Papakatsu is the new “sugar daddy” genre of compensated dating. For some, it’s an easy way for guys who are middle aged or older with some money to have sex with younger women.

For others, it’s a way to fall victim to crime.

In May, a man was almost murdered by woman who looked in reality very different from the cute lady in the pictures she put online.

Now comes a fresh cautionary tale. A 25-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of fraud. According to media reports, Mai Watanabe is accused of swindling a whopping ¥52 million — in cash!

She was first indicted in September on charges of aiding and abetting fraud. Under the name Itadaki-joshi Riri-chan (literally, Receiving Girl Riri-chan), she sold manuals and advice to women who want to manipulate men romantically into giving them cash during compensated dating relationships.

She advertised her services on YouTube, though her channel is no longer online. She would sell PDF manuals for ¥10,000, starting in August 2020.

But she was more than just a consultant. Watanabe practiced what she preached — and succeeded in getting the dough by wrapping men around her finger. In October, she was indicted for fraud for conning a 50-year-old man out of ¥38 million over four months from April this year. She met the alleged victim on a matching app.

Later in October, she was served a fresh arrest warrant by police in Nagoya, this time pertaining to a 54-year-old man from Yokohama that she picked up a store where she worked. Between July 2021 and June 2022, Watanabe managed to swindle him of tens of millions of yen over six occasions. She persuaded him to transfer the sums to her account with lies about business debts.

The hapless man, who must have thought he was going to get something in return (it’s not clear if Watanabe was sleeping with him, but we presume so), ultimately transferred an incredible ¥117 million. In addition to the charge relating to the ¥52 million, police hope to charge her with fraud over the second half of the money after they get more evidence.

In truth, she wanted money to fund her lavish spending at a host club. So in the end, the only people who won in this sad story were the hosts.

After graduating high school, Watanabe went to vocational college, but dropped out and worked as a prostitute. She reportedly got into host clubs about five years ago, but had trouble paying her bill at the end of each month.

Watanabe’s first court hearing was on November 2, leading to a frenzy of media interest in her appearance. The public seats in the courtroom were reportedly packed with older men, keen to get a glimpse of this fraudster.

The gentrification of Kabukicho, which has turned the main strip and square into a cleaner, more tourist-friendly place, has not changed the fundamental nature of the district. Just turn a corner and you’ll find blowjob parlors and host or hostess clubs galore, not to mention Shinjuku’s massive love hotel area right behind.

The dark side of Kabukicho, which gets its name from an unfulfilled plan in the postwar years to build a kabuki theater in the neighborhood, reared its head over the weekend — in two very unpleasant scenes.

A few weeks ago, someone was thankfully prevented from jumping off the Godzilla building (a complex containing a hotel and movie theater). The rooftop and its Godzilla head are publicly accessible, and it seems possible to climb over the barrier.

On the afternoon of Saturday, the same thing happened — but the person unfortunately succeeded in jumping this time.

We will refrain from sharing any images but social media was quickly filled with pics and video of the figure standing on the rooftop and then jumping to the ground below, hitting a tree on the way. The victim was a man in his twenties or thirties. He died instantly.

And then in the early hours of November 5, police were called to break up a fight in the main square. But this was much more serious than the usual drunkard brawls or even a yakuza fight.

A woman in her twenties was arrested for attempted murder after she had stabbed the neck of a male host with a utility knife. Surrounded by a crowd of onlookers — bizarrely, despite the copious amounts of blood, almost none seemed to intervene in the videos we have seen — she is holding the man down on the street as blood pours from a wound.

She apparently told onlookers that she had spent over ¥10 million on the man in six moths.

When police arrived and asked her if she had stabbed the man, she cooled answered: “Ten minutes ago.”

There is speculation that the pair were living together and he had been abusive to her, and that her attack may have been revenge.

Despite the drama of the event, she might not get such a long sentence. Yuka Takaoka, for instance, only received 3.5 years after almost killing her Kabukicho host boyfriend in a fit of jealousy. The images of the pretty Takaoka sitting, talking on her phone and smoking beside the sprawled body of her naked, bloodied boyfriend in the lobby of their Shinjuku apartment, and then smiling in the police car after she had been detained became an internet sensation in 2019. “I just loved him too much,” she explained.

