April marks the start of the 2022 fiscal and academic years in Japan. It also brings with a major change for young people: the age of adulthood will come down from 20 to 18. Eighteen- and 19-year-olds can already vote, so this change has already been in the works for a while. One of the…

When does an orgy become a crime? If it’s group sex among consenting adults, there should be no issue, right? That’s today’s legal conundrum. One man in Japan found himself arrested for hosting an orgy (in Japanese, ranko party). So what was his crime? Strangely enough, it was fraud. He had booked a hotel room…

She teased. The mainstream media lapped it up. She delivered. Now the publisher is looking to see the impact on the sales figures. The former top fashion model Yukina Kinoshita has attempted her comeback with a page straight out of Angelica Michibata’s book: when in doubt, take off your clothes. As we continue to revel…

Tenga is, as regular readers will know, one of Japan’s leading adult toy brands, and surely the one that has the most success overseas, helped by its very clean and universal design (a far cry from the kind of highly Japanese style of hentai illustrations you find on box art on releases by Tama Toys,…

Skinship is big in Japan: a concept of bodily intimacy via contact through the skin, such as by sleeping on neighboring futon or, most obviously, bathing together. So while your mom or bestie might not hug you as much, you will bathe with your immediate relatives, such as your kids, siblings, or partner, and it…

Here’s a peculiar case. As reported in Bengo4, a woman is suing her employer in Japan for enabling sexual harassment. Her company failed to act after it was alleged the woman’s section chief sent her around 150 pornographic images. They were sent to her at the company address over three occasions between January and April…

They say that everything is small in Japan. Small cars. Small homes. Small food portions. Small people. Only kidding about that last one. Sometimes it seems that there really are capsule toys and model kits for everything. In the latest evidence of this, renowned plastic model kit maker Hasegawa is set to release another miniature…

Is it the miso, the seaweed, the tofu, or the fish? Theories abound, but one thing is certain: Japan is a nation with a high life expectancy. The average lifespan is 84 years, several years longer than Western nations. Now a cardiovascular physiologist has cut through the rhetoric to propose that the secret to longevity…

It’s common enough to read reports about male celebrities dating women a decade or more their junior. What about the ladies? The actress Chiharu Niiyama is now 41. She married a famous baseball coach in 2004, gave birth to a daughter in 2006, and then divorced in 2014. Along with small acting roles, she has…

After losing his wife, the former TV announcer Mao Kobayashi, to cancer in 2017, the top kabuki actor Ebizo Ichikawa was reinvented in the public imagination as a sympathetic figure bravely battling on as a single parent. Ebizo, who had an image as a womanizer before he settled down with Mao Kobayashi, is apparently starting…