As regular readers will know, one of our preoccupations is the afterlives of idols: what happens to music, gravure, and adult video idols after they retire?

Aya Takanashi is a freelance columnist and writer. She claims she made her debut as a porn star in 2016 because “I have nothing else to do” and then left the industry after two and a half years. In a recent article for Spa!, she says she was able to return to the “daytime world” (meaning the non-porn world) as if nothing had ever happened.

After her AV career ended, she worked for a while as a scriptwriter for social network games before going freelance. Today, she writers manga and film reviews, columns, and porn scripts.

She’s another interesting example of the creative bent of some porn stars (active and retired). Others include manga writer Nayuka Mine and the photographer Saki Otsuka.

Some porn stars also pursue interesting side gigs while still working in AV, like Mana Sakura’s novel writing and Elly Akira’s art.

Takanashi’s most recenty article mostly focuses on the practical advantages and disadvantages of being freelance, rather than the details of her career shift from porn. In some ways, she was familiar with being a freelancer, since AV performers also work on a per-contract freelance basis with no guaranteed income between shoots and projects.

We now belatedly discover that she has written articles for Spa! for several weeks now, generally focussing on her professional travails and advice for readers. Her former career in porn has affected her later path, such as how she hid her AV activities as a period of “unemployment” when she interviewed with a company but they were unimpressed by such a long blank in her résumé and didn’t hire her. Sometimes, though, the impact was more amusing. She once wrote, for instance, about her experience of attending scriptwriting classes and penning rather more sexually explicit scenes than her teachers and classmates were expecting!

Well, isn’t this just the pot calling the kettle black?

A prominent lawyer known for his work to stamp out sexual harassment is himself now being sued by an actress he represented for, you’ve guessed it, sexual harassment.

The complainant is a 25-year-old woman who goes by the name Chino. The stage actor wants the 47-year-old Izutaro Managi disbarred and is seeking ¥11 million in damages.

Managi has spoken in the National Diet on the issue of harassment and frequently appears in the media to discuss the problem in the theater and movie business.

In 2018, Chino set up a support organization for victims of harassment in the theater world. Managi was an advisor, but Chino claims that he started harassing her from the following year, relentlessly asking her out from September 2019 and January 2022 on the pretext of talking about a civil lawsuit in which she was a defendant.

Concretely, she says he did things like stroke her thigh, kiss her on the street, and repeatedly send her sexual messages on LINE.

For example, he would ask her to send him photos of herself in the bath. Chino says she felt like he was pressuring her to have sex with him to continue providing his services as a lawyer.

On March 1, Managi released a statement on his blog that admitted he had sexually harassed her and apologized. “I thought she was interested in me,” he said in an attempt to explain, if not justify, what he did.

Sadly, Managi’s own actions seem to suggest how deeply ingrained sexual harassment is — even among the men who purport to tackle it.

The flight attendant is, of course, a much-fetishized occupation. They rank highly among male fantasies, whether that’s joining the mile high club mid-flight while receiving some extra service, or having a liaison at an airport hotel during a stop between flights. Themed costumes are one way to sate your appetite for flight attendant sex role plays (and if you’re alone, how about a flight attendant pocket pussy?).

Other guys adopt a different approach, it seems.

According to a report from the Kyodo news agency, around 70% of Japanese flight attendants say people have taken photos of them secretly.

This phenomenon, a type of voyeurism known as “tosatsu,” is a significant social problem affecting women in many walks of life, and is linked to upskirting, where photos are taken under a woman’s skirt (sparked by a fetish for glimpses of a woman’s panties, known as panchira).

Flight attendants were asked about their experiences and 38% said that they knew that pictures had been secretly taken of them, and another 33% thought pictures had been taken but were not certain.

The Japan Federation of Aviation Industry Unions says this is a rise of 9% since the previous such survey in 2019. The survey was conducted online between November and December last year among flight attendants belonging to member unions. It received responses from 1,573 cabin crew.

The illicit photos were mostly of cabin crew’s faces and full body (in uniform, natch), though a few reported experiences of being upskirted or even people taking close-ups of their chest or behind.

It seems there are few repercussions for the photographers, though, perhaps in part because they are often the customer in the situation.

Of those who reported being photographed, 57% said they did nothing about the offense. A small percentage of flight attendants said they gave a verbal warning or requested that the offending photo be deleted.