Host club debts can lead women to do desperate things. We reported yesterday, for instance, on the papakatsu fraudster who stole millions from men to pay for a host club. Paying for visits to host clubs is also one of the reasons that street walkers sell their bodies in Kabukicho.

Though hostess clubs are certainly not cheap, we rarely seem to hear about men’s addiction to them leading crime, but perhaps those narratives are less dramatic.

In a recent interview with Aera, the former AKB48 idol Nana Okada (岡田奈々) has come out as nonbinary.

They don’t explicitly also come as bisexual but the 26-year-old does say they are attracted to both men and women, and that they dated a woman back in 2017 (during their tenure in AKB48, which started in 2012).

As readers will remember, Okada was fired from AKB48 over a dating scandal in 2022. Until then, she had been one of the most popular members of the idol group.

For a more in-depth analysis of the interview and what Okada reveals, we recommend this thread. Okada is currently promoting their first solo album, which is released this week.

Other prominent Japanese celebrities to come out as nonbinary include twice-married singer Hikaru Utada.

Politicians in the Kanagawa assembly were recently filmed by the media sleeping on the job.

Over several days, FNN’s cameras spotted multiple lawmakers having a nap during sessions of the assembly, instead of doing the job the public elects (and pays) them to do.

Plus ça change. We could fill this blog with examples of politicos sleeping on the job.

But the cameras also spotted one lawmaker doing something a bit more cheeky.

Yusuke Terasaki of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan was observed using his computer to look up non-work-related matters. In fact, he was planning his night out at a Ginza hostess bar.

FNN’s intrepid crew later filmed him actually going to the bar after the work meeting was over.

They even confronted him about the matter. Very conveniently, Terasaki claimed to have no memory of what he had done. “I don’t remember why I searched it.”

FNN did this report in response to a similar one three years ago, which resulted in Kanagawa’s politicians pledging they would stop shirking their duties. Perhaps they also have no memory of that promise.

Kanagawa assemblymembers earn ¥16 million a year, which is about three times the average salary in Japan — and presumably more than enough to pay for many trips to Ginza hostesses. (Let’s not forget former prime minister Sosuke Uno, whose relationship with a geisha brought an fast end to his premiership after just 68 days in 1989.)

Still, Terasaki’s after-work activities are at least more innocent than those of the Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker who was spotted last year doing compensated dating with an 18-year-old after work.

We are pleased to see that the impossibly sexy and cute gravure idol and actress Yuno Ohara is to release a new photo book.

The as-yet untitled photo book comes out on January 31 next year. It marks her third photo book, with her debut release released back in 2018.

Three preview images are available at the moment, with more sure to come in the near future.

Yuno Ohara is no stranger to these digital pages. We previous covered her (non-nude) sex scenes in drama series Sweat and Soap last year and The Young Boys with Secrets earlier this year.

The 24-year-old also did a hot shoot for the November issue of ar magazine.

If you can’t wait until the photo book comes out, you could sate your appetite for all things Yuno with her 2023-2024 calendar. Some highlights are below.

In 2021, she released a digital photo book with Weekly Playboy called Reborn.

Have you ever wondered what that sex position is called in Japanese?

This could be for purely academic reasons, of course, if you are a bit of a linguistic or just like having random knowledge in your arsenal.

Or it could be for that time when you need to explain to your Japanese partner the position you want to try next.

This superbly useful guide has illustrations of various sex positions with their Japanese name, including transliterated versions if you can’t read the kanji.

The guide was created by illustrator Jikumaru and published online in 2019, giving kind permission for people to share and use it.

Armed with this resource, you’ll never suffer from a lack of words in the bedroom again!

These positions are actually from the legendary “48 positions” guide called Shijuuhatte or Shijuhatte (四十八手), itself inspired by a series of sumo moves.

Here is an old shunga erotic print showing them all in action.

But the guide goes much further than the classic 48 positions, providing names for an amazing 76. That should definitely keep us busy for a while.

Of course, the guide doesn’t bother to include the most basic positions, so we’ll fill you in on those now.

missionary: seijoi (正常位)
cowgirl: kijoi (騎乗位)
prone bone: nebakku (寝バック)
doggy: bakku (バック), kohai (後背位)
standing doggy: tachi-bakku (立ちバック)
face to face: taimen-zai (対面座位)
spoons: sokui (側位)
splitter (one leg up): matsuba-kuzushi (松葉崩し)

Former top adult video star Sola (Sora) Aoi has given her first on-camera interview in four years.

