Gravure idols famously come and go. Those who seemed at the top of their game with regular cover shoots in the weeklies might fall out of favor in a couple of months and be gone from our lives. The most successful idols learn that they need to branch out into acting and TV work, and not rely on the precarious gigs doing shoots for magazines and releasing digital photo books in a crowded market.
Nana Asakawa was huge at the end of the 2010s and likewise began to take high-profile acting jobs, including sex scenes in the Haram Marriage TV adaptation and We're Too Bad at Romance.
Those ...
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 ...
The Nogizaka46 idol Hina Higuchi has released her first photo book and fans are delighted that it's by far the sexiest shoot she has done to date. It's not nude, to be precise, but it probably qualifies as semi-nude.
The 24-year-old sweetie shows off some underboob as well as her pert yet curvy butt while wearing a thong. The best shots, though, show Hinachima in a milky bath, with her breasts either cupped by her arm in the classic tebura pose or just barely resting under the water. The response of her many male fans has, predictably, been ecstatic.
"Like a Lover" (Koibito no yo ni) was ...
You can be an acclaimed actor and also a sex symbol. That's perhaps not acknowledged enough, especially in Japan, where beauty inevitably tends to take precedence over talent.
There is quite a discrepancy between "serious actors" and the "stars," who are generally hired for their looks and fandom. Perhaps only a handful of lead actors are truly able to navigate both aspects of their fame.
Shizuka Ishibashi (石橋静河), the 27-year-old actor known for her roles in films like The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue Mika and 37 Seconds, has decided to take advantage of her ...
She is, in our humble opinion, the proud owner of the best pair of buttocks in gravure at the moment, and now she's just showed us even more of them.
Umi Shinonome has released her first photo book, Umi no naka (a pun meaning both "Inside Umi" and also "In the Sea"), this month, which has a decidedly summery, beach theme.
With her G-cup bust and 100-cm hips, the gradol is absolutely popular with male fans, but she has cemented her following with her videos showcasing her hobby: building models.
A print photo book is another major step in her career.
The 25-year-old is promoting her ...
Is it something in the air? A kind of "comeback vapor" that's encouraging all these lovely ladies to re-enter the limelight?
Another one has come out of the woodwork: in the wake of high-profile comebacks by the likes of Yukina Kinoshita, Shizuka Nakamura, and Ai Shinozaki, we are very pleased to welcome the return of Shoko Nakagawa.
The 36-year-old tarento, voice actress, and singer is celebrating 20 years of her showbiz career with a new photo book.
Famously short at 155 cm (a smidge over 5 feet!) and a proud owner of a "duck-bill mouth," the cutie and firm fan favorite has been ...
She teased. The mainstream media lapped it up. She delivered. Now the publisher is looking to see the impact on the sales figures.
The former top fashion model Yukina Kinoshita has attempted her comeback with a page straight out of Angelica Michibata's book: when in doubt, take off your clothes.
As we continue to revel in a wave of nostalgia with recent gravure comebacks by the likes of Shizuka Nakamura and Ai Shinozaki -- likewise, nude or semi-nude -- we were intrigued by this slightly different case, in which the model Kinoshita, after being dropped by her agency over the celebrity's ...
Welcome back, Shizuka Nakamura. We've missed you.
We can't think of the last time that we saw a new shoot by the former top gradol. Thankfully, building on the momentum of her role in the high-profile Netflix adultery drama Fishbowl Wives, in which she appears in a sex scene, Shizuka Nakamura has returned to her first career: gravure.
Shizuka Nakamura appears in the March 25 issue of weekly magazine Friday with a nine-page, winter-onsen-themed shoot. Now aged 33 and as a slim as ever (if anything, a bit slimmer than before?), the Kyoto native has matured into a sensual jukujo. (If we're ...
It seems a long time since current or past members of AKB48 have made a real impression on the public at large. The power of the supergroup has waned significantly and its members are rarely seen in major advertising campaigns like they were in the 2000s and early 2010s, though we still try to follow what certain present and former idols are up to these days.
Ayaka Umeda is now 33 years old. She left AKB48 in 2016 after 10 years with the group, and has since established herself as an actor. What a great age, and it really shows.
Her second photo book, "Etude," is out now, and here are a few ...
We love a good comeback story.
After some time quietly doing her own thing on YouTube and Instagram, Yukina Kinoshita (木下優樹菜) has returned to the mainstream entertainment world.
As a kind of de facto apology for her recent scandals, the 34-year-old mother of two is releasing a nude photo book.
"CORRECT" is published by Futabasha and released on March 17. It's being publicized heavily as "nude," though the preview images we have seen so far are only semi-nude (in the classic "hand bra" pose, or tebura). We will update with more pictures when they become available. Hopefully this ...
