The photographer Beniko has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a follow-up photo book to her 2023 publication about Japan's disappearing old red-light districts (yukaku, akasen).
Beniko is herself a former sex worker at a soapland in Yoshiwara, the famous red-light district in east Tokyo that was a booming licensed pleasure quarter during the Edo period. A single mother in her early fifties, she taught herself to use a camera from the age of 48.
She has given guided tours of Yoshiwara and taken portraits of porn stars, strippers, and Yoshiwara soaplands.
Her photography project has ...
When does a debate over gravure photography become a debate over public space, civil rights, freedom of speech, and other lofty notions? When it involves parks in Saitama.
A surprisingly big controversy last year involved the withdrawal of permission to use public parks in Saitama for gravure swimwear events, where models would pose for fans to take photos. Such events are particularly popular for fans to take photos of idols up-close and for freelance models who don't get the lucrative cover shoots in the weeklies to make some much-needed yen.
But the events were planned for pools located ...
Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama has died at the age of 83.
As regular readers will know, Shinoyama is regarded as the king of the hair nude (full-frontal nude), and is largely responsible for establishing it as a publishing genre in the early 1990s with his photo books of Rie Miyazawa (Santa Fe) and Kanoko Higuchi (Water Fruit), though Shinoyama and others had already done nudes in the previous decade (notably, a lovely shoot with Aki Mizusawa).
Others quickly dropped their clothes in front of the camera (not least, Yoko Shimada and Saki Takaoka), hoping to replicate Miyazawa ...
When you've been at this game as long as us, you start to see patterns and cycles in the mainstream media's reporting about Japan -- including by the Japanese media itself.
Perennially, we spot articles about sexless Japan based on a new survey with minimal data. Sometimes even the same content reappears, slightly rejigged for a fresh article.
In 2017, we reported on the private sex museum run by a photographer from his own home.
Yoshitaka Hyodo's extraordinary museum in Yashio, Saitama, is still around and going strong. It has received the latest boost to its publicity with a recent ...
Last month, we wrote about the controversy that threatened to wreck one of the conventions of the Japanese summer: swimwear gravure photo events where fans go to see and take pictures of models and idols.
These are often held in public lidos (outdoor pools), and are popular events that attract large numbers of fans.
After local Japanese Communist Party politicians complained about the commercial use of prefectural parks and the "lewd" nature of the poses, though, authorities stepped in to ask organizers to call off some events in June.
This was then criticized as censorship and ...
This story has been percolating since early June and has now become a very interesting incident generating national headlines, and with potential implications for future gravure events.
Swimwear photo shoot events in public pools in Saitama have ignited an intense debate. During the events, idols and models gather at the pool for fans to take photographs of them in their swimsuits. Admission to such events is expensive, costing from ¥10,000 to ¥36,000.
Various locals voiced concern to the public parks association in late May about the sexy nature of the gravure-style poses. Local ...
The non-fungible tokens boom seems to have petered out internationally. Prices of NFTs skyrocketed but then plummeted over the course of 2022, and many believe the market is over (not coincidentally, the crypto markets has also experienced a crunch in 2022). The art and photography industries may soon move onto the next fad, if they haven't already.
In Japan, NFTs are still something of a thing, though, even if the haven't reached the heights of fame and fortune that they (briefly) attained in other countries.
In 2021, shibari artist Hajime Kinoko created an NFT rope bondage art ...
Gravure photographer Seiichi Nomura recently sat down for an interview with Aera.dot in which he looked back on his five-decade-long career, during which he has photographed countless numbers of idols, actresses, models, and singers.
"I've done more than 400 hundred photo books and thousands of covers for weekly magazines," Nomura estimates.
Originally an interior photographer, Nomura got into gravure by necessity: he needed the money. In the summer of 1976, at the age of 25, he traveled to Europe. After he returned, though, he was told by his clients that he had been away too long and they ...
Maki Makie (マキエマキ) has been working since the early 1990s as a freelance commercial photographer.
Now aged 56, she gained a whole new following when she began taking self-portraits in 2015 and repositioning herself as a "selfie jukujo" (自撮り熟女) model.
This fame has had some unexpected consequences, as she revealed in a long interview with Bunshun.
Her self-portraits revel in a Showa-era atmosphere. Often shot in sketchy or remote locations (like old, rundown resorts or empty shopping streets), they mix humor with the erotic. She is currently exhibiting her work in ...
The 2018 Japanese movie Still Life of Memories didn't make much of a splash when it was first released and we are finally catching up with it now. The somewhat peculiar plot is about a love triangle that emerges between a photographer, played by Masanobu Ando, and his younger girlfriend (Rima Matsuda, b. 1994) and a jukujo museum curator (Natsuko Haru, b. 1983), who asks the photographer to take pictures of her most intimate body parts.
Yes, this is one of those little films that looks certain to cement the reputation that Japanese have internationally for perversion -- and Japanese women, ...
