The New Year period in Japan is traditionally a time when celebrities announce marriages. Despite being overshadowed by tragic events in Noto and Haneda, this year proved to be business as usual in that respect: the actress Aya Hirano announced her marriage, and gravure idol Tomomi Morisaki confirmed her long-rumored coupling with baseball player Shota…

Japan’s Noto Peninsula was hit by a huge earthquake on New Year’s Day, causing massive damage to roads and buildings, and triggering a tsunami. Over a hundred have died, with many more still missing, and Ishikawa and surrounding prefectures have suffered almost immeasurable levels of destruction to property and infrastructure. As locals subsist in evacuation…

Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama has died at the age of 83. As regular readers will know, Shinoyama is regarded as the king of the hair nude (full-frontal nude), and is largely responsible for establishing it as a publishing genre in the early 1990s with his photo books of Rie Miyazawa (Santa Fe) and Kanoko Higuchi…

A new survey has found that a third of unmarried Japanese adults in their twenties, thirties, and forties have never been in a relationship. As reported by Kyodo News: At 34.1 percent, the ratio of single men and women who have never had a romantic relationship was at a record high since Recruit Holdings Co.,…

The biggest entertainment world scandal in Japan of late has been the allegations of past sexual assault made against one of the nation’s most famous comedians, Hitoshi Matsumoto. The reports first emerged in a tabloid magazine in late December and have continued to unfold. At first, Matsumoto, his agency (Yoshimoto Kogyo), and broadcasters ignored or…

Sex in Japan can be noisy business, with excessive groans and even “narration” of how they feel from the female party. Couple this with thin walls and windows, and densely packed residential areas, and you have a recipe for overheard copulation. This can be a kinky experience but also infuriating, especially if it’s late at…

Another month, another damning survey that says Japanese couples are sexless. The latest, conducted with 4,000 married people, concludes that two in three marriages in Japan are sexless. The survey asked people in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties (500 men and women from each age group). The results show that 68.2% engage in little…

Japanese sex dolls are some of the best in the world in terms of quality and variety. In particularly, the silicone sex dolls by the likes of Orient Industry are the crème de la crème. They are not, however, cheap. Given the amount of craftsmanship and material that goes into them, not to mention all…

When a foreign-born contestant won Miss Japan last month, it sparked much wringing of hands from certain sections of the commentariat and internet, and a roughly equal amount of earnest gushing about how much Japan was changing. Karolina Shiino, who was born in Ukraine but has lived in Japan since the age of five and…

The new Korean TV drama A Killer Paradox (Sarinja-ng-Nangam) features a nude sex scene with Choi Mi-geum in the cowgirl position. The scene only lasts a few seconds, but Choi Mi-geum makes quite an impression. We see the attractive Choi sitting on her male lover and bouncing up and down in short yet intense bobs,…