Megumi, Kazuki, Tadashi and I like to scour the streets looking for new adventures in Tokyo. But we also make time to read. Obviously, with the amount of crime and dirty antics we report on in this blog, we need to keep a close eye on the weekly tabloids. But we also like to read…

Mobile phone games can be addictive. One cop found this out to his cost. The 44-year-old Takahiro Ueyama from Hyogo has just got an 18-month sentence for using his position to keep up with his mobile phone game debt, which had apparently reached as high as ¥500,000 ($5,000). That is some addiction! What was the…

What were we saying yesterday about the police? Well, now they’ve turned their attention to someone who has been delighting Tokyo in recent months. Twitter has been abuzz with images snapped of an old guy wandering the city dressed in sailor school uniform cosplay and very happy to pose for pictures. He has companions who…

A long article in the Guardian has been published that purports to be sociological and serious, but is actually perpetuating the usual myths we read about our great country — everyone is unhappy, everyone only works, no one has sex. The sexes, especially in Japan’s giant cities, are “spiralling away from each other”. Lacking long-term…

There’s been a lot of media attention about stalking recently, not least due to the sad case of 18-year-old Saaya Suzuki, murdered by a stalker earlier this month. Now comes another odd twist on the situation. The National Police Agency (NPA) has reported a 3.8 increase on incidents of stalking by citizens over 60 over…

It must be the season. Just as Tokyo is getting pounded by typhoons on a weekly basis, so is the foreign media taking an interest in reporting about “nerdy” Japan. First we had the respected newspaper the Guardian cherry-pick some statistics to produce the dubious conclusion that young people aren’t having sex anymore. Now the…

For around ¥4,000 an hour you can have a girlfriend or boyfriend. Well, you can have what’s nice about having a partner without the physical stuff, at any rate. Rental friends have been around for a while in many places and the ones in Japan have often disproportionately been given space by the foreign media….

After it got big media attention last year, designer Kaori Kato‘s novel if creepy “flip-a-skirt” calendar has returned with a new edition for 2014. We weren’t sure what to make of it when we blogged about the skirt-lifting calendar last year. Now we have been thoroughly won over by its charms. Like in 2013 you…

Japanese TV is disgraceful at times. Here is the shocking image from a TV show broadcast on state channel NHK. It shows quite clearly a young child fondling a certain member. What a scandal! Hang on, it’s not human. Does this make it worse? Is it bestiality as well as prepubescent porn? Well, no. But…

When we think of Japanese virginal girls, we tend to think of cute girls like this. But there were another kind. The Ojiroku and Obasa was a rural custom that is said to have continued until the twentieth century. They weren’t allowed contact with anyone except the oldest son and could not marry, instead being…