“It is a very serious issue,” said the chair of the union federation at a press conference last week. He noted that “tougher penalties” were needed to deter people from taking illicit photographs. At the moment, upskirting and secretly taking photos of genitalia are not punishable under Japan’s Penal Code.

The report about this issue is somewhat undermined by a bizarre inclusion of “allegedly dangerous conduct” that may not seem dangerous. Over half of the 1,573 flight attendants said they were subjected to such conduct, but the examples provided are “persistent complaints or reprimands” or customers “deliberately” not wearing a face mask despite antivirus rules during the pandemic.

The new Netflix Korean drama series The Glory is getting some traction, with the first season’s second and final batch of episodes recently released. It’s a fun revenge tale about Moon Dong-eun, who plots ways to get back at her former school bullies who destroyed her dream of becoming an architect.

It stars Song Hye-kyo (Descendants of the Sun) in the lead role.

Another role as a flight attendant is played by Cha Joo-young. The 32-year-old was a new name for us, though she’s amassed a fair few credits in movies over the years.

She features in two nude scenes in episode 13 of The Glory. In one, she undresses seductively and joins a very lucky guy in a bubble bath.

In the other, more explicit scene sees her whip her top off and show off her breasts to another woman (played by Lim Ji-yeon, who has herself appeared in several impressive movie nude scenes).

Cha Joo-young’s breasts are stunning: round and nicely sized, without being too big. According to press reports, the actress upped her diet to fill out a a little and look curvier on camera. Her character is supposed to have had plastic surgery, so we wonder if the breasts are also digitally “improved” to make them look like breasts that have had work done on them. That would rather spoil the image but enhanced or natural, these are some seriously impressive assets.

On Monday came news that Yua Mikami is to retire from porn after a stunning eight-year run in the industry.

The announcement isn’t a huge surprise, given her age (she turns 30 in August) and length of time in the industry, plus Mikami had also done other things in parallel with her adult video performing, such as being a member of a K-Pop music group (comprising only porn stars), selling NFT art, and designing her own apparel.

As regular readers and JAV fans will know well, Yua Mikami used to be a member of the AKB48 spin-off group SKE48. She is one of many AKB-related idols who branched out into porn but is by far the most successful, blazing a path through the industry after her AV debut in 2015.

During her music idol days she was known as Momona Kito. We wonder if she will keep her current porn name during the next phase of her life and career, or will adopt yet another moniker.

Mikami announced the news in a 14-minute video published on her popular YouTube channel on Monday, which has already attracted more than 850,000 videos as of writing. Such is her fame that the news quickly sparked headlines in the mainstream media. She did not fix the exact date for her retirement, but said she would leave by the time she turns 30 in August.

It looks like her final major release is this 170-minute one (code SSIS663) from S1 No. 1 Style, which comes out on April 11 (and on which Mikami served as producer). It appeared as a preorder online shortly after Mikami’s official announcement. It’s possible there may be other releases between April and August, plus she is likely to feature in subsequent omnibus/anthology releases compiled from previously released footage (and these may continue to come out even after she formally retires).

With the retirement last year of Shoko Takahashi — another performer who very successfully switched from another industry to porn (in her case, gravure and following a compensated dating scandal) — it feels like the end of a certain AV era.

The beautiful Akari Fukunaga (福永朱梨) is a relatively unknown, 28-year-old Japanese actress whose credits include The Real Thing (2019) and She Is Alone (2021).

In 2022, she had a starring role in the film Hand, a pink movie in Nikkatsu’s revived Roman Porno series (made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the series), though based on a literary source (a novel by a prize-winning female writer, Nao-Cola Yamazaki).

Fukunaga plays 25-year-old Sawako, who has a thing for watching and photographing older men, but starts an affair with a young coworker nonetheless. She must slowly learn to love someone who isn’t a father figure.

There is a fair bit of erotic action, but as sex scenes go it’s fairly tame for softcore porn (as pink movies are meant to be) or even an erotic drama. It seems to belong to a subgenre we might call “literary sexploitation,” “serious sexploitation,” or “thoughtful sexploitation.”

Here’s the trailer with English subtitles.

Fukunaga does bare her modestly sized but nicely shaped breasts, but that’s about the most we get to see. We love her pale skin and demure looks.

People bemoan the lack of women in Japanese politics but we suspect this is not the solution.

The NHK Party, a fringe people whose aim is to “protect” the Japanese population again the titular public broadcaster, has gone through its umpteenth name change, now becoming the Seijika Joshi 48 To, or the Politician Girls 48 Party.

