Like most places, older politicians in Japan are no strangers to sex scandals: from gay prostitutes to forcing young sportsmen to kiss them or even putting bondage club visits on the expense books.
And it's not just the politicos. The bureaucrats are at it too.
In 1998 seven senior civil servants in the Ministry of Finance were arrested and charged with corruption. They had received favors from figures in the finance world, such as trips to a "no-panties shabu shabu" establishment in Tokyo's Kabukicho.
Japan's anti-prostitution laws -- paying for penetration is officially illegal ...
Another day, another idol sex scandal.
The latest leaked sex photos victim is Nozomi Tsuji.
Only this week we had Mayu Harada of Keyakizaka46, whose leaked photos of her kissing her former junior high school teacher and now boyfriend led to her departure from the idol group.
Now it's the turn of SKE48 idol Nozomi Tsuji to worry about her career after images of her apparently with a boyfriend have somehow leaked online.
And the photos are much more explicit that Mayu Harada's sentimental kisses and embraces.
Nozomi Tsuji is shown giving oral sex to a lucky guy in what seems like a love ...
Another one bites the dust.
Mayu Harada has announced she is officially leaving Keyakizaka46.
Of course, we are sure this has nothing to do with the fact that the 17-year-old was featured in leaked photos showing her kissing and embracing an older man.
It is rumored that the man was her junior high school teacher. The school where he works in Ota ward, Tokyo, has apparently been flooded with phone calls from angry parents. After all, who is next on his hit list of underage kids?
The idol industry's response? Nothing to see here, keep moving along, nothing to see ...
In the latest example of how the "sex ban" on AKB-affiliated idol groups does not work in practice (er, these are young women with legions of male admirers) and is just a ruse to appease certain otaku, images have leaked showing Keyakizaka46's Mayu Harada apparently kissing a man.
The much older male is shown kissing Mayu Harada on the lips and groping her breasts in what appears to be Puri Kura photo-booth images.
The 17-year-old Mayu may be in a relationship with the older man, who some suspect is her former junior high teacher. If true, a physical courtship between the two ...
Remember when we reported on two former idols in Aoyama Saint Hachamecha High School (Mechahai) in 2014, who were being sued by their managers for dating fans?
Well, now the sorry state of Japan's idol industry gets worse.
When a 17-year-old girl who was a member of an unnamed idol group (allegedly Dokidoki) was found to have "breached" her group's rules against dating, it meant the management apparently was forced to disband the entire idol group.
The management then sued the teenager and her family for around ¥5.1 million (over $40,000) in damages.
The courts ruled on the suit on ...
Mero Imai is a woman of many talents: a former snowboard half-pipe Olympic competitor, a one-time hostess and call girl, a nude model, and a bondage slave (photographically, at least).
Born in 1987, Imai has posed for a hair nude shoot for her 2013 photo book "Mellow Style", as well as a series of provocative bondage images for a weekly tabloid.
Alas, the images of the 2013 BDSM-inspired shoot only seem to be online as scans of the magazine.
She revealed in 2012 that after her failure at the 2006 Winter Olympics, she became a ...
Takaya Muto has already been forced to resign over a money scandal.
Now he might have to contend with a sex scandal too.
The 36-year-old Lower House member of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party already made a lot of enemies when he took to Twitter to brand activists protesting against the government's immensely controversial state security bills as "selfish" and "fooled" by "propaganda and false information".
That was late July.
Fast-forward a few weeks and Muto is not looking so smug now.
He has been forced to quit his party after tabloid Shukan Bunshun exposed ...
A Japanese tabloid has published a photo of AKB48 idol Yuki Kashiwagi in an embrace in a yukata with Yuya Tegoshi, the 27-year-old member of male idol agency Johnny's.
According to Shukan Bunshun, it was taken between autumn 2013 and the start of 2014 at an exclusive Japanese inn in Hakone, a venue popular for celebrities to sneak off for some private time away from the prying eyes of the tabloids.
Lying down on the floor together after or before a bath, the couple seem very comfortable with each other's bodies.
A "friend" of Yuki said that the pair are still very close and ...
Former office48 (part of the AKS group) executive Takashi Nodera has been arrested and imprisoned for filming illicit naked videos of the young idols under his charge.
There has been total silence on this so far in the mainstream media, as well as, needless to say, from the powers that be at AKS, the company that runs the juggernaut that is AKB48.
But the tabloids have fortunately broken the story.
Takashi Nodera hid secret cameras in bathrooms, dressing rooms and hotel rooms between 2009 and 2010 to film the girls, possibly under age, while they relaxed without clothes ...
In September last year we wrote about the attempted comeback of the model Karina, after her notorious leaked sex photo scandal.
The word that was used a lot to describe this was nyan-nyan. It has come to mean both having sex, and more specifically, sex photos (nyan-nyan shashin).
Of course, scandals of leaked nude photos is a problem even more of the digital age and is perhaps even more notorious in America (Jennifer Lawrence et al).
However, in Japan is all goes back to the 1983 and a magazine called Focus.
Nyan-nyan starts with Tomoko Takabe, an actress and tarento TV celebrity in the ...
