Yesterday we wrote about a Japanese photographer who has turned his private house into a sex doll museum — and opened it up to the public. Now here are three developments related to Japan’s top sex doll brand, Orient Industry.

Orient Industry has released a 40th-anniversary book looking at the history of their sex dolls (also known as love dolls) and how they are made.

The Kishin Shinoyama photography exhibition we previewed in April has now started at the Shibuya art space Atsuko Barouh Arts Drinks Talk. It runs until May 14th.

The same venue will also host an Orient Industry event to commemorate the book publication, running from May 20th to June 11th. The exhibition will feature the various Orient Industry dolls from over the four decades of the manufacturer’s history as well as doll heads with special make-up and even the rare Party Doll sex dolls that dispense wine from their breasts!

Tickets cost ¥1,000 on the door and you can purchase joint tickets for both the Kishin Shinoyama and Orient Industry show.

It’s going to be great few weeks for sex doll fans in Tokyo!

We have written about these Orient Industry events before and they are always well worth attend. Be aware, though, that they can get crowded.

Mero Imai is a former Olympic snowboarder turned nude model and call girl.

As we reported in April, the 29-year-old single mother from Osaka has also now added porn star to her cluttered resume. Her debut Snow Drop was released May 1st from Muteki, which specializes in minor celebrities making the switch to porn.

The first pictures are in, so let’s take a look.

What do you think? Mero Imai has a nice body and there’s always the novelty factor with a release like this, but otherwise it looks pretty banal in terms of setting and on-screen action.

Most readers probably spotted this, but the guy getting to enjoy her physical charms is the very busy male AV performer Shimiken, whose exploits with thousands of women over the years have included sex with Shoko Takasaki/Takahashi and Yua Mikami (Momona Kito). Yes, he’s one seriously lucky man. Sigh.

We’re not sure how long Imai’s contract is with Muteki and we rather suspect her AV career may fizzle out unless she can add a certain spark to her appearances. So let’s enjoy this while it lasts.

Do you want a cute girlfriend but don’t have the looks, social skills, money, time, or language ability to get one?

Fear not. As we know, there are lots of virtual dating and 2D character options in Japan, from Lovely x Cation to VR Kanojo and a virtual version of the gravure idol Ai Shinozaki. Recently this has become enhanced thanks to smartphone apps and virtual reality, though we remember sims and dating characters from back in the pre-iPhone days.

Here’s another possibility: Ai Furuse is a virtual female being developed by the artificial intelligence smartphone app SELF. It now has the ability to converse in a way that is allegedly close to a real girlfriend or partner.

Ai (spot the pun on her name) can remember the conversations you had in the past as well as spot changes in what you want. Apparently she tries to get information out of you through conversation so that she can adapt to better match your interests or remember when your birthday is.

However, you may feel silly talking to a 2D girl on your phone and there is obviously a limit to how physical you can get. Moreover, there is no indication that the Ai Furuse or any of the other characters available on SELF have an “adult” side. This is not an eroge, so don’t expect any nudity or sex scenes to appear on your screen.

Naturally all this technological lovin’ comes at a price. The app offers three days’ worth of digital interaction with Ai for free but then takes you back to your first meeting (this in itself could be nice — if only we could “forget” things and start again with real-life partners) unless you pay to use cloud data storage.

A survey by Japan Pres Research Institute asked 1,000 people across various countries for their views on Japan. Part of this included naming living or dead Japanese people that they knew. The results were, to say the least, intriguing…

By default the survey became a resource for seeing which Japanese people are famous abroad. In France, America, South Korea and other places, the results were familiar: the prime minister, emperor, popular sports figures, an anime character, and so on.

But in Thailand, things were rather different:

1. Shinzo Abe (178)
2. Doraemon (111)
3. The Emperor (59)
4. Emperor Akihito (50)
5. Maria Ozawa (20)
6. Kobori (17)
7. X-Japan (16)
8. Kyoko Fukada (16)
9. Nobita Nobi (14)
10. Sora Aoi (13)

But let’s take a closer look at the people ranked fifth, eighth and tenth.

