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…

Uber Eats (and similar services) has become a part of daily life in Tokyo, with its bike couriers often seen shuttling around the city making deliveries. You know that something is an established part of Japanese pop culture when it gets its own parody onahole. Plus it has inspired fantasies of hot girls bringing you…

As reported recently on this blog, one of the unexpected outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic has been how the ubiquity of face masks has merged with an existing fetish for used underwear to beget a whole new brand of the adult market: used face masks. However, though schoolgirls and housewives are apparently benefitting financially from…

Shibari, the Japanese art of rope bondage, is a sexual subculture, something confined to certain clubs and establishments, right? Wrong. As one event proved, shibari (also known as kinbaku) is also very visible in the streets of Tokyo. On May 7, Hajime Kinoko, probably the most successful and well-known shibari rope artist in Japan, created…