We’ve always been a fan of the older idols. We find the photo shoots sexier and the woman more alluring.

From Chiharu Komatsu to Naomi Kawashima and Azumi Kawashima, our glory days are the 1990s and early 2000s, especially when the so-called “hair nude” shoots were still at their peak.

Kanako Kojima is one such beauty. Born in 1975, her career height was from around 1997 for a few years as an actress and tarento. Towards the end — in 2006 — she released a great hair nude photo book. She also showed off her naked pregnant body.

These days she is in her forties and out of the limelight as she raises her new family.

But her legendary hair nude shoot continues to resonant across the years. So much so that a weekly tabloid recently republished some the images from the now out of print photo book and claimed some had never been shown before.

10 years on, the new photos show off the G-cup idol’s charms and ravishing body to the max. Kanako, we salute you!

For reference, here is Kanako today with her child.

It’s good news for naturists and nudists as Japan’s first “naked restaurant” is set to open in Tokyo in July.

However, it’s bad news if you’ve been to one too many restaurants yourself: overweight patrons are banned!

Naturally, this being Japan, such a draconian rule need not actually exclude much of the demographic.

The classically themed Amrita only allows diners aged 18 and 60, and you have to wear paper underwear provided by the restaurant so this isn’t a paradise for exhibitionists per se.

“If you are more than 15 kilos (33 pounds) above the average weight for your height, we ask you refrain from making a reservation,” says the website. They may even weigh you at the door to check.

Payments are made in advance for this roshutsu (exhibitionism fetish) eatery. If you are then found to be too fat to enter, your money won’t even be refunded.

Also, if you have a tattoo you can’t enjoy the nude charms either. Oh, and there’s no touching of other diners, and your phones and cameras get locked away.

Sadly, you are not served by naked waitresses, but there are plenty of establishments of that kind in Japan already.

This is getting worse by the minute!

Instead, diners are served by muscular men in g-strings (we’re not sure if these are foreign or Japanese). There’s also a dance show with male models. Yes, we reckon this is squarely aimed at the older lady and joshi-kai (girls’ party) crowd!

Meal tickets start from ¥14,000 but the full course with the strippers (we mean, waiters) and show is ¥80,000! Basically a host club without the flashy suits!

The Amrita opens on July 29th.

A company president of a Japanese AV talent agency has been arrested for allegedly forcing a woman to appear in pornography.

It was learnt on June 11th that Marks Japan was raided by cops and three of its employees arrested. Police also raided other related businesses, including two production companies.

The allegations stem from a woman who signed up to Marks Japan’s roster of talent as a gravure idol in 2009, but was then sent to a porn shoot in September 2013 despite knowing she did not want to appear.

Marks Japan’s talent includes everyone from relatively innocuous things like booth babes (“companions”) for events to full-on gravure, AV and more.

The scouts and other agencies that recruit women are notorious. Women picked up on the street are sometimes led to believe they are being offered modeling gigs, and instead end up as uncredited “amateurs” and extras in big porn features.

The line between gravure glamor models and AV is actually very slender. Though the big stars rarely cross over — with the notable exception recently of Shoko Takasaki — the minor idols are often forced into pornography by economics and their dwindling career, or by their agencies who treat them like cattle.

More and more women are coming forward to lodge complaints about these practices. Police say that illegal shoots are becoming normal as the industry tries to expand its output to content suitable for distribution overseas through online portals.

Moreover, it is an open secret that the gravure industry involves sleeping with managers to get ahead and make a break into the mainstream entertainment world.

A debate is raging right now in the media and beyond about Japanese pornography and exploitation. Critics accuse the AV industry of human trafficking; some defend it as allowing enough labor rights for the industry to work for consumers.

One AV star who was sued for refusing to appear in porn and won her case.

But the AV industry is so huge and involves so many performers, that it will take more than just one victory to force it to change.

This new development will only add more fuel to the fire for the time being as this issue continues to develop.

Tokyo Kinky was there on Sunday, loyally lining up in Akihabara for what had been touted as Japan’s first ever adult virtual reality event. But all was in vain.

We had our suspicions about the event, given how shoddy the event’s website was. Still, word had obvious got out — that and how virtual reality is one of the big trends of the year and there had been promises of its adult implications for years.