Japanese adult video is very popular in other parts of Asia and this includes Thailand. Remember, Thailand is the place where a math textbook “accidentally” used a porn star on the cover.

Here, the top ten includes Kyoko Fukada, the cute actress who is looking better and better as she and her svelte body exceed thirty.

And the list also includes probably the two Japanese porn stars most popular abroad: Sora (or Sola) Aoi and Maria Ozawa.

Haafu porn princess Ozawa is now retired but enjoys much fame around Asia, and her clone masturbator toy remains a bestseller. Sora Aoi has an insane amount of fans in China, as we know, but it seems her renown in Thailand is big enough to keep her in the top ten. Congratulations, ladies! You are representing Japan abroad.

In desperate need for a place to stay in Japan? All the hotels are full and you don’t fancy your chances with an Airbnb? Another option is a love hotel, which is often not much more expensive than a regular hotel and sometimes even cheaper.

However, many hotels cannot always be booked in advance and even ones that can are typically lacking in any services for non-Japanese-speaking guests.

Enter Rakuten, the Japanese online retail giant that counts a travel site within its bevy. Due to the ongoing tourism boom in Japan, there is a shortage of hotel rooms and Rakuten Travel hopes to make up the shortfall by offering a love hotel reservation service.

This is not a surprise: as we reported in 2016, the government has even hoped that love hotels would start offering “regular” accommodation to visiting tourists to help cover the shortage.

Apparently Rakuten Travel is the first company in Japan to accept reservations for overnight stays in love hotels from foreign visitors, according to the Asahi Shimbun. Love hotels are a major industry in Japan and frequented by people from all walks of life. However, travel companies associate them with being revenue sources for organized crime groups, though we are not sure how accurate this stereotype actually is. Many love hotels are family-owned.

Rakuten is negotiating with Alex, which operates an information and reservation website for love hotels. Though Rakuten Travel wants to distinguish its love hotels listing from other “normal” hotels, it won’t be short of options to offer customers. It has already received requests from some 200 hotels to be listed. It will have to vet all hotels to ensure they are not linked to the yakuza, the company has said, since its code of ethics prohibit dealing with organized crime. However, there may be various front organizations at play here that make it hard to tell who is really operating the hotels.

If Rakuten Travel can make a success of this, expect other tour operators and travel companies to follow suit smartish as everyone tries to cash in on the tourism boom.

More than 20 million tourists visited Japan in 2016 and the government wants this to keep on rising as we get closer to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. This means there’s a real need for more hotels and accommodation. Many people also want interesting experiences and a stay at a love hotel, especially in a famous place like Shibuya’s Dogenzaka or a wacky themed hotel somewhere, might be just the thing to make a trip truly memorable.

As we know, the popular meet-and-greet events that idols organize is one of the main reasons they attract such strong fan bases: you can actually meet and shake your idol’s hand!

But they can go wrong, badly wrong. Fans say horrible things. They are, quite literally, dirty. And they may even attack the idols, as AKB48 found out in 2014 when two idols were attacked with a saw. As such, these days there is often increased security at the events.

CY8ER seems to be taking a tongue-in-cheek attitude towards this physical aspect of the idol industry. At a two-hour meet-and-greet event held at Budokan over the Golden Week holiday, the six members of the idol group dressed up in quasi-hazmat suits — complete with air-filtration masks and colorful gloves.

Fans were told to turn away from the idols and shuffle along sideways, waiting for the idols to briefly hug them from behind one by one.

For this privilege, you could pay ¥100 and also get a Polaroid-style snapshot of your joyful encounter for ¥2,000. Well, there’s one born every minute, as they say. (To be fair, originally CY8ER wanted to offer the hugs for nothing but the rules of the idol event at Budokan prohibited free services so they had to do it for a nominal charge.)

See a video of the intimate and personal hugging experience below.

