her to take up papakatsu.
As reported before, this is a euphemism for compensated dating with older men (sugar daddies). The principle is hardly new but the term has ...
Is compensated dating with sugar daddies increasing among Japanese women due to remote working?
Bunshun Online had an intriguing article suggesting something to that effect. It interviews a 24-year-old female office worker who has started doing "papakatsu," a newly coined kind of compensated dating where younger women go on dates with older men.
She started her new sideline in January and over the course of the past few months, has met over 60 men this way.
The woman says that shifting to working remotely has changed her whole daily schedule, making it more flexible, whole semi-lockdowns ...
The casting couch is one of the open secrets of the idol industry. Another one is the extra money that idols (music, gravure, AV), seiyu, models, and actors earn from compensated dating.
This gets exposed at regular intervals by tabloid scoops. One such scandal caused Shoko Takahashi to lose her agency as a gradol (when she worked as Shoko Takasaki) and launched her porn career.
The JAV star Yuria Satomi had trouble with the tax agency in 2016 over huge amounts of undeclared income from her "boyfriends," who compensated her financially for their relationship.
The latest scandal was broken ...
In December 2019, it was reported that 61-year-old Japanese politician Yasuhiro Ozata (小里泰弘) was asked to pay a "break-up fee" (solatium) by a much-younger woman with whom he was having an affair.
The Liberal Democratic Party member of the House of Representatives and former Cabinet minister allegedly paid Yuno Morita (森田由乃) ¥100,000 per night during their relationship. They became acquainted through a members-only club where she worked in Roppongi three years ago. They would subsequently meet as often as three times a month at a hotel -- high-end, naturally, not some grubby ...
It's an open secret that "compensated dating" (援助交際, enjo kosai) is common in the Japanese idol world, even among mainstream entertainers and celebrities.
Just as the casting couch exists, so too does the dating table. Idols don't earn that much money and their careers are fickle, so they boost their income with dates.
There doesn't always sex involved, it should be added, but it's surely not impossible. It's like a hostess "dohan" date (where the hostess accompanies you for dining before going to the club together) or services offered by "dating clubs" (交際クラブ, kosai ...
