This is either brutally honest or a great example of trolling. An Osaka-based organization involved in combating chikan (molesting) on trains received a package in the mail from Tokyo in July. They opened it up to find a used onahole (male masturbator toy) and a letter. “I released my sexual urges in order not to…

The old favorites are the best. We are pleased to welcome actress Saki Takaoka back to the big screen. Now 40 years old and still a stunner, Takaoka will be performing her first nude scene in 17 years in a new film, Monster, to be released in Japan on April 27. She is well known…

How to deal with depopulation in rural areas? This question has been haunting Japanese regional governments for decades now. Above all, not only do they need to encourage the people who move away to major urban centers for work to return, they really need to target younger people with families. Because above all, these areas…

We’ve long been a fan of Korean actress Bae Doo-na. The cutie (33) has been on our screen for years already, including in a couple of Japanese films as well as several major Korean hits. She is not afraid to strip off either, having shed her clothes for Plum Blossom and Sympathy For Mr Vengeance…

Say the word “feminist” to a young Japanese guy and you may be surprised by the negative reaction you get. This is partly because the word in Japanese has a stronger connotation, implying what we might call a radical feminist in English. Nonetheless, anti-feminist attitudes can be surprisingly ingrained. And while we might ascribe this…

Have you ever wanted to see a film about a talking vagina? You can from December 7 in Japan. Junan is based on a 1997 book by Kaoruko Himeno about a pure girl who becomes interested in sexuality and whose vagina then suddenly develops not only a personality — but even a voice! The lead…

A survey has found that the number of high school students who have never kissed someone had increased. The numbers of high schoolers with experience of kissing or sex is now around half of what it was in the early 2000s. The Japanese Association for Sex Education’s survey, which it carries out diligently every six…

A new film is about to be released that promises, so its marketers say, to have only 18 minutes of clothed scenes in its 123-minute running time. Ai no Uzu (Love’s Whirlpool) is written and directed by Daisuke Miura, adapted from his award-winning 2006 play that won him the top drama prize in Japan and…

A 31-year-old Pakistani man has been arrested for sexual assault on a female high school student on a train near Takao, West Tokyo. Muhammad Afzal is accused of sexually assaulting a schoolgirl as the second grader slept on a train on the JR Chuo Line in August, and then of taking her to a nearby…

When we look back to those first generations of AKB48 in the late 2000s, it almost seems like carefree halcyon days when the nastiness of Japan’s idol industry — which we all knew was there — was not the dominant talking point in the discourse, and everywhere we went we saw ads featuring the young…