What do you think? Would you pay for this? Or is it a novelty gone too far?

Pictures via @haseyoung_3rd and @shiii77.

Pregnancy porn is big in Japan: we’ve blogged before the glory that is pregnancy and lactating fetish AV.

Of course, there are lots of accompanying adult toys, from themed onaholes to breast milk lubes.

Here’s another one — and it has a unique design.

The Pregnant Fairy Maid Onahole might initially seem like more of the same: a masturbator with a cute body with the sexy pregnant curve that slender Japanese girls have.

But there is so much more to enjoy. Penetrate this fairy and your cock will push against her stomach from the inside, like it is going to burst out from inside her.

We’ve never seen a masturbator toy quite like this (though we have seen the opposite, so to speak: a navel penetration toy). While to some this is paradise and allows you to recreate your favorite fantasies from hentai anime, other people might think of Alien and be put off. To each their own!

The Pregnant Fairy Maid Onahole is available now from Kanojo Toys.

The visitor to Japan quickly notes the large number of vending machines everywhere.

They are typically just for drinks but there are more unusual ones around. And this now includes gachapon capsule-style vending machines that offer sealed love letters from schoolgirls.

Shocked? You shouldn’t be. After all, in Japan you can get refrigerated used panties from vending machines as well as Tenga and even prostitutes.

We can’t speak for the veracity of the love letters, which cost ¥200 a pop, but they are written by hand and ostensibly from a young girl called Kiki.

One enterprising blogger has created a translation of the letters. Here is one.

It’s me Kiki, the girl who sits next to you.
Thank you for lending me your CD. We always have so much in common with our favorite music and things. I’ve been listening nonstop to the band you recommended to me the other day! I really like it (><) ♪ I heard they’re going to have a concert soon. I want to go, but just going by myself would be lonely. Do you want to come with me?? If you don’t want to that's perfectly fine! But, if you do want to go together, maybe we could have a really fun time! Since we only ever talk at school, I always think of things I want to tell you when I get home lol. So maybe we could do other things together, not just the concert, but like go to karaoke or out to eat after school! I have a ton of other things I want to tell you. Tell me your answer tomorrow. Oh, and don't forget your textbook tomorrow! I’m not gonna let you borrow mine anymore lol Kiki

We’re not sure how long this service has been available but we imagine similar things have been around for some time. It was recently spotted and shared on Twitter by @higebozu72.

If you want to get your hands on a love letter from Kiki, head to Nagoya and the Osu branch of Capsule House.

Who says the Japanese don’t have a sense of humor? In fact, it often mixes very curiously with their sense of sexuality, too.

Parody is a very healthy element to the adult industry and many toys reef of various aspects of pop or subculture, including anime, well-known consumer products, and more.

Our recent favorites include the Kimi no Ana Your Name Kimi no Na wa Parody Onahole and DanMachi Hestia Strangle Hole.

Now we have spotted this new one: the Japan Sex Tourism Kumamoto Onahole.

It stops short of actually parodying Kumamon, the wildly popular Kumamoto Prefecture mascot (though there is a parody lubricant based on Funassyi), given the litigious nature of the licensers, it is still a hilariously original design — and also a great sex toy on top of all the mirth!

As our friends at Kanojo Toys note, the Japan Sex Tourism Kumamoto Onahole mimics famous places in Kumamoto. And so we have inner hole ribs in the style of the Kusasenri prairie, and two bumps at the entrance and far end that imitate the caldera of the volcanic Mt Aso. Even the yellow color (in itself, pretty unique) is meant to represent the prefecture’s mustard-stuffed lotus root delicacy kurashi renkon.

So… fancy trip down south to Kumamoto?

Here’s a nice tip from a very cute girl, which could well come in handy when you are with your next prize.

G-cup idol Erina Kamiya from the group Kamen Joshi (Masked Girls) has unveiled a stunning technique: how to strip off a t-shirt in a flash. This is quite impressive, given that her massive chest could be reasonably expected to provide quite on obstruction to slipping off clothes.