Once the most famous Japanese porn star, and popular also in other parts of Asia, Sora Aoi announced her marriage at the start of 2018 to DJ Non.

When she then announced she was pregnant at the end of that year, she experienced quite a lot of abuse on social media. Despite not appearing in porn since 2011, many trolls still criticized her for becoming a mother, saying it was “sad for the children.”

Now aged 42, Sola Aoi has two kids with DJ Non. She gave birth to twins in May 2019.

She recalls that online criticism. She says she thought people who would leave such comments must be still young without much life experience.

In her new interview with Abema, she doesn’t exactly tell us anything so new, but fills us in on her domestic arrangements.

There are such nuggets as the fact that she handles most of the childcare but her husband does a lot of the housework, like cleaning the home, washing the bath, doing the laundry, and taking out the trash. So if you want a way into the heart of your favorite Japanese porn star, it might start with being willing to do more than your share of the household chores!

She explains that she has to write details about her work on nursery school forms, so suspects that the staff know who she is and what she used to do for a living. That said, she is mostly focused right now on parenting.

She expects her kids will find out when they are in junior high school and able to search things online. When that inevitably happens, Aoi says she will respond truthfully and try to protect her children from bullying.

We recently wrote about the frankly shocking papakatsu compensated dating fraud perpetuated by a woman to fund her trips to host clubs.

It shows many things, not least the extraordinary lengths some women will go to to feed their addiction to host clubs.

This issue has drawn attention of late, with host clubs seen as more exploitative than hostess clubs. Host clubs have developed an image as an ecosystem that preys on vulnerable women and with a financial structure that leads to debt, whereby women are encouraged to rack up huge bills that they pay later.

Many of the women who go to host clubs are themselves working as hostesses, so the two mizu-shobai industries feed into each other.

Whereas expensive trips to hostess clubs are regarded as a luxury indulgence for men, including (or perhaps especially) married men of a certain age, host clubs often attract unmarried, younger women without the wherewithal necessarily to pay the eye-watering costs involved.

Now opposition lawmakers had raised the need for measures to tackle “malicious host clubs.” Quite how they plan to define which clubs are malicious and which are not is no doubt a matter of hot debate.

On Monday, Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan heard from women and support groups about how some hosts target vulnerable. The hosts will say that the first visit is just ¥1,000 and then as women start to go regularly, the hosts traffic them into sex work to pay off their outstanding bills at the club.

One women said she paid ¥5 million to a club. She was brought up at a child welfare facility and went to the club because she was lonely.

Proposed measures include putting a limit on how much can be invoiced through the industry’s notorious “pay later” (kake) system, and forcing clubs to provide a clear and proper breakdown of pricing.

Intense competition among hosts in districts like Kabukicho apparently forces them to try to keep customers by allowing them to gorge themselves at the club with pricy food and drinks, and then pay later.

They then feel obliged to pay, even if it means taking out a high-interest loan or doing sex work. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police have arrested 11 hosts over the past five years for pimping women to pay back their debts.

Media reporting about such cases has brought the problem to the attention of politicians.

After Ayaka Shiomura (who has made a name for herself by campaigning for women’s rights and against exploitative practices in the adult video industry) raised the issue at a House of Councilors Cabinet Committee, the government yesterday said that it would draw up policies for a police crackdown and support for women involved.

At a House of Representatives hearing on November 10, government lawmakers also promised to do more to deal with the problem.

A 43-year-old man has been arrested at a hot spring facility in the Mie city of Kuwana for entering the women-only bathing area.

The man, who is described in media reports as unemployed, is from Kasugai in Aichi.

According to police, the man is suspected of sneaking into the women’s baths at around 8:30 pm on November 13.

A female customer alerted a member of staff, who confirmed that a man was washing himself in the female bathing area, and then called the cops.

However, the story then becomes complicated because the man told police: “I’m a woman inside, so I can’t understand at all why I’m not allowed to enter the women-only baths.”