No prizes for guessing, the name (abbreviated to SJJ49) is a cheeky reference to AKB48, and yes, the candidates are all female.

Note our neutral vocabulary — though the party itself has used joshi, or “girl,” meaning the wannabe lawmakers are very young woman (and apparently that’s the only thing we need to know about them).

So far that seems to hold true: the candidates include former celebrities, actresses, hostesses, and so on.

And they are deliberately emphasized their cute charm, rather than dull and dry things like actual policies or ideologies. At a recent press conference, 30-year-old Ayaka Otsu was asked about tax and she giggled, saying she wanted to pass on that “difficult” question. Otsu is the newly appointed party leader.

It’s not usual for former models, idols, and actors to move into a career in politics, despite their apparent lack of qualifications or reputation. Renho, a leading opposition lawmaker, used to be a gravure model, and her party also includes Ayaka Shiomura, likewise a one-time gravure idol. A recent example is former gravure hottie (well, she’s still a hottie but she’s no longer doing gravure) Chisato Morishita, who has so far failed in her ambitions.

The NHK Party’s current sole member of the Japanese Diet, Yoshikazu Higashitani (aka GaaSyy), has just been expelled for failing to turn up for work once since election. He is a YouTuber based in Dubai and cannot return to Japan for fear of arrest over fraud allegations. Now police have issued yet another arrest warrant for him on further charges related to intimidation online defamation (GaaSyy is notorious for the wild things he has said online; see the accusations he made against actor Mackenyu Arata of sex with minors and more). He won his seat on proportional representation votes.

The party’s name change is also an image rebrand (it had previously had a very male-centric image), indicating it is either trying to pick up other kinds of voters (younger people and woman) or merely pandering to what its current demographic wants to see (i.e., eye candy), since they vote for any candidate based on their agreement with the party’s anti-NHK and antiestablishment stance.

You would think that a company as large and successful as Soft on Demand would have an army of lawyers and legal advisors on retainer, and that they would consult them carefully when launching a major and costly new project. Or perhaps they did and their team simply wasn’t doing their job right.

Either way, our proverbial jaw hit the floor when we read this news.

On March 16, it was announced by Tokyo Metropolitan Police that the 40-year-old CEO of SOD — the biggest porn producer in Japan — has been arrested for violation of the fuzoku law. You might presume this is related to prostitution, but it’s actually more mundane.

In 2020, we reported on the opening of SOD Land, a kind of porn theme park bar complex in Kabukicho that pluckily opened in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Customers can meet and interact with actual porn performers, including some of the top names in the industry, across five floors in the heart of Shinjuku. Facilities include a basement standing bar with “female employees,” a “semi-standing” bar with sex workers and hostesses, the SyainBar on the third floor for talking with famous adult video stars, and the Silent Bar on the fourth floor for watching swimwear-clad performers through a see-through screen.

Because of the nature of the establishment and its operating hours beyond midnight (though it was officially open only until 11 pm), SOD Land qualifies as a kind of hostess club and so requires a special permit under the fuzoku law (which, despite the name, covers all kinds of businesses like bars and clubs, not just brothels).

SOD is not new to this kind of venture. In 2018, it opened the Tachi Syain standing bar with “female employees” in Akihabara and then SyainBar on the ground floor of its own HQ in Nakano, west Tokyo, until 2022. These were projects to offer fan service and also provide second careers for AV stars.

What’s new this time, and which had led to the trouble with police, is that SOD Land offers what is legally classified as “entertainment/hospitality for customers,” not just serving food and drink.

When SOD Land opened, there was a lot of publicity about hygiene and ventilation and the immense efforts organizers were taking to keep people safe during the pandemic, but it seems they did not take this legal dimension of the venture into consideration.

The police apparently told SOD in December last year that they needed to comply with the law, so this really does seem like a massive oversight on the part of such a major corporation. (To be fair, given the massive logistical repercussions of the controversial new porn law that was introduced last year, perhaps the company was simply too preoccupied with adjusting its production schedules and contracts.)

Along with the company president, the 27-year-old SOD Land manager was also arrested. (Incidentally, we are pleased that relatively young people are in such senior positions in a major company, which perhaps shows how the adult industry offers opportunities that more conventional industries don’t.)

Yesterday, following the arrests, SOD Land announced it was temporarily closing, along with the Tachi Syain standing bar in Akihabara.