She shows off two different ways to take off a t-shirt in a second, notably faster than the conventional method.

This is certainly appreciated, given that we all want more time to view Kamiya’s awe-inspiring body.

Okay, it’s time to get practicing. It reminds us of the Tokyo Game Show 2016 event where girls “tore” off the clothes of a booth babe to show us what instant stripping looks like!

Kamiya was also recently on television revealing some bonus uses for her incredible bust. The 25-year-old can easily keep a phone balanced on her breasts as well as other items such as a box and even an entire clothes drying pole. This is about as good as Japanese television gets, folks.

For more pictures of Erina Kamiya, see our Tumblr account.

The Guardian has profiled the porn star Kurumin Aroma, another example of the chronic problem of coercion in the adult video industry in Japan.

Though long widely known for some time, the controversy over the coercion and exploitation of female performers has recently scandalized the industry, leading to a lot of press attention, a public apology and even arrests. Several prominent performers have come forward with stories of how they were tricked and forced into performing.

Aroma wanted to be a gravure idol and was spotted by a scout while still at college. Then when she had a final interview with an agency president, a contract was produced and it said she would be required to go nude for a photo shoot.

“That was the first I’d heard about nudity,” she said. “I cried, but felt under a lot pressure to say yes, so I agreed.”

Over the following months, the agency raised the possibility of making a pornographic video, summoning her several times to the firm’s office for meetings. Faced with repeated demands from as many as eight male staff, she eventually capitulated.

“They told me I could stop at any time if I felt uncomfortable or if it hurt. But that wasn’t true,” she said.

Kurumin Aroma managed to succeed in blocking the DVD release of her films and now campaigns against coercion in the industry.

Idols and performers are threatened with legal action if they pull out of nude scenes and shoots, though it seems the courts will now rule in favor of the exploited women.

The government is making an ostensibly public sign of cracking down. It launched a survey of the industry and found high levels of sexual harassment. Many respondents had actually signed up for glamor modelling work, only for this to be changed to nude modelling and then porn.

With 20,000 titles released a year, according to some estimates, and portions of the industry effectively operating on the black market and even the major studios and production companies allegedly controlled at least in part by the yakuza, it is nearly impossible to regulate the safety of all participants. Shoots are often held inside closed hotel rooms or at remote locations, making it hard for young women to escape when confronted by an aggressive male crew.

As we’ve noted before, porn stars are just like other workers: they need genuine labor rights and protection.

Overseas there has recently been a lot of talk about making things like public toilets “genderless” so as not to show bias towards people who do not identity by binary genders.

Japan has not embraced this kind of debate in the same way, not least because the LGBT community is largely reduced to being a subculture without real legal rights. On the other hand, fluid gender identity has been part of Japanese culture for a long time in Kabuki and so on. In many ways people just don’t need all the labels and legal discussions that have obsessed other countries for the past generation.

Things are changing, though, as we see more and more local governments giving legal recognition to same-sex couples, not least Shibuya and Setagaya wards in Tokyo, and the growth of Tokyo Rainbow Pride, whose march had record attendance this year of over 6,000.

The discount store Don Quijote has recently said that it has installed unisex restrooms at its flagship Shibuya store.

The business federation Keidanren also conducted a survey and announced this month that found that over 40% of major corporations are doing something to make it easier for LGBT people to work.

We also heard about a Tokyo-based website that offers genderless clothing alterations.

Some lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender customers might be reluctant to visit a store to ask for alterations to their clothes, so an online service has stepped in.

Tokyo-based En Coton set up the website Madam M last year. It claims to be Japan’s first genderless clothing repair shop. The picture shows the website at the 2016 Tokyo Rainbow Pride.

“There are many places in cities where LGBT people interact, but there are also people in regional areas who are afraid to speak (about their concerns) to those around them,” said Koki Hashimoto, who runs the Madam M website.

