Japan’s public broadcaster has to appeal to a wide section of the nation with its programming. The show Makaizo no yoru (Crazy Modification Night) is primarily aimed at engineer-type guys who love making and customizing stuff. But did the family-friendly broadcaster sneak a porn subtext into the latest edition? This one featured three teams of…

Tech is going to solve all our problems, right? Tech — and especially AI — is the Band-Aid, the panacea. Or so we are led to believe, and so the government certainly seems to believe. We wrote before that the Japanese government is turning to artificial intelligence to fix the chronically declining birth rate, and…

Shinjuku police have arrested a 22-year-old in Kabukicho host for tricking a 17-year-old girl out of around ¥400,000 in cash. Rai Akama is a former actor and was in contact with the girl after she came to see one of his stage productions last summer. He invited her to his host club and, so that…

More bad news about compensated dating now as the moral panic over papakatsu continues. Papakatsu is a kind of newish buzzword to describe compensated dating that involves an older man and younger woman (though in practice, compensated dating often meant such sugar daddy relationships regardless of terminology). Following media stories about female fraudsters and even…

In today’s social media–driven world, it can feel like a new meme and “enjo” scandal appear every day to rage-bait us into clicks and views. One of the more recent examples in Japan was a video in January of a hostess and a client at an expensive sushi restaurant, arguing with the owner about their…

A candidate for the upcoming Tokyo governor election is using a naked female model on his campaign posters. Yusuke Kawai’s schtick is cosplaying as the Joker and doing provocative stuff, though this might be the most extreme of all his stunts to date. The model is Miu Sakurai, a gyaru model, music idol (with the…

A Japanese pianist has been arrested for stealing the aprons of flight attendants to satisfy a fetish for their smell. Thirty-four-year-old Kazuya Saito lives in Tokyo but travels widely for his work as a professional concert pianist. In May, airline ANA reported the theft of several flight attendant aprons. Saito is accused of stealing an…

Election broadcasts are a bit of a circus in Japan. Legally, the public broadcaster NHK is obliged to show them and this is why so many fringe and wacky candidates ultimately pay to stand for election, because it means they’re guaranteed several minutes of fame. This year is particularly strange with the July election for…

This story has been bubbling away for a few days and it’s finally time to write it up here. The former figure skater Miki Ando has been accused of having an inappropriate relationship with her 16-year-old male protégé after a tabloid snapped them out together on a date. The 36-year-old Ando, a two-time former world…

It sounds like the plot of a modern-day Edogawa Rampo story. Police have arrested a 39-year-old elementary school teacher for trespassing. Masashi Mizuno teaches at a school in Edogawa, Tokyo, and snuck into the home of a high school student who used to be in his class at another school. According to police, Mizuno secretly…