The man apparently dressed as a woman, which enabled him to receive entry to the women-only area at the reception desk. It wasn’t until he took his clothes off that he was rumbled.

Please that we are using male pronouns and describing the arrestee as a man because that is what news media is doing. This is the only information we have, and cannot presume anything about the gender identity.

Though Japan has so far largely avoided the intense culture war surrounding trans rights that has engulfed parts of the West, especially the United States and Britain, the strong culture of public bathing makes it a potentially tricky issue.

Is this man genuinely trans? If so, it raises all kinds of of questions about how to deal with such people’s identity at hot springs and public baths.

Or was he merely using trans identity as a cloak to mask his real intentions? In which case, how can this be prevented in the future without offending people who are genuinely trans?

In June, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare issued guidance to public baths that they should decide based on physical attributes, and that those “with a male body who feel female inside” should not be allowed into female baths.

The Japanese movie Shrieking in the Rain is about a 1988 sexploitation film shoot. Since the movie deals with softcore porn, it inevitably has some fairly explicit scenes itself.

It first came out in late 2021, streaming on Amazon Prime, and there now seems to be a more explicit “late-night version” rated R18 that’s available on Netflix Japan. To be honest, these release details are a bit confusing and it’s perhaps why the hot stuff only came to our attention recently.

Directed by Eiji Uchida, who made the JAV-themed The Naked Director series for Netflix and the film Love and Other Cults, it has the usual pantomimish tone of Japanese TV dramas.

While the budget is clearly limited (most of the story is shot in a few interiors), it stars quite a big name in the main role of the film director: the lovely Marika Matsumoto.

Marika Matsumoto is an actress and model who has garnered her own legions of admirers for her looks, helped by her sensual photo shoots and (non-nude) sex scenes. In Shrieking in the Rain, she looks gorgeous in her frizzly ’80s hairstyle and denim fashion.

There are several nude scenes and nude sex scenes, most of which involve Maeko Oyama.

Maeko Oyama is not someone we know well. She is nude several times in the film, which are scenes of the film within the film (so there are other characters standing around watching).

She is first shown nude from behind, displaying her naked body to the director.

In the most explicit scenes, she is shown filming sex scenes on a sofa, first underneath her co-star and then on top.

The best scene shows them having passionate sex on a red rug on the floor.

Two other great scenes involve the ravishing, voluptuous gravure model Yuka Someya, who appears in flashback sequences as the protagonist’s mother. Though she has done plenty of nude shoots before, including full-frontals, we think this is her first nude sex scene.

We see her riding a man in bed, grinding him in slow motion with her shapely butt and thighs sitting on top of him like a juicy hunks of meat ready to be devoured.

We also see her getting fucked from behind, her succulent tits on full display.

The best shot, though, is when she’s having sex with her lover side by side, her amazing leg wrapped over his body, and his hand reaching over to cop a hold of her buttock and squeeze it. This stretches her ass wide and it just looks good enough to eat.

Short as it is, this is one of the best sex scenes we have seen in a mainstream Japanese movie for a while.

These sex scenes with Yuka Someya are all shown in slow motion, which reduces the realism somewhat but gives the scenes a dreamy tone in keeping with their place in the story as flashbacks. If only they were memories of our experience with Yuka Someya!

The surge in streetwalkers at Okubo Park near Kabukicho, Shinjuku’s red-light district, has prompted a media panic over the last year or so, not least because the women seem very young.

A lot of media reports have indicated that the women are doing sex work to pay off debts or fund their trips to host clubs. The latter have been demonized by the media and politicians of late, and lawmakers are trying to target “malicious clubs” that trap vulnerable women in a spiral of debt.

The streetwalkers are also perhaps not as freelance as you might think, as one case indicates.

A 27-year-old Japanese man has been arrested for allegedly forcing a woman into prostitution and offering her services in Okubo Park.

The 28-year-old woman was reportedly beaten by Tetsu Nemoto if she didn’t earn enough for him through her sex work. Nemoto is suspected of keeping most of the more than ¥3 million that she earned.

The woman received just ¥150,000 of the money she earned from 43 days of continuous prostitution in Kabukicho.

Nemoto resides in Kyoto but apparently contacted the woman via social media, suggesting she try working at Okubo Park in early September.