The potential loss of income for SOD due to these closures, even if temporary, is considerable. Police estimate that SOD Land made ¥600 million in sales over 2.5 years.

Kazusa Okuyama is one of the top gravure idols in Japan right now, though she went quiet for a while from the end of last year with few social media updates. The last major gravure-related thing she did was release a 2023 calendar and hold an exhibition with top gravure photographer Chikashi Kasai (both in December 2022).

Her absence was essentially explained on February 14 (yes, Valentine’s Day), when there came the shock announcement that one of the most eligible ladies in the land had got married.

This typically would mean the end of a gravure career. (She also does occasional acting. In fact, the mainstream media reporting about this has referred to her as an actor, not a gravure model, which is perhaps what her agency wants.)

When a female celebrity in Japan at the peak of her fame announces her marriage, it is often a surprise. They frequently keep their dating secret, though tabloids might get wind of it (especially if their partner is another celebrity). Management agencies are famously controlling in Japan (they are the ones that employ the talent, not the other way around), even to the extent of preventing a woman from getting married because of the impact it will have on her career (especially in terms of advertising and brand ambassador contracts). As such, shotgun weddings (already quite common here due to the lack of regard for contraception) are apparently popular solutions among celebs: if you’re knocked up, management can’t exactly point to certain clauses and stop you from signing the marriage papers.

In Okuyama’s case, then, we were surprised by the fact that her marriage announcement did not include mention of a pregnancy. Was she expecting to continue her gravure career after her marriage? Or switch entirely to mainstream acting?

But then on March 17, the plot thickened: the media is now reporting that Okuyama is indeed pregnant, so her marriage was effectively a de facto shotgun wedding.

It means the 29-year-old is almost certain to leave gravure behind for good, unless she surprises us yet again with a maternity nude shoot (once very popular among celebrities) or pulls a Yuka Kuramochi and makes a postnatal comeback to gravure.

More details about her lucky husband have also emerged: he’s younger (25) and a newbie announcer at TV Asahi.

Weirdly, Okuyama’s agency is still refusing to confirm or deny the deports, suggesting they aren’t happy or are simply maintaining some polite distance from this new period in Okuyama’s career.

The Aomori native was a one-time race queen who launched a gravure career in 2016 after winning a contest. She made her acting debut in 2018, appearing in a tokusatsu sci-fi series. She has released three photo books.

Well, since we are unlikely to see more gravure shoots by Kazusa Okuyama in the future, check out our picture archive on tumblr to look back at what we’ll be missing.

The travails of the Michibata family are set to continue, it seems.

After Angelica Michibata’s husband was arrested for extortion, her career and reputation were left in tatters (not least because her involvement in the crime was also suggested). She later divorced her husband and made a comeback with a nude photo book in her mid-thirties.

The latest scandal to hit the glamorous Argentine-Japanese model family affects the most famous of the sisters, Jessica.

According to police announcement on March 20, the 38-year-old Jessica Michibata (one-time wife of F1 driver Jenson Button) was arrested at a hotel in Tokyo for possession of MMDA.

Commonly known as ecstasy, MMDA is a popular recreational drug taken by clubbers in other countries, but is heavily stigmatized (and illegal) in Japan.

The media coverage of the Michibata case has inevitably veered into the wildly sensational territory, with some reporting saying she was arrested for possession of a “sex drug.”

Michibata was originally more of a lingerie model in the 2000s before breaking out into more mainstream fashion modeling and general celebrity, attracting a large fandom among women for her tips on beauty. Though she has been in the public eye less of late as she has got a little older and focused on raising a family, she is still famous and, as such, this is a massive scandal that she might struggle to recover from (and will gall many fans, no doubt, because MMDA use would see to contradict Michibata’s promotion of wellness, Chinese medicine, and a healthy-seeming lifestyle).

After years of other scandals, it was drugs that finally spelled the end of Erika Sawajiri’s career. Michibata might be able to claim the drugs were not hers (she has denied the alleged possession as well, according to media reports). This is probably the only feasible path to recovery for her (it worked for Yukipoyo, but she wasn’t actually arrested).