The shop has provided a way for anyone, regardless of gender identity, to arrange alterations anonymously over the internet.

For transgender individuals, ready-made clothing they had hoped to wear might not fit properly, such as in the shoulder width or sleeve length.

Even if the clothing is resized to fit at a regular clothes repair shop, it might be lacking a particular femininity or masculinity that can only be handled by making more substantial alterations, the company said. Indeed, requests will vary greatly, it said.

Customers may feel reluctant to explain these details to store clerks or in front of other customers. A man who wishes to have his skirt altered might lie and say it is for his wife, while a woman who brings in men’s clothing might claim it belongs to her brother.

They want to make it an open service ideal also for the gender-curious or the beginner. “We want to make this a place where people feel free to consult with us,” Hashimoto said. Customers unsure about taking their own measurements can ask questions by email.

We wonder how many articles we are going to see like this as we get closer towards the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The Washington Post is the latest media outlet to step into the controversy over osanpo (walking dates) and JK business (high school girl dating) with an article somewhat provocatively headlined “For vulnerable high school girls in Japan, a culture of ‘dates’ with older men”.

It sets the tone early on: “Here, ‘high school dating’ matches girls in uniforms with men in their 40s and 50s and beyond. And it means money changing hands.”

It goes on to explain that the dates may be a drink or a walk, but will “more often” involve sex.

Beyond the sensationalism, perhaps the most interesting nuggets are the quotes the article manages to get from customers frequenting so-called JK business establishments, the current version of enjo kosai (compensated dating) that has actually been an issue for decades.

“It’s easy to talk to these girls.”

“We actually find regular bars uninteresting these days. I got tired of regular bars with old women.”

“They look so cute. The uniforms make them look one and a half times cuter than they actually are.”

Of course, JK businesses have been condemned as child prostitution and sex trafficking in all but name, and the police have been cracking down by arresting and closing down many establishments. Expect this to continue until at least the end of the Olympics. But the demand remains and when there’s demand, there will always be supply.

The article interviews Yuki Aoyama, who has made a whole career out of “schoolgirl complex” photographs.

“There are men who want to spend time with high school girls, and there are girls who want to make money,” he said. In other words, it’s just business.

Why do the girls do it? “There are girls in difficult situations — they could be coming from a poor family or could be sexually abused at home — and find it hard to live their lives,” a campaigner said. “Some say they are so lonely that they want to die and disappear. Often these girls don’t have a place to stay, so they get into the JK business.”

What do the actual girls have to say? The article lands a great insight when interviewing one of them.

Mio, a 17-year-old in her second year of high school in Tokyo, started in this business last year, having sex with a man in a karaoke room for $30.

“When I’m at home at night, I get lonely and want to be needed by someone. That’s when I do it,” said Mio, asking to be identified only by her work name.

Now she posts on a messaging app on weekends — when she’s not at dance or band practice — and finds an eager audience, sometimes college students, sometimes men in their 50s, the same age as her father.

Once, a man choked her during sex. Another, she said, “wouldn’t stop when I said no.” But generally, the men treat her well, she said.

“I feel accepted and needed, and I don’t have these feelings otherwise,” Mio said.

As a campaigner notes in the article, more legislation will just push the JK businesses further underground and out of the public eye. So far many of the tactics have been aimed at the girls, such as by imposing curfews, rather than penalizing customers or business owners. Even the recent slew of arrests are often essentially related to labor laws rather than actual sexual exploitation, which can be harder to prove.

The only solution is to help the truly vulnerable schoolgirls who are taking part for the wrong reason. To do that, you need to understand why they ended up there in the first place, which it is harder. It means confronting some unpleasant aspects about society.

Ayumi Hamasaki is the gift that keeps on giving. From her bizarre marriages and divorces to foreigners, to her ex-boyfriend’s porn debut, and her ever-more desperate attempts to revive her career, there’s always something new to say about her.

But she hasn’t been on our radar for a while. Where has she been? Courting more foreign men? Getting more plastic surgery?