Their professional “contract” went back some time, it seems, though Nemoto and the unnamed woman originally split the proceeds evenly. They became acquainted in September last year via social media, with Nemoto promising her that she could earn more money than papakatsu compensated dating. She started to do sex work as a streetwalker in Kansai from March this year.

From May, Nemoto started to take most of the money she earned. Police believe Nemoto obtained more than ¥15 million in a year from prostitution.

The woman was arrested at Okubo Park for soliciting on October 16 and then released. Nemoto made her go back to the park and she was arrested again, whereupon she told police that Nemoto would beat her if her sales dropped.

Police have cracked down on the prostitutes at Okubo Park, arresting many. So far this year, 116 women have been detained — twice as many as last year.

This video shows the reality of some nights at Okubo Park.

Street prostitution is illegal in Japan (though prostitution itself is not), so streetwalkers take a big risk. Pimping a woman for your own financial gain is, of course, also illegal.

Regular readers will know how often we praise the Japanese adult brand Tama Toys on these digital pages. The feisty, prolific manufacturer pumps out a huge range of toys and goodies, including probably the best hug pillows and covers in the industry.

It has also developed a fine line in creating radical, sometimes bizarre masturbators. Perhaps you remember its previous achievements, like masturbators inspired by a bullet, brick, bamboo, and even a grenade.

More recently, we wrote about its strikingly designed heart-shaped masturbator toy.

Now comes another entry in the annals of hyper-experimental Japanese sex toy design: the Ms. Stone Onahole.

No, this isn’t an Emma Stone toy (though that would be cool). It’s based on a female knight who has been turned to stone and into your personal, statuesque sex slave!

Just when you think you’ve seen every kind of hentai onahole imaginable, along comes this! It takes some of the elements of the frozen schoolgirl porn we wrote about it in 2022, and adds a killer body and a hard texture with a stone-gray color.

The skin is as stony as you were expect from a petrified woman.

With box art by legendary illustrator Ryu Ganari, the toy feature a beautiful pair of breasts, curvy waist, and a stunningly tight pussy with a long “stone ridge” running the whole way.

Don’t worry, having sex with Ms. Stone won’t turn you into stone as well! Nor will she crumble or crack in your hands.

The Ms. Stone Onahole is available now internationally from Kanojo Toys, the biggest online source of Japanese adult toys, with more than 9,500 toys currently available.

Slinky sexplot Kanami Takasaki is to release her second, hotly anticipated photo book.

Blooming Bud comes out on January 25, 2024, from Transworld Japan, which specializes in publishing idol books and calendars.

It features Takasaki, who is known for her girl-next-door looks, in a more alluring, sensual style, including a cover image where she is posing naked at the sea, holding up a sheer piece of fabric. As the title of the book suggests, 26-year-old Takasaki is possible entering a more mature stage in her career.

Blooming Bud has a beach theme and was shot in Hawaii.

This follows on from the nude (and wet) shoot Kanami Takasaki did for her first photo book in 2021 in which she showed off her slender body and naked butt. Here are some highlights from that debut book.

Takasaki, known as Kanamin to her fans, also made a big impression at the Tokyo Game Show in September, where she was a scantily clad booth babe (known as a “companion” in Japanese) for Cluster.

We have written before about multilingual actress and model Manami Shindo, who has a penchant for doing nude shoots.

She also did nude sex scenes in 2022 in the movie Far Away, Further Away.

The 31-year-old who can speak five languages has followed this up with another erotic role in the movie Manji, which involves nude lesbian sex scenes with the actress Noriko Kohara.

Who is Noriko Kohara, we hear you ask? Well, she’s actually none other than Noriko Kijima under a different name. Kijima had a gravure career in the 2000s in which she did nude shoots (which got her featured in our roundup of best Japanese asses) and has appeared nude in several films over the years, including some mild bondage scenes.

She is now in her mid-thirties — very ripe and succulent jukujo territory! We were totally unaware of this, but she changed her professional name to Kohara in 2018.

Manji was released in Japan in September 2023. It is yet another adaptation of the Tanizaki novel, which has been filmed several times and better-known in English as Quicksand.

The movie features several scenes in which the lovers explore each other’s bodies, from a hotel bed to a car.