The details of the case are still hazy but it seems that Jessica Michibata was in the hotel room with her foreign boyfriend. The drugs arrived at the high-end hotel in Roppongi and that’s when the police pounced (the package was already caught by customs and authorities just followed the trail to catch the culprits). The drugs were, however, addressed to the foreign lover, so Michibata might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The model, whose legal name is Jessica Celeste González Almada, was married to Jenson button for a year in the mid-2010s after what seemed like an eternity of an on-again, off-again relationship. She then gave birth to a child in 2017. Rhe father was never made public, though it’s rumored to be Hollywood producer Ken Kao, with whom she was pictured in public at the time.

In the current issue of Weekly Playboy, busty Japanese model, cosplayer, YouTuber, and plastic modeler Umi Shinonome discusses how she got into gravure.

When in her third year at university, she was invited to do a shoot with some otaku photographer friends. She says she found the experience enjoyable, not just the shoot itself but the costumes, the location scouting, and the whole process of putting the results together.

Shinonome then started using social media to recruit photographers to shoot her.

After about a year, her management agency spotted and scouted her. She made her official gravure debut in January 2020 and immediately attracted a fandom.

She is quite candid about this: she notes that she couldn’t sing or dance, and her face and body were not suitable for regular fashion modeling. She also says she had no interest in acting.

“I had always liked gravure, so it felt like that was what I should do. That’s how I became a photo shoot model.”

While she liked gravure, actually doing it is another thing entirely. Asked if she had any uncertainties about launching that kind of career, Shinonome says she was pretty confident.

“My mom and grandma also have G-cups. My breasts were quite big, so I thought I could do it.”

The 26-year-old was an F-cup initially. This was, needless to say, large for a student and she got groped by her fellow students a lot at school.

It couldn’t have gone differently if she hadn’t been scouted. She was originally working in sales and was, perhaps for obvious reasons, very good at her job. At weekends she would do shoots with the photographers she recruited online. But eventually these shoots started to take over and she quit her job to concentrate on them. The rest, as they say, is (gravure) history. She is now one of the top idols in the industry.

Shinonome’s highly anticipated second photo book, which has a decidedly summery beach vibe, will be released in Japan on April 25.

Ah, springtime. A season for the sakura cherry blossom. For those debauched hanami picnics in parks that are great opportunities for hooking up and meeting friends of friends who become lovers.

Well, the bloom has come a little early this year in Tokyo but it looks like the peak will be spoiled by rain anyway.

So much for going outdoors and enjoying what promised to be the first true post-Covid hanami season (during the waves of the pandemic, the authorities made rather redundant gestures toward social distancing by closing off parts of parks, which generally just meant that determined hanami parties clustered even more closely together).

Instead, perhaps we’ll stay indoors and catch up on some new AV releases — and some toys.

Our friends at Kanojo Toys, the biggest online source for Japanese adult toys, are having a spring sale to celebrate the arrival of the cherry blossom.

You can get 20% off any order until March 28. To get your discount, use the coupon “Cherry” when you order.

We were checking out a few of the latest arrivals at Kanojo Toys and we’re particularly keen to try the Junjokaren Succubunny Hips Onahole (a bunny girl succubus fetish waist/buttocks toy with two holes) and the more compact I Dedicate My First H to You Onahole, since a virgin schoolgirl pocket pussy is always a winner.

Once one of the most famous idols in Japan, Mariko Shinoda has divorced her husband of four years. The 37-year-old announced the news on Instagram.

A former AKB48 singer who later branched out into acting, Shinoda married an entrepreneur three years her junior in 2019 and gave birth to a daughter in 2020.

As reported on this blog, rumors emerged last year that her marriage was on the rocks due to her alleged adultery. Her husband apparently took their child away from her for a time.

The divorce follows a mediation process due to the alleged infidelity. In Japan, the aggrieved spouse can demand consolation money from both the spouse they are divorcing and the person with whom they had an affair.

In her Instagram post, Shinoda did not touch on the consolation fee or last year’s controversy that lit up the pages of the tabloids, though she did publicly deny the adultery on social media in 2022. She also did not mention custody of her child.

Despite managing to navigate from young idol with legions of adoring male fans to a youngish mother popular with women, it is hard to see how Shinoda can make a comeback from this.

On the other hand, there is a tried and tested formula, it seems: stripping off.

Angelica Michibata was able to make a comeback to a certain extent with a nude shoot and former Morning Musume idol Maki Goto also went nude in 2021 following her marriage and career break (and alleged adultery).

Shinoda joins the growing ranks of ex-AKB48 idol divorcées, including Kana Kobayashi and Atsuko Maeda.