Eating well, it seems, judging by these pictures.

This is Ayu at an arena concert in Yokohama, wearing a costume that showed off her newly voluptuous figure.

Many have remarked online about how bad the 38-year-old looks, plus it seems to be a kind of imitation of the comedienne Kazuko Kurosawa.

We’re not criticizing at all, since we personally like a lady with a bit of meat — much more preferable to usual skinny Japanese model with no bust or butt to speak of.

What do you think of Ayu’s new look?

It’s a crowded music industry, so what can you do to stand out from the rest?

Well, the answer in Japan would seem to be: use female pubic hair to produce new sounds. No, this not appear to be a spoof and it’s far too late for April Fools’ Day.

Taku Takahashi is a musician and DJ with the unit hip hop m-flo, which has experimented with finding new sounds. Takahashi’s latest electronic triumph is In Motion.

Here’s how he describes it:

An unprecedented musical project, Public Hair Grooving broadcasts a new wave of groove into the world with groomed pubic hair. Taku Takahashi from m-flo delivers a new groove into the world, with his (stylish/sensational/latest) arrangements of sounds generated from individual waveforms provided by project participants.

Yes, inspired by the idea that pubic hair “looks like sound waves”, Takahashi and his collaborators employed actual women’s bush hair to get the sounds you can hear in the finished track.

There’s certainly no shortage of “underhair” here. After all, Japanese women don’t tend to groom their bushes (in stark contrast to the rest of their body, which is typically shaved all over).

As Takahashi himself admitted, it is a “crazy idea”. “It wasn’t easy to tame these unruly notes into music. It’s a bit melancholic, it tugs at the heartstrings.”

Have a listen to the results below!

And here is a video with English subtitles about the making of the track. Unfortunately they don’t seem to explain how the women were chosen, their hair collected, or what was actually done to the hair to create the sounds.

It reminds us of this musical masterpiece composed only of sounds from the porn catalogue of AV star Mihane Yuuki.

Back in 2015 we reported about M.S.M. — Men Who Have Sex With Men, an upcoming documentary by Ian Thomas Ash and Adrian Storey/Uchujin.

Despite the announcement, nothing seemed to happen with it and the official website went dead. We assumed the project had somehow fizzled out.

So we were very pleased to see that it is still alive, though in a slightly different form.

Ian Thomas Ash and Adrian Storey/Uchujin are still involved, but as producers and DOP. The title has changed, too, and presumably the content. It’s now called Boys for Sale.

Boys are selling sex in Japan. Who is buying?

Journey with urisen — mostly straight boys who sell sex to men — as they reveal their experiences, how they were recruited, and their working and living conditions. Set in the Tokyo neighborhood of Shinjuku 2-chome, the area’s connection to the sex trade began in the 17th century and continues to this day.

Here is the trailer.

The film makes the provocative point that the “majority” of young men at escort clubs (urisen) in Nichome — Tokyo’s main gay nightlife district — are actually straight.

Here is what the director, Itako, has to say about the film.

I followed my subject, a transsexual woman, into a dark bar hidden away on the 2nd floor of a building in Nichome. “For only having a few seats, there are an awful lot of bartenders here,” I thought, glancing at the 10 or so young guys behind the bar. Opening what I thought was a drink menu, inside were photos of the young guys, together with fact sheets detailing their ages (18-24), hobbies, body measurements and sexuality (mostly straight). Next to this was a list of sexual acts each was willing to do with men and a price list.

I needed to know more — how they could claim to be straight but engage in sex work with men — but the only way to speak with the boys was to purchase them and bring them upstairs to a sex room…

Using animation and illustrations alongside regular documentary footage, the film interviews escorts and goes behind the scenes of the ambiguous world of “gay” prostitution. Famous and powerful clients. No condoms. May-December partnerships. It’s got the works!

Boys for Sale is set for its world premier at the film festival Nippon Connection this month in Frankfurt.

