Once again we have been trawling some of Japan's postwar history for insights about the sexual development of the nation. Here are some awesome vintage images of classic love hotels.
Fans of love hotels and this blog will immediately spot that this one is the Meguro Emperor, a pioneering love hotel from the 1970s that has since re-opened.
The other two are, apparently, the Ichinomiya London and Olympia hotels.
It was around this time that love hotels started to become very elaborate, adding castle-style "battlements" and turrets. The results are bizarre, lurid and wacky, ...
Just a quick and dirty post today, indulging our tastes for vintage kink.
It's no secret that we love older stuff here, especially hair nudes and sexy shoots from the 1990s and early 2000s. Give us Rie Miyazawa's "Santa Fe" over the latest AKB48 photo book any day.
We also like to explore some of the fun, fascinating and fantastical aspects of the history of sex in Japan, from Yoshiwara to yobai night-crawling, shunga erotic prints, and no-panties shabu-shabu (yes, that really was a thing).
One of our favorite recent finds in our daily trawls through the interwebs was this vintage ...
Japan's first strip show opened in January 1947 and we found some fantastic vintage advertising for it.
Seventy years ago, the pioneering strip club event took place in Shinjuku at the Teitoza theater and was rather tame, not surprising given the attitude toward women at the time.
It was a "gakubuchi show", where woman would strike poses of famous nudes in art history, such as Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" that features on the advertising. This is similar to other tableau vivant or poses plastiques early strip shows in other cities, perhaps especially London. They kept their bras on for ...
Some time ago we wrote about the 1990s scandal in which Ministry of Finance bureaucrats were arrested for receiving favors, including trips to shabu shabu restaurants where the female staff wore no panties.
Such "no-pan kissa" (no-panties coffee shops or cafes) or restaurants peaked during the 1980s, especially in Osaka and Tokyo, and had many variations. Some had mirrored floors so diners could see up waitresses' skirts. Others may have offered "extras" not on the official menu. They might serve drinks or full meals -- but there was always a smile on the face of the clientele.
In many ...
Here's some vintage coverage of United States servicemen enjoying nascent Japanese-style Turkish baths (toruko-buro, the old name for what became soapland).
"The Turkish Bath has come to Tokyo with a difference," it proclaims. "Real Hot Turkish Bath". Hmm, quite.
The source is apparently a June 1958 issue of adult magazine People Today. The original scans are viewable here.
The magazine article appears to cover the new modern steam baths appearing in Tokyo in the postwar period, possibly during the occupation years before prostitution was illegalized.
This is all very ...
It is said that half of all sex in Japan happens in a love hotel. 1% of the population uses a love hotel on any single day; something like 1,370,000 couples. A large proportion of the nation's new babies are conceived in a love hotel. There are 500 million visits a year. Room occupancy is 600-700% in some busy establishments -- 78.8 stays per room per month!
The love hotel industry has an annual turnover of ¥4 trillion yen, which is around four times the operating profits of Toyota and double the anime industry. And yet it's cars and anime that the government wants to push as the face ...
Hihokan (literally "secret treasure hall") are Japan's sex museums, a wealth of postwar kitsch that fester around the country.
Now Atami Hihokan, one of the most famous of them all, has apparently achieved the dubious honor of being the last remaining sex museum. Like a lot of regional facilities in Japan, the effects of a changing economy, cheaper overseas travel and depopulation have meant that the countryside is full of rotting and rusting theme parks and museums. The Hihokan have sadly not escaped this fate.
Image of Beppu Hihokan via Hakkaku Culture
The Hihokan (sometimes spelt ...
Megumi, Kazuki, Tadashi and I like to scour the streets looking for new adventures in Tokyo. But we also make time to read. Obviously, with the amount of crime and dirty antics we report on in this blog, we need to keep a close eye on the weekly tabloids.
But we also like to read serious books. One I've been perusing recently is The Inland Sea (1971) by the late, great Donald Richie.
Richie was a famous Japan observer, a writer based her from just after the war and who did a lot to promote Japanese cinema in particular.
In the early 1960's he took a long trip around the Seto Inland ...
Sometimes the oldies are the best.
We all love our sexy idols today but I also enjoy a good perv over the ladies big in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Their bikinis might not be as hot. The shots might be a little old-fashioned. But man, they still look damn fine!
Here's a small selection of some of the best of Japan's nostalgic idols!
Kanako Nakajo (b. 1973) is a former gravure model who made her debut in 1991. She got married to a baseball player and left the entertainment world in the late 1990s.
The actress Atsuko Asano (b. 1960) was big in the 1970s from her teenaged ...