Last week, we wrote about the Politician Girls 48 Party, the latest incarnation of an anti-NHK fringe right-wing populist party. The candidates are all female and feature many former idols, models, and minor celebrities.

Now, as the party fields candidates in various upcoming local elections, more details have emerged about its prospective lawmakers.

In April, Hasumin Yoshikawa is standing for a seat in the Setagaya City Council election. Setagaya, incidentally, is where the Tokyo Kinky offices are located. It’s a large, mostly residential part of Tokyo known for somewhat liberal politics (the mayor is backed by the Socialist Party).

Yoshikawa is a former Japan Self-Defense Force nurse. If that wasn’t alluring enough for male voters, she’s supposed to be a porn star (some reports say she is going to debut after the election but she describes herself as a “current” AV performer).

That’s pretty sensational stuff, but the plot thickens — and grows more lurid. According to news reports over the weekend and shared in a useful Twitter thread by Japanese politics scholar Jeffrey J. Hall, Yoshikawa was already moonlighting as a sex worker while a JSDF nurse.

She’s also claimed that she was the victim of harassment at the JSDF, where bullying and harassment has recently got a lot of attention. Despite the headline-grabbing gimmicks, Yoshikawa’s campaign is actually centered on the very sincere topic of anti-harassment policies. She says she was doing sex work to earn enough to pay off her tuition and wanted to quit the JSDF as soon as she could because of the harassment she received during her time there.

Yoshikawa has been promoting her campaigning with the usual stump speeches in Setagaya, but also by hiring out a bar and posing for pictures with customers while wearing a bunny girl suit. When out and about campaigning on the streets, she sometimes seems to wear a JSDF-style camouflage uniform.

As someone working in the adult video industry, Yoshikawa has a vested interested in the new porn law that passed last year. She is opposed to it because of the restrictions it places on porn productions. This may seem oxymoronic, since she is supposed to be running as an anti-harassment candidate and the new porn law, flawed though it may be, is meant to stamp out coercion of performers. On the other hand, Yoshikawa is in fine company: many prominent JAV performers are also opposed to the new law.

The Politician Girls 48 Party is the new guise of the NHK Party. Last year, the party fielded another porn-related candidate. Riyo Takahashi is the founder of the Japanese video hosting site FC2, known for hosting porn. He ran on a campaign to legalize uncensored porn in Japan, but did not win a seat.

Many moons ago, we used to live in a “gaijin house” — one of those guest houses that cater specifically to foreign residents of Tokyo. It wasn’t as bad as some of the horror stories we have heard about such places, but the walls were decidedly thin.

One morning, we woke up to hear sounds from across the hall (through at least two doors/walls). Our young American neighbor was clearly balls deep in his Sunday breakfast as we could hear his partner (at least the one he had snagged that week, since he always had several on the go) groaning how “kimochi ii” (good) it felt.

Another time, we were plodding up the stairs one afternoon to use the washing machine on the top floor. And then we heard the distinct sound of flesh slapping against flesh and the grunt-groan of a Japanese girl. That was the French guy on the third floor enjoying some afternoon sex.

A British guy on another floor had such loud sex with his Korean girlfriend (who would groan out in loud Japanese porn phrases) that a neighboring tenant called the guest house operators, who then called him during the deed to tell him to pipe down.

Knowing all of the above, when we brought a date back to our little pad in the guest house, we would be very conscious of our neighbors, prompting us to literally cover the girl’s mouth if she got too loud.

All this preamble is a long way of saying, as we have said before, that sex can be a noisy affair in Japan, which is not helped by the thin walls, doors, and windows.

For some neighbors, this may be a voyeuristic turn-on or just something amusing. For others, it’s a nuisance and they will leave a note in public informing you of the fact.

As these recently spotted images on social media demonstrate.

This rather sloppily written missive says (roughly translated): “The sound of your girlfriend’s (?) moaning and your balls slapping is very annoying, so please at least close the window when you have sex.”

This one says: “Don’t play adult games late at night. The woman’s pants are audible next door. Turn it down!”

This long and furious note says that they took a video outside someone’s home recording their loud groans during sex on Friday night. It specifies the types of groans too (“Ah! Ooh! Yaa!”).

We’ve written before about the wonder that is Japanese gravure idol Sayaka Nitori, who has proven adept at building her own fandom on social media (1.1 million followers on Instagram!) and releasing products independently.