In keeping with the bisexual themes of the Tanizaki novel, the film also includes a nude sex scene between Shindo and a man.

The model, occasional actress, and former AKB48 music idol Mariya Nagao continues to get more alluring the older she gets.

Slinky. Cheeky. Sexy. Mariya-chan has got it all in abundance.

On the verge of 30 (she hits that magic number in March next year), she has thankfully not gone the way of most AKB idols and disappeared into the ether, but still fields regular invites to do gravure photo shoots, model jaw-dropping lingerie, and publish photo books.

In recent months, she has been in the gossip columns because the tabloids found out that she has a boyfriend who is a former host.

In early 2022, she released a Showa-themed photo book that finally showed us some nudity, though it was restrained to her butt and tantalizing glimpses of the rest of her body.

Her new photo book — her fifth — has about the same level of nudity, but her beach body still looks amazing. As winter sets in, these summery pics are an especially welcome salve for our sensually starved soul.

Capricious came out on November 14 from Kodansha, and is likely to be one of the biggest sellers over the end-of-year period (a major season for idol/model publishing, with lots of photo books and calendars hitting the market).

We’ve included some highlights that have appeared in Weekly Friday.

In one shot, she’s lying naked on a bed with her hands covering her breasts (the classic tebura “hand bra” pose that is a staple of gravure shoots).

In another pic, she’s sitting on the beach, her bikini bottoms untied to show off her delicious thigh, and just about hiding her nipple while teasing lots of side boob.

In another photo, she’s lying naked on her front on a beach, with some of her buttocks in view.

We assume that the actual photo book doesn’t show any more explicit nudity than this, but we hope we’re wrong.

Will we one day get to see her breasts?

Regular readers might remember Ayana Kobayashi, whose stunning gravure shoot we wrote about in 2019. It was notable because she did an alluring nude shoot with her butt and nipples on display despite being married (to a comedian).

She has since released a couple of DVDs.

It’s perhaps because she’s a bit of an outsider — someone who came to mainstream gravure a bit late and already married with a child — that she’s freer to say certain things.

Now in her early thirties, Kobayashi recently made headlines with a blog entry in which she described her own experience with sexual harassment.

In the 2010s before she got married, Kobayashi was attached to Ohta Production, a large talent agency.

When she was younger, she relates, she was approached by a self-proclaimed producer who said that she could appear on a TV show if she slept with him. “All the popular gravure idols have slept with me,” he boasted.

She reveals that he clearly targeted young women who wanted to be famous at all costs.

Your choice of agency really impacts your career, she says, because of the people around you. Fortunately for her, Ohta Production didn’t have predators like the producer she describes.

The casting couch (known as makura eigyo, literally pillow business) is an open secret in the music and gravure idol world. Cocona Yuzuki has also revealed that this affects the seiyuu voice actress world too.

Celebrate Thanksgiving in the best way possible: by busting a nut!

Our friends at Kanojo Toys, the biggest online source of Japanese adult toys, are now running a Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale.

During the sale, all items in store are 20% off if you use the coupon code BFCM. (And here’s a pro tip: if you subscribe to the Kanojo Toys newsletter, you can get an even better deal!)

Everything is discounted, from classic bestsellers to the latest arrivals.

Among our personal recommendations of new products, we like the Japanese Real Hole Geki Jun Kasui Masturbator (based on a Japanese porn star’s pussy), 2.5D Girlfriend Piledriver Position Version (an inflatable toy in the piledriver sex position), and Niece Sweat Smell Spray (for those times when you want to add the scent of a young Japanese female body to your costumes, bedding, and toys).

The sale runs through November 29. Is it too early to get yourself a Christmas present you really want?

Tama Toys has already shown us what AI can do to design masturbator toys with the bestselling Artificial Intelligence Vagina onahole series.

Now comes the inevitable next step: AI porn.

An AI-generated adult video produced by h.m.p. stars a digitally created performer called Ai Kihana (木花あい).

The 35-minute video (41AIBV0001) claims to be the world’s first such AI porn release. It comes out December 22 on DVD and Blu-ray.

We will have to withhold judgment until we view the actual footage, but the Ai Kihana’s face is attractive, yet does have that uncanny valley kind of “off-ness.”