There were hundreds of people trying to make it into a tiny venue in Akiba. We were all lining up patiently outside but the police eventually had to come and help control the size of the crowd. Then the organizers finally shut the event early because there were too many people and they had already reached maximum capacity. Shucks.

We never made it in but we could see what was awaiting the lucky few by going online…

The venue was hardly the largest or most sophisticated of places, by the looks of things.

And some of the VR goggles seemed rather low-fi (or is this a joke?).

This may have been the most exciting booth.

Or if you prefer 2D ladies…

This looks like fun, though.

The toys themselves seemed familiar ones, such as the Vorze A10 Cyclone SA. We have yet to see major new, dedicated VR releases for the adult market.

The idea seems to be to combine sex machines and powered onaholes with VR content and headsets. This has been happening for some time, though, such as DIY efforts like this Tenga and Oculus Rift combo.

That being said, it would be easy to do in Japan, since there’s already a wealth of eroge, SIM and virtual dating content out there.

Another adult VR event has been announced for August. No details are available yet, so keep an eye on this blog or the Adult VR Festa website. Next time, let’s make it Tokyo Big Sight!

The AV industry in Japan is not all take, take, take. It likes to give back, too.

The “boob aid” annual event is one of the best examples of this, in which porn stars let their breasts be groped by ordinary members of the public in order to raise money for AIDS charities.

Now Soft on Demand and Japanese porn stars have come together (no pun) to help save the planet.

The Do Eco website looks like a porn video streaming site, but don’t be fooled. While it’s not fully safe for work, there’s no sex or nudity. And it’s all for a good cause.

It features nine AV performers, including the ubiquitous Mana Sakura getting horny as she cuts some greens.

The other ladies taking part in the charity project are Iori Kogawa, China Matsuoka, Marina Shirashi, Haruna Aisaka (formerly known as Risa Naruse of AKB48), Manaka Minami, Masami Ichikawa, Misa Suzumi and Yuri Asada. All the videos are shot by a professional porn director.

This Masami Ichikawa’s video.

As you tell, all the videos are very tongue in cheek as they teach us to save energy and the planet with a certain amount of innuendo.

Iori Kogawa has some fun ironing a Tenga t-shirt.

At a later date, SOD will be collecting charity donations via the site. Right now they are trying to create buzz for the project. Our advice: add some actual nudity and see charitable attention soar!

The recent interest in Japanese AV performers’ labor and human rights continues to develop. It’s one of the big stories of the year so far.

Following the arrest mere days ago of a porn performer agency for forcing its roster of women to appear in porn and other recent developments like a damning report and seminar on the issue of exploitation and trafficking, now comes news that former AV star Mariko Kawana has launched a new orgnization to help.

There are already groups like Lighthouse: Center for Human Trafficking Victims (formerly Polaris Project Japan) and Human Rights Now (HRN) as well as People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence (PAPS).

Kawana’s new group, Protection for Actress Rights, is specifically focussed on female performers’ rights and is set to launch in July.

Kawana is now in her late forties. She appeared in something like 400 AV titles over the course of her career, before retiring in 2004. She also appeared in pink films.

She married porn director Goro Tameike — known for his jukujo films — and also famously made a nude photo book covering the stages of her pregnancy in 2004. As we know, this is something of a fetish in Japan.

However, at the above-mentioned seminar, Kawana and her husband defended the industry against the HRN report.

Far from it being the directors who were exploiting women, “it was more like I was the one who yelled, screamed and made the director grovel on the ground whenever there was something screwy on the set,” Kawana said at the time.

“Porn actresses come to act, not to have sex,” she asserted. “Neither I nor anyone around me has ever experienced the kinds of things depicted in the HRN report. Maybe it’s because I’m a strong woman and strong people tend to draw other strong people.”

The Japan Times’ coverage of the seminar highlighted how Kawana set out to dismantle the HRN report’s claims.

Kawana stressed that the actresses are private contractors so they have a right to speak up. Later she tweeted: “If porn actresses are employed with labor contracts, they will enter into highly exploitative relationships, vulnerable to all manner of harassment from their employers, long work hours, lower take-home pay (since they will get benefits), and may even enter the ranks of the working poor.” Her Twitter feed read like a negative campaign being waged to stop actresses signing labor contracts.

