It's one of the famous perks of the digital age: all kinds of funny things can be spotted on Google Street View for those willing to trawl through all the images.
Thankfully, there's already plenty of websites out there detailing the images of people wearing strange clothes or doing weird things. Of course, Japan has its own memorable examples and the local version of Street View even lets you take a virtual tour of love hotels.
Well, you can now spot something decidedly kinky down in Wakayama Prefecture.
Google Street View has unwittingly captured a woman arriving (or leaving?) a ...
A few days ago, we reported on one of the more surprising (if less spectacular) images from the recent typhoon that hit Japan -- in this case, sending a pair of panties flying splat onto a car window.
Typhoon Jebi was quickly followed by a strong earthquake in Hokkaido in northern Japan that has killed dozens. It has also left many areas in Hokkaido without power. It is a major emergency for the prefecture and in times like this, people need to pull together and help each other out.
It is in this spirit that a soapland in central Sapporo has, reports the Sankei Shimbun (and picked up by ...
It's from late December 2013 but we just stumbled upon this stimulating article on The Tokyo Files about Yoshiwara.
As regular readers will know, Yoshiwara was the licensed pleasure quarter in historical Tokyo (Edo). Today it doesn't correspond to an official address (funny that!) but you can find it at Senzoku 4-chome in Taito-ku, which is in the east of the city and very far from the expensive brand stores or third-wave coffee shops of Shinjuku, Shibuya and Omotesando.
Its location from 1675 was moated with two entry points: the Japanese love to control everything, even ...
Is Shoko Takahashi/Takasaki the perfect soapland sex worker?
She certainly looks and acts the part in her latest AV release from Moodyz, aptly titled "Gravure Soap". The former gravure idol with the mega bust, whose switch to a career in porn last year was one of the highlights of the calendar, demonstrates how an awesome soapland experience should look. We have to use our fertile imaginations for how it feels, though.
After all, she certainly has the breasts for paizuri and a curvy body that is ideal for rubbing herself all over a very lucky, prone male ...
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 ...
Forget Toyota and Sony, the real beneficiaries of Abenomics and the boost to the economy Japan is receiving (at least in spirit) is Yoshiwara, the old red light district near the Tokyo Sky Tree and still active centuries after it first became a licensed sex area.
Of course, these days prostitution is officially outlawed (thanks to the US occupation for that) but the true Yoshiwara experience can still be enjoyed in the soaplands, where you get a bubbly rub-down followed by other kinds of services.
The increase in tourists to the nearby Sky Tree is having a knock-on effect on the ...
Hurray for good customer service.
Over on Tokyo Reporter we read a interesting little summary of a tabloid article that claims Abenomics -- the Japanese prime minister's fiscal policies aimed at bringing inflation -- are having no effect on the sex industry.
You can still head to a soapland and have a good time with all the foam and frolics for as little as 10,000 yen, and sometimes even lower in certain east Tokyo neighborhoods like Yoshiwara.
Abenomics might have raised the Nikkei by sixty percent but actually a price war has emerged between certain establishments in notorious ...
