Another day, another new brand opens up a store in Tokyo. This time it’s Desigual, the Spanish clothes shop, which held a “seminaked [sic] party” to celebrate the opening of its new Japanese branch in Harajuku on June 22nd. People started to appear the night before and numbers had already exceeded the 100 limit by…

The days of deai-kei websites are looking numbered as high-profile cases of arrests and suing continue. Deai-kei sites are ostensibly dating sites, though many are actually run all by men, who pose as women — sometimes as idols — in order to extract fees over long periods of time. Police arrested the thirty-four-year-old executive of…

Want to canoodle with a former AKB48 idol? Just go to one of Erena Ono’s “handshaking” events. Such meet-and-greet sessions are controversial staples of the AKB48 itinerary, and since graduating from the idol supergroup in 2010, Erena has been using similar tactics to entice fans to buy more CDs. After purchasing a copy of her…

With the ink on her 2012 divorce to an Austrian actor still fresh, singer Ayumi Hamasaki is rumored to have taken up with another “white” lover. The pair were spotted at a luxury resort in Bali, where they apparently shared the same hotel suite. Ayumi seems to have been around for an eternity, though she…

We’ve looked at surveys before — from men who never date to the best breasts, habits and the most-viewed Wikipedia pages. Now Sagami, one of Japan’s leading condom makers, has released the results of a big nationwide survey, Nippon no Sex, it did in January this year. It surveyed 14,100 men and women online (plus…

After making tentative moves at the end of last year, US gaijin tarento and Gravure model Leah Dizon has at last fully begun her comeback in Japan. She appeared for the first time professionally in public in Tokyo at an event for a men’s cosmetic brand since leaving the country three years ago. “Long time…

Life is short. Have an affair. So says the slogan Ashley Madison, the infamous social media for adultery, which has 1.8 million unique users. It started in Canada in 2001 and now has finally come to Japan. It works by users purchasing credits, which they can use to send mails to potential partners, so in…

The discovery of one picture on the Internet has led to speculation that now Japanese schools are brimming with boys and girls who kiss each other for fun. Well, that of course sounds like a perfectly ordinary school activity. But the “school rule” is that you can only kiss members of the same sex. The…

You gotta admire the guts of Miyabi Asai, the member of the Kawasaki City local idol group Kawasaki Junjo Komachi whose friend was groped on a train — known as chikan — but then grabbed the culprit and held onto him. This has made her a bit of a star, thus doing more than even…

Imagine you are out for a night of fun at a Tokyo strip club. Your eyes are naturally scanning the unbelievably hot girls on the stage. Then you catch sight of two ladies in the audience who look familiar. Hey, aren’t they famous models? When a friend or companion assures you they are, you can…