We only have the preview images to go by for now, though the rest of her body and the surroundings seem better — except for the hands/fingers, which are the well-known way to spot AI-generated visuals. In some of other images, the hands or fingers seem a little off in terms of their contours or dimensions. That said, it’s perhaps only because we are parsing the images; at a glance, the untrained eye would be none the wiser.

Is this the shape of things to come? In the future, will all porn by made by computers?

After all, it removes issues like production schedules and budgets, not to mention the costly and time-consuming nature of performer contracts now in the aftermath of the legislation passed in 2022. Should Japan’s legions of flesh-and-blood AV performers be worried about their job prospects?

On the other hand, there is speculation that this AI porn is actually itself fake: that the face is AI-generated and the rest actually filmed as usual, and the face has been Photoshopped onto the real performer.

Either way, if the aim was to spark debate and generate buzz ahead of the release, the makers certainly succeeded.

Famous (or possibly infamous) Japanese entrepreneur Takafumi Horie, aka Horiemon, has weighed in on the issue of adult video censorship.

Japanese adult video, despite being possibly the biggest porn industry in the world, is censored: no genitals are shown. This is a strange workaround to avoid prosecution under the obscenity law that was introduced to Japan in the Meiji era. The same policy is used in softcore porn and mainstream cinema, even if the nudity is not in a sex scene.

In a Japanese movie, the makers will simply shoot in a way to avoid genitals. If it’s a foreign film, they will add black marks to cover the offending bits of flesh or pixelate the image.

This pixelation is known in Japanese as “mosaic” and is the censorship method of choice in Japanese porn.

It takes a bit of getting used but has acquired an aesthetic of its own — so much so that fans might be uncomfortable with uncensored porn.

That said, consider the poor souls whose job is to pixelate cocks all day just so you can enjoy the latest releases by your favorite Japanese porn stars.

There is something faintly ridiculous about the pixelation, since it’s obvious what it’s (barely) obscuring. Nonetheless, it allows the industry to thrive without fear of prosecution.

Demand for uncensored porn certainly exists, domestically and especially internationally, but removing the mosaic can lead to arrest and prosecution. Likewise if you make your own porn and sell it uncensored: expect to be targeted by police and made to do the perp walk for the cameras.

In his characteristically blunt verbal style, Horiemon recently argued on his YouTube channel that Japan’s stance on censorship of nudity is ridiculous because uncensored porn is “easily available overseas.” (Actually, Mr. Horie, you can still watched uncensored porn easily in Japan — it just won’t be Japanese, on the whole.)

“Why does Japan prohibit uncensored porn? It’s pointless.”

Ever the businessman, Horiemon says that ending the culture of mosaic would boost the Japanese economy because it would be

He may have a point, though JAV is already insanely popular around the world, especially in other parts of Japan (not least because those countries are even stricter and don’t allow hardcore pornography, like South Korea). Would uncensored content make it even more popular? Quite possible.

But Horiemon is thinking also about the Japanese viewer, who is apparently so desperate to see uncensored content that they resort to overseas providers and pay them money. If Japanese-produced content was uncensored, that money would go back into the domestic industry (and then to to nation through the taxes that distribution companies pay).

“This is bleeding the nation dry! The taxes that should be coming back to us are draining away because the police are idiots.”

For his anti-mosaic rent, Horiemon was talking with former porn star (and now scholar/writer) Suzumi Suzuki.

We suspect that Japanese viewers are so accustomed to censored porn that they don’t mind consuming JAV as it is, and their tastes and fetishes are probably better served by JAV than foreign porn.

On the other hand, Horiemon could be referring to overseas distributors like FC2 who provide Japanese porn content uncensored (and with their servers and executives safely based outside the country). FC2 is certainly very popular among Japanese men, which has made it the enemy of both the police and mainstream JAV distributors.

The founder of FC2 is openly opposed to porn censorship and even ran as a political candidate on that platform. He is also on an international wanted list and cannot return to Japan for fear of arrest.

Horiemon is known for his loud, flashy style, his opinionated personality, and provocative business ventures. Shunned by the mainstream media since his legal woes in the 2000s, he has found success via his own online platform and outlandish projects.

These include launching a rocket into space with Tenga in 2021.

While the Japanese mainstream media and social media seems obsessed right now with young women