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…

It was surely inevitable. We all know that used panties is an infamous and genuine fetish in Japan (and elsewhere, of course), whose needs are served by various products sold by major companies as well as individuals hoping to make a quick yen. Face masks were already a big part of people’s lives in Japan…

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police’s chikan (molesting) app Digi Police (Digital Police) has won plaudits for recently leading to the arrest of a man in his fifties, who was allegedly groping the body of a young girl on a crowded train. The incident happened on the morning of April 15 on a train running between Saitama…

A 40-year-old political candidate has allegedly fathered a child with a junior high school second grader. Masayuki Hiratsuka, who is the head of the Popular Sovereignty Party and advocates not wearing masks (quite something in a culture like Japan where wearing masks is already ingrained, especially during flu or pollen allergy seasons) and not getting…

The growing problem of syphilis in Japan is not new: we’ve been writing about it for years now. But it simples that it won’t get better any time soon. Just when you think cases can’t rise anymore or that the coronavirus pandemic would at least slow its relentless spread, along comes the latest batch of…