She isn’t attached to a talent management agency and so has to go the extra mile to promote her releases and run her own online fan club.

Last year, she released her debut photo book with a major publisher — and it was semi-nude, giving us stunning glimpses of her naked G-cup breasts.

The book was a bestseller (it recently entered its fifth printing) and now the 29-year-old is continuing her strong run with a 2023 calendar release (that may sound like it’s pretty late but since the academic and fiscal year in Japan starts in April, it’s not so unusual for calendars to also begin in the spring).

The 36-page calendar, called Luna, is another nude release from the slinky star, showing off her naked butt. A digital photo book with the same title is meant to come out concurrently on March 31.

Here are some highlights.

With her usual savvy, Sayaka Nitori is promoting the calendar through meet-and-greet events in Tokyo and Nagoya in mid-April. Expect there to be a long line to meet her!

The non-fungible tokens boom seems to have petered out internationally. Prices of NFTs skyrocketed but then plummeted over the course of 2022, and many believe the market is over (not coincidentally, the crypto markets has also experienced a crunch in 2022). The art and photography industries may soon move onto the next fad, if they haven’t already.

In Japan, NFTs are still something of a thing, though, even if the haven’t reached the heights of fame and fortune that they (briefly) attained in other countries.

In 2021, shibari artist Hajime Kinoko created an NFT rope bondage art installation, while even soon-to-be-former porn star Yua Mikami got in on the act with an NFTs sale that same year.

And we were intrigued to learn this week that historical gravure NFTs exist.

The photographer Yasuo Kujirai, known for his 2000s gravure work, is trying to establish a market for NFTs of old gravure photos shot on film.

Since last month, he has offered classic shots of Emiri Nakayama, Chiriko Sakashita, and Maju Ozawa “remade” as NFTs, available on the NFTs platform Adam by GMO.

From photo books he shot with the models — mainly Principessa with Emiri Nakayama (released September 2003), Back Off!! with Chiriko Sakashita (released February 2003), and Pearl with Maju Ozawa (released May 2002) — he has selected shots to make (at time of writing) some 200 NFTs.

Sounds like a gimmick? That’s because it is, but perhaps Kujirai can trade on nostalgia among the models’ male fans, who are now middle-aged (like the models themselves) and may have some money lying around. And because he presumably owns the copyright on the photos, he probably hopes he can recycle some of his considerable back catalogue for a bit of profit.

You can browse the shots he has offered on the Adam by GMO website, which also include former race queens Toko Ushikawa and Kaoru Sumiya. None of the shots are especially explicit; by gravure standards, these are at the tamer end of the spectrum.

The NFTs are mostly available from ¥10,000, though some can be yours for just ¥2,000 or even ¥1,000.

At the time of writing, none of the NFTs seem to have received any bids.

We’ve written before about the problem of scams in the Japanese “dating site” industry, where customers think they are interacting with real women who want to meet them but are actually exchanging messages with someone (perhaps even a man) who is trying to ensure they keep paying the membership fees for as long as possible.

In a recent article on Japan Today, someone apparently interviewed two such scammers.

The first is actually just someone who worked as a cheap hostess bar. We don’t think this qualifies, since though it is possible for a customer to take a hostess out on a date, it’s not really a scam in the sense that the man already knows he is paying for her drinks and time.

We were more interested in the second interview and example: a sakura (fake person, plant) at a dating website (deai-kei site).

She had to pretend to be a woman genuinely looking for a boyfriend but she was part of a team of 30 such women whose job was to write messages and keep men interested (and so keep on paying the fees for the service). She notes that most of the women — at least they were women, unlike some such sites — were shy types and socially awkward, while the site was run by these flashy guys who graduated from top universities.

The interview suggests that such scammer jobs are appealing for people with low social skills who don’t want to talk to people face to face.

“Then, when I was looking at a job-hunting site, I found a listing for an ’email writing’ position. They hired me, and when I showed up for work, the job was being a dating site sakura.”

But such fake dating sites rarely last long. Such was the case this time.

“One day, I showed up at the office for work, and the company had vanished. The computers, the furniture, everything was gone — the room was empty. We tried calling the managers’ phones, but the numbers weren’t in service anymore. I was stunned.”

The management are sometimes the one who end up on the evening news doing the perp walk.

In more recent years, with the rise of simpler and safer dating apps like Tinder in Japan, and when people can check if a website or service is legit just by a quick Google search, it might seem strange that there is any sort of market still for such deai-kei sites.