This 19-year-old college student may well have the best pair of breasts you are going to see this week, certainly on this side of the Pacific Ocean. Sure, there are plenty of AV idols out there with chests that are almost illegally impressive — but you can’t beat an amateur for sheer realism. After all, you might actually meet this girl in a bar in Tokyo!

The anonymous university student is keen to show off her beautifully pale skin and firm nipples in a series of alluring nude selfies taken at home in front of the mirror and in the bath.

There’s few long shots, unfortunately, so the “context” of her body and life is a mystery, but we can imagine… Oh, can we imagine…

Check out Minkch.com for more images and even videos (scroll to the bottom).

And see more nude selfies from Japanese amateurs.

We first encountered the gyaru ero-cosplayer and model non (also known as Nonsummerjack) when we visited Fetish Fes 2015. Frankly she was so hot (and scantily clad) that we basically creamed in our pants. She was lying on a bed, charging a few coins for the chance to take a few photos.

Since then we have occasionally followed her latest shoots and so on. All for purely professional reasons, of course!

We are late with this — it was an entry in our ever-growing backlog of future blog posts — but back in April she did something pretty cool with the lower half of her body. Wait, stop thinking like that. This actually involves something she wore and how she cleverly manipulated its appearance.

What’s going on here? In a nutshell, she wore black sheer stockings and then poured water over them. The result is that it looks like an alluring lady from cyberpunk in a “contour-hugging sci-fi bodysuit” made of steel, as others have put it.

If there’s ever a gyaru version of Ghost in the Shell, we know who to cast as Major Motoko Kusanagi!

Let’s hope non does more of this — and to all her body!

Recently it was “Kiss Day” in Japan. Given how little you see kissing in public here, perhaps it’s pointless to have a designated day like that.

That being said, apparently Japanese girls like kissing.

In fact, 79.5% of respondents to a (somewhat bizarre) survey said they did, so it’s safe to presume your date would like a smooch. It’s just all about when and where.

51.8% of women said they had kissed someone they weren’t dating (yet), proving it pays at least some of the time to lunge at a club or bar. (Curiously, the number was lower for guys: 58% of them said they had never kissed someone they weren’t dating, though perhaps definitions of “dating” vary between genders.)

More importantly (and useful), what are the best scenarios to kiss your loved one in Japan? When do girls want to be kissed?

Here are the top-scoring scenarios:

4. While being cuddled from behind (11.2% women/3.3% men)

3. A farewell kiss (14% women/22% men)

2. In a place with nobody but the two of you (e.g. a car or elevator) (19.9% women/29.3% men)

1. Being kissed unexpectedly (32.5% women/20.7% men)

The big “trend” from a couple of years ago, kabe-don (where a man corners a woman against a wall, blocking her from leaving with his hand and then leaning in for a kiss), didn’t seem to make the cut.

But the other big question is, how good are Japanese guys and girls at kissing?

Torture Garden Japan is back this summer for another bonanza of BDSM wonder.

The premier mainstream event for bondage fans in Japan, it’s also the only officially licensed offshoot of London’s original Torture Garden, the world’s leading fetish club. It has been happening in Tokyo since 2001 and often holds events more than once a year, though the summer one is the highlight of the calendar. We blogged about the 2016 summer ball.

Tickets to the event on June 10th at XEX Nihonbashi cost ¥6,000 and doors open at 10pm.

Performers included Miss Miranda from the United States, Missa Blue from the UK and Alysia Rose from Australia.

Needless to say, there is a strict dress code: you have to be wearing a full costume. No street wear or casual clothing is allowed. However, a wide range of fetish gear and styles/genres are permitted. Expect whips, PVC, leather, tattoos and everything in between.

As the organizers say, Torture Garden is an “Extreme Event for Extreme People!” We’ve included a few photos from previous events, taken from the official website.

As you can tell, TGT attracts a very international crowd but this is not for the uninitiated or merely curious. If you’re a novice or just beginning your fetish journey, we recommend you take an experienced companion or two so you get the most of the experience.