The Japan Times also criticized Kawana for being self-serving in her analysis of the industry.

The breach-of-contract penalty that many gyōmu itaku (outsourcing) contracts contain is also illegal in a labor contract (under Article 16 of the Labor Standards Law). Kawana tweeted: “I think choosing protection of actors under labor law is a bad move. Porn actresses under the current outsourcing contracts have the right to accept or refuse to act in any particular film, and the production company cannot give orders. So coercion is unlikely. But with an employment contract (koyō keiyaku), the production company can give work orders, so the actress cannot refuse to act in a film.”

….

Kawana is disseminating online will mislead many porn actresses into thinking that labor law would deprive them of their liberty.

But why is a porn heavyweight like Kawana spending precious waking hours at the keyboard blasting away at labor law? Because although she was an actress, today she is management.

To this extent, it’s not clear how much Kawana’s organization is in alignment with the work of existing rights groups — or whether it is in fact more like a counter-group set up to challenge the others.

Ami Tomite becomes the latest former AKB48 idol to strip off and show us her nude body.

Granted, the pictures are “censored” for weekly tabloid publication but these are essentially verging on hair nude territory.

Tomite joined AKB48 in 2009 but left while still a “research student” to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. Since then she has become a minor gravure idol, though now can capitalize on the notoriety of being yet another ex-AKB girl who has stripped off.

Other than briefly joining another music group, Ami’s career has mostly been playing bit parts in a bunch of movies. But, hey, she’s only 22. The world is her oyster!

Maybe it’s just us, but Ami’s pout reminds us a little of the lovely Mugi Kadowaki. What do you think?

As we know, virtual reality is big right now and that includes for the adult market.

This isn’t from the recent Adult VR Festa but the geeks and tech event, Niconico Chokaigi 2016, held in April, but we were saving it until now.

Strictly speaking, we think this was developed for people who work in the care industry to experience what it is like to be incontinent, but there are also adult: this is a DIY virtual omorashi device!

No longer is your only option getting some rubber diapers. Instead, now you can feel like you are peeing yourself just by wearing some wires and sitting on a special stool.

As the video shows, a 21-year-old female college student gets the shock of her lifetime when she tries VR omorashi. She is connected to the machine and asked to drink water. Then it all starts to “leak out”. Watch her squirm with shame (and delight). It was so realistic that her first instinct afterwards was to check her groin.

The system itself looks like a real mix of low-fi and high-tech equipment.

Developed by students at the University of Electro-Communications, the device was also showcased last year at IVRC 2015.

Ahead of the release in July of her new photo book, a preview image of Minami Minegishi has come out showing the slinky idol doing the classic semi-nude “hand bra” (tebura) pose.

While pretty tame considering what some AKB48 graduates get up to, this kind of photo shoot has become something of a rite of passage for AKB48 idols.

Haruna Kojima did it, covering her gorgeous pale flesh with her tiny hands. Likewise, Atsuko Maeda has done a tebura and so did Yuko Oshima in a Mika Ninagawa shoot.

Most notoriously, Tomomi Kasai’s tebura was so controversial it led Kodansha to cancel the release of her photo book.

Though once most famous for having sex and shaving her head in penitence, the 23-year-old Minami Minegishi has recently generated headlines for her overweight-to-muscular advertising campaign.

One thing seems sure: though Rino Sashihara may have won the AKB48 “election” this weekend for the second time running, the AKB paymasters are determined to push Minegishi as the new big idol.

A woman who fell asleep on a train woke up to find herself abducted and trapped in the home of a man she did not know.

The 28-year-old company employee from Adachi ward in east Tokyo was allegedly confined between June 4th and June 5th after she fell asleep on a train.

The suspect is 33-year-old Yoshifumi Kurita, a temp from Sagamihara, who was arrested by Kanagawa police on June 18th.

According to police, Kurita is maintaining silence, though there have been five similar cases in the area around where there crime took place.

The victim had been out drinking and was riding on a JR train in Tokyo in the early hours of June 4th when she fell asleep. The next thing she remembers is waking up on a futon in Kurita’s apartment in the morning. He was in the apartment as well, though the woman was able to run away and contact police.

Be careful about falling asleep on a train.

Japanese trains are dangerous places for women despite the female-only carriages. You might easily get groped (perhaps by multiple men) or find your panties have been snapped by the phone camera of a horny fellow passenger. You might even find your skirt has been cut.

And we all remember the case of the man who kissed a sleeping woman on a train.

It reminds us of those notorious pictures of former AKB48 idol Atsuko Maeda being carried home totally drunk — no doubt to wake up in the bed of the man carrying her.

Remember Yasumasa Yonehara? Big a few years ago, he’s the bald Japanese photographer with the habit of taking slutty pictures of slutty girls in hotel rooms.

He’s one of those people who just proves that if you are cocky enough and say you are a photographer, you can get almost any woman to pose for you.

Perhaps that’s why half the male foreigners we seem to meet in Japan claim to be photographers (the other half claim to be DJs).

Yonehara has now turned his attention to swimwear. After all, it is summer.

We have no idea what purpose this new project is meant to serve, but we like the boobies and butts on display.

He “directed” this video of gravure idol Airi Shimizu running on a treadmill with inevitably bouncy results.

Other “running girls” to come apparently include Mai Tsukamoto, Yuki Osaki, Una, Hanami Natsume.

In the past he has also shot gravure idols Anna Konno and Mai Sasaki, which makes him one hell of a lucky man indeed.

To the victor, the spoils!

Back when Mariya Nagao was one of the members of AKB48, we already took something of a liking to her.

But it is since leaving the (faltering) group that she has shined, stripping off to reveal her perfect bikini butt and body.

As we have discussed before, Japanese TV is a tame entity, though livened up by the occasional scene of Nanao in lingerie.

Nagao was recently gracing Japanese television screens to show us what it is like to kiss her in a swimming pool. Naturally, Nagao was wearing slinky swimwear.

The 22-year-old was kissed by Popteen model Koji Konishi on the aptly named TBS show The Last Kiss, which shows Nagao on a “date” in Guam with the man chosen for her by the producers.

The 21-year-old male model had some trouble controlling himself on camera, it seems, since online commentators are convinced he got an erection while filming the scene. What do you think?

We have no idea what this show is supposed to be, though watching from the studio was a series of “experts” including Rino Sashihara, who knows all about kissing and seducing men. One of the older women watching is the ravishing Saki Takaoka, whose birthday suit is surely still as amazing it was when she went fully nude in her twenties.

Yoshiwara was the main red-light district (yukaku) in Edo, the old name for Tokyo. Its legacy continues to resonate today: the area remains full of soaplands and prostitutes, and other parts of the east of the city, such as Ueno, Nippori and Akihabara, are also centers of cheap sex.

That being said, Yoshiwara is gentrifying to a certain extent — and here’s an interesting example, first reported on Spoon Tamago.

But for designer Yayoi Okano, Yoshiwara was more than just a neighborhood known for its sex trade. It was home.

Okano grew up in Yoshiwara where, despite its reputation, people looked out for each other. She recalls her and her friends getting to know the barkers who stood out on the street trying to get male clientele into their establishments. They’d talk to her and her friends, offering them water if they were thirsty.

Last year Okano decided to create a brand of Yoshiwara-inspired souvenirs called Shin-Yoshiwara (shin means “new”). Together with her friend and designer Daisuke Yokoyama, they came up with a fitting logo that proudly represents what Yoshiwara stands for. The pair of female breasts carries the characters of the name inside them, and is simple and classy without being overtly erotic. It’s a brilliant logo that doesn’t run or hide; it stands proud of its heritage.

The recently opened shop, Okano Yayoi Shouten, sells all kinds of items with an erotic, historical style, from old-style fans to hand towels, pens, clothing and more.

The motifs include a smoking oiran, the famous “top courtesans” who dominated the pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara.

What a great idea!

If you’re in Yoshiwara, pop in… before visiting a soapland.

Yoshiwara was established as a yukaku in 1617, one of the many ways the clever feudal government kept a tight lease on the population by giving them controlled outlets for fun. By the late 19th century, there were thousands of women working there as courtesans.

Though the akasen red-light districts thrived during the American occupation after the licensed brothels were closed, prostitution was made formally illegal in 1956, leading to the situation today where everything and anything is available — but not penetrative sex (at least, officially that is).

Yoshiwara today corresponds roughly to Senzoku 4-chome in Taito ward.

Yuki Aoyama and his Schoolgirl Complex series has fast become the pseudo-artistic erotic photography phenomenon of the 2010s.

If you have a thing for waif-like, slender angels, then Aoyama’s work is for you.

Well, School Complex 4 has come out and this time the theme is schoolgirls “flipping” each other’s skirts — a theme also explored in calendars, of course. As Kenny Everett said: All in the best possible taste!

To celebrate, there is an exhibition at Yukai Hands Gallery, in the Waseda area, from July 22nd to July 31st.

We love how a section of the Japanese photography and art scene has no problem with what would be decried as pure fetish art in other countries. Photography is inherently voyeuristic but when you have a male photographer who has made his whole career out of this kind of images, many feminists would be horrified. Here it is “cute” and acceptable as mainstream, and popular with girls too.

Last year, an exhibition dedicated to panchira (panty shot) attracted 20,000 visitors in a week.

While Yuki Aoyama stops short at actual panchira (is that the next book?), we predict the exhibition and new release will be hits.

Sometimes it can be hard to hold back. You see a hot girl in close proximity and you may have to force yourself not to try to grope her. Being under the influence of alcohol doesn’t help either.

What if this was a sultry gravure model?!

But it it’s okay if it’s a professional, right? This “bust booster” expert has helped 30,000 women increase their bust size by massage techniques. She demonstrated this on Japanese television with gravure model Anna Konno, whose breasts are already more than impressive.

In other words, Anna Konno had her F-cup breasts groped on TV for the benefit of the viewing nation.

We love the fact that the expert is this old woman, who gets to travel the country putting her hands on women’s breasts.

Here’s a before and after: can you tell the difference? Has Anna Konno’s not inconsiderable bust improved?

Personally we prefer breast groping on Japanese TV when it’s done for charity and with already men and porn stars.

Japanese porn star Nozomi Aso has been arrested on drug charges, according to the July 21st Shukan Jitsuwa weekly tabloid that went on sale today.

The 27-year-old AV star is a graduate of Senshu University and made her debut in 2012. She left Soft on Demand in 2014 and then joined MAXING. Since then she has switched again to chacha promotion. She appeared in many releases in 2015 and 2016. One of her films from December last year was aptly called “Fucking Machine Sex Nozomi Aso”. As well as enjoying commercial success in Japan, the slender actress with a G-cup is also popular in China. She appeared in the Hong Kong film Naked Ambition 2, released in 2014.

According to the Shukan Jitsuwa, she was arrested when drugs were confiscated from her apartment last month. Why police searched her apartment is currently unknown. Perhaps they got a tip-off, but then who had Nozomi Aso annoyed to justify such a targeting?

On her official Twitter feed, the last post is from June 19th.

As we know, drugs are rife in both the mainstream entertainment world, as the recent arrest of Noboru Takachi showed, as well as the gravure and music idol scene. Needless to say, hostesses and AV stars are also often users of recreational drugs, not surprisingly given that their lifestyles are so closely linked to organized crime.

Previously Minako Komukai was arrested on drug charges, and then became a stripper and porn star. However, we cannot think of a recent porn star of Nozomi Aso’s fame who was ever arrested for drugs, making this a not inconsiderable scandal. The mainstream porn world is bound by the rules of the market and is controlled by several large companies and studios like Soft on Demand, much like the regular entertainment agencies. While there is a lot of dubious activities that go on behind the scenes, including coercion and trafficking, on the surface the industry operates like any other respectable one.

The Japanese AV industry is under a lot of pressure right now.

Just today we heard that top porn star Nozomi Aso has been arrested on drug charges.

Then there have been all the reports and criticisms about alleged coercion and exploitation in the industry, which even led to the arrest of porn industry staff and an official industry apology last month.

Now the arrests have led to new charges. This time, the president of production company CA, Yoshihide Murayama, is one of 52 people — 9 actresses 24 male performers, plus crew — accused of indecent exposure during a shoot a camping site in Sagamihara City, Kanagawa Prefecture, on September 30th and October 1st, 2013. This is an unprecedented number of arrests for such a case, indicating that the police are possibly cracking down on the porn industry.

The woman who accused Murayama of coercion was one of the performers in the film, which apparently led to these secondary charges. The shoot involved talent agency Marks Japan, whose former president was among the arrests in June, and also the production company CA.

We haven’t seen the AV in question but we can easily imagine the genre: the kind of film where a handful of women are chased or enslaved by multiple men (often played by amateur performers). These types of outdoor shoots are risky and usually done at private resorts to avoid charges of indecent exposure.

Murayama denies the charges, claiming that the section of the camping site was sealed off to prevent ordinary members of the public seeing what they were doing. The male and female performers all admit the charges, so presumably will escape with light fines.

Who says politics is boring? Politics encourages you to masturbate!

Yes, you read that right.

Tenga is never one to miss a marketing opportunity. Previous gimmicks include an advertising contest, a business card holder, and a beach cleanup event.

This weekend it’s the House of Councillors election in Japan and it’s special because it’s the first time that 18- and 19-year-olds can vote.

To encourage the newly enfranchised youngsters to head to the voting booth on July 10th, Tenga is giving away 100 Pocket Tenga sex toys, which is probably the brand’s most convenient way to jack off.

To enter the competition, just tweet your photo of your completed voting certificate with the hashtag #投票行ってTENGAゲット.

You have to be 18 or 19 years old, though. Tenga will also ask for a photo of your ID.

If you were born after April 2nd, 1997, then you get Tenga Condoms, rather then the Pocket Tenga. The logic seems to be that high schoolers should only masturbate, while graduates get to have sex (safely).

Tenga’s reticence to encourage high schoolers to have sex may have something to do with the recent case of the male high school student who was expelled for having sex.

Was there ever been a better reason to head to the voting booth on July 10th? Perhaps the opposition parties should start offering free sex toys to encourage young supporters.

Rejoice! If you are a little overweight, you can still enjoy the unique charms of the naked restaurant.

Japan’s first nudist eatery, The Amrita, opens on July 29th. Frankly it’s so hot and sweaty right now that my home it a permanent nudist camp.

Originally it had made a big thing out of how you couldn’t be more then 15kg (33 lbs) over the average weight for your height — and that they would be weighing patrons at the entrance to check! After all, the logic went, who wants to be put off their dinner by excess flab?

Guests are served by near-naked hot guys, meaning this is a host club or strip club in a very scantily clad disguise (with apologies for the pun).

Aimed squarely at women, it seems, the costs of the courses are also similarly eye-watering like a host club.

There was a bit of a backlash against the snobbery about the restrictions against “fat” and “old” people (reservations were only taken from those up to 60).

The owners have listened and decided to lift the restrictions for two special events in August. On August 26th and August 27th, no matter how fat or old you are (as long as you are over 20), you can enjoy the benefit of a naked restaurant. Of course, you still have to wear the paper underwear like everyone else, though on these dates even the shy will be happy. The organizers have said that customers can wear their ordinary clothes, too, so you don’t even have to be naked now.

By the way, all cameras and phones are placed in a box on the table and locked away.

Even better, there seems to be so much buzz about the naked restaurant that Amrita has announced new branches in Kyoto and Nagoya! Roshutsu fetish is spreading!

Though the restaurant has got a lot of press attention and some surprise about the restrictions on age and weight, no one seems bothered by the ban on tattoos. It is normal for Japanese bathhouses, springs and pools are very strict about banning visitors with tattoos or making them cover them up, ostensibly because of their association with the yakuza. Amrita also bans customers with tattoos. Perhaps if we make enough of a fuss about this then they will listen?

We got pretty excited when news broke in May that model Haruna Yabuki was releasing a hair nude photo book by Kishin Shinoyama.

Now that the collection — called simply “Haruna” — has hit the shelves, we are pleased that some scans are making the rounds online.

More will surely emerge over the weeks — and hopefully better quality ones, too. For now, enjoy Haruna’s lush thirty-something body. If she seems too good to be true, remember that her celebrity boyfriend wasn’t satisfied and two-timed her with a hostess. She literally found him in bed with his other lover.