But men join (or used to join) the old style of deai-kei sites perhaps because they treat it like compensated dating and a quick fix (i.e., looking for a sex friend, not a partner), one step removed from prostitution. They probably expect to pay the woman (either in cash or with a meal), who in turn is expecting to have sex with the man. That is, of course, if the whole site isn’t fake and full of scammers.

One of the lesser-known effects of the coronavirus pandemic (or at least, the recent economic situation caused by multiple factors) is that it has led to an influx of Japanese sex workers in Kabukicho going abroad to earn better money.

According to recent articles in the magazine Friday (March 31 and April 7 issues), the United States used to be a popular destination among Japanese prostitutes, but increased checks at immigration control — including apparently checking smartphone pics to see if they contain lingerie-clad selfies — have prompted sex workers to seek out alternative destinations. Some are going to Dubai and Southeast Asia instead, it seems.

And this has led to a crackdown by local police (we reported last year on the arrest of Japanese porn star Noa Aizawa, who was providing sex services from a luxury hotel in Hong Kong).

Friday spoke with a 22-year-old university student who was arrested in Southeast Asia.

“I went abroad to earn money so I could give my favorite host a ¥10 million champagne tower, since he was going to quit in January.”

A lot of these women are apparently making contact with locals and arranging conditions for their trips via social media.

The interviewee had previously done sex work abroad, earning over ¥200,000 a day — a fee unimaginable in Japan. For just an hour of “play,” the client would pay ¥50,000, of which she took 70%.

So it was a no-brainer when it came to deciding to go again when she wanted to earn some quick cash. She left Japan in mid-December, intending to stay abroad for two weeks.

However, one week into the trip and just after she had taken a client back to her hotel room, she suddenly found herself handcuffed, arrested, and in a detention center. Luckily, she was released two days later. She wasn’t the real target; the police had actually hoped to arrest her local pimp.

But the police called her back in for questioning and kept her phone and passport, so she couldn’t go home.

Her favorite host saved the day: she was able to contact him when initially arrested and he bought a phone and took it to her.

The student and sex worker remains stuck in the unnamed country in Southeast Asia, according to Friday, three months on. “The owner of the prostitution ring has been arrested, so they will probably call me as a witness in the trial. The date for the trial isn’t decided yet, so I don’t know when I can go home.”

She was meant to graduate college in April and start working at a company. She has yet to explain to them that she is stuck outside the country.

The plucky host has again stepped in to help, explaining to her family (who are blissfully ignorant of her frequenting of host clubs or employment in the sex industry) that there was unspecified “trouble” on a trip overseas and she was arrested.

“I want to go home quickly and marry him,” she confesses.

One of the most sensational stories that has gripped the Japanese media over the past few weeks has involved the arrests and deportations in the Philippines of several young Japanese citizens, who were allegedly part of the “Luffy group” responsible robbery and fraud since 2021 (including from behind bars). The name of the gang is a reference to the manga and anime franchise One Piece.

One of the most recently detained citizens was 25-year-old Hitomi Kumai. Japanese police issued a warrant for her arrest last September on fraud charges. She is accused of making phone calls tricking people into paying money.

The most intriguing thing about Kumai is her background. She hails from quite a prestigious family, growing up in a large house in Mitaka, an affluent suburb of Tokyo. Her grandfather was a politician who served in the Kochi Prefectural Assembly for five terms.

As a child, she dreamed of being an interpreter and eventually entered Tama Art University after two years as a ronin student (where you cram for exams). It is one of the best art colleges in Japan.

As art college, she had something of an epiphany when she entered a student beauty contest in 2018 (such pageants and contests are still common at Japanese universities). She got through to the finals, claiming her “future dream” is to “do a job that makes people smile,” and her success changed her outlook. No longer interested in fashion design, she wanted to be a model and started proactively posting selfies on social media.

She also allegedly started to make money from compensated dating with older men (in recent lingo, papakatsu). She acquired expensive tastes, buying luxury brand goods and rarely attending classes. She eventually dropped out of college in her third year.

Somewhere along the line, she relocated to the Philippines and became romantically involved with a 24-year-old man, Kairi Fujita, who was arrested with Kumai on March 10. She is said to be pregnant with his child.

From affluence to art college beauty finalist to papakatsu, fraud, and international crime. Now that’s quite a story. And she’s still only 25!