Something that shocks some visitors to Japan is the volume of porn, soft-core porn or other adult magazines lining the shelves of convenience stores. It is placed in a certain section marked as "adult" but not on a top shelf like in other countries. And the covers make it very clear what is inside, awaiting the horny reader.
There has been talk about "cleaning this up" as we get closer to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, but no concrete developments.
Until now. In what may be the first salvo against the freedom for pornographers to push their wares in open, a local mayor has taken the ...
Be warned. Be careful what you have in your drawer or on your phone, hard drive or cloud.
While the government was pressured by mangaka and animators to exclude comic book and drawn images from the new pornography laws passed in 2014, it seems the courts do not agree.
The Tokyo District Court has found an artist "guilty of violating the child pornography law by creating and selling realistic computer graphic images of a naked girl," reports the Asahi Shimbun.
The court on March 15 sentenced Akashi Takahashi, a 55-year-old computer graphic designer from Gifu city, to a one-year ...
Vice seems to have a bee in its bonnet over Japan's so-called "JK industry" of schoolgirl prostitution.
After its provocative and criticized article and video last year, now it reports on a police crackdown on "businesses that exploit underage girls".
The article is written by Tokyo Vice (no relation) author Jake Adelstein, who has made a career out of presenting himself as the gaijin expert on all things Yakuza. Recently he has tried to talk a lot about teenager prostitution too and linking it to AKB48, getting a lot of flak for it.
When a UN investigator visiting Japan ...
Ever hired a lady of the night and then changed your mind? Tried to cancel and had trouble with the girl or her handlers?
One man had such a problem in Kabukicho but ended up on top, legally speaking.
Yukie Shimoyachi, a 30-year-old prostitute, was arrested earlier this week for extortion. She had forced a man to pay her a "cancellation fee" of ¥50,000 ($410) in the early hours of September 27th.
The man had been lured by a street tout in Kabukicho (lesson of the day: DON'T trust those guys) with the promise of a lady who could provide full penetrative sex services (technically ...
Police are cracking down on "obscene" video sites.
Asiajin reports that at the end of April, Kyoto and other police forces arrested the president of Home Page System, which is meant to be a PR company acting for Japanese web service FC2.
FC2 is the fourth most popular Japanese web service, after Yahoo! Japan, Google Japan and Amazon Japan.
FC2 is well known by claiming to be an American company based in Las Vegas, therefore the contents are not restricted by Japanese law. The Las Vegas address is a rental address and it has been suspected years that the Home Page System is the ...
Amazon got busted!
Not even the biggest online retailer in the world is safe from the cops.
The Japanese police have raided the Amazon Japan office on suspicion of assisting the sale of child pornography.
On Friday, cops raided the Tokyo headquarters of Amazon Japan, plus the distribution center in Chiba Prefecture (ironically, you can spot it on the way to Disneyland).
The charges are that Amazon let products be sold on its website which broke laws against child pornography. The photo books featured nude girls under 18 and police suspect Amazon knew what the products were -- and ...
We've been reading some interesting reports about goings-on in Osaka, which despite its inferior size compared to Tokyo, is often the first to try certain trends. And we suspect this might be the case here.
Following a recent series of arrests and police raids on "suspicious" maid cafes and schoolgirl "massage" parlors in Akihabara and elsewhere, the JK girl services are rebranding to get around the child labor laws. Now the high school girl parlors as so-called taiiki-suwari cafes.
A new addition to the Japanese erotic lexicon!
These cafes of course have a no-touching policy. ...
Under Japan's current laws, it is illegal to produce and distribute child pornography. However, politicians are looking to toughen this up by making it illegal also top possess child porn. Japan is one of the few major industrialized nations not to have a law against this.
However, the new law will not include comic book depictions.
The proposed revision to the law would exclude manga, anime and computer graphics, but would make possession of other forms of child porn punishable by up to a year in prison and a fine of 1 million yen (nearly $10,000).
The bill was debated by a ...
Wow, this is big. We have been worried about police crackdowns for a while, especially with the upcoming Olympics likely to become an excuse for exerting state power.
Could this be the tip of the iceberg?
Police have raided one of Tokyo's top BDSM clubs, KUNKUN. The Ueno club is pretty big (we've been there) and also fairly new (it opened in mid-2012). It is the base of one of Japan's best-known shibari (kinbaku) rope bondage art masters, Hajime Kinoko (Hideto Hiramatsu).
Of course, there is a thin line between being bondage club where a show may take place and being a "happening" ...
As widely reported in the media, the police have begun a new campaign cracking down on so-called "walking dates" in Akihabara in Tokyo.
On Monday night, a dragnet of 100 police officers raided the famed electronics shopping and otaku subculture district in search of girls of schoolgirl age standing on the streets.
Apparently ten girls under 18 were taken into "protective custody". Their crime? Wearing a school uniform on the streets of Akihabara.
Recent concerns about walking dates recall the media frenzy on enjo kosai in the 1990's, though this is supposed to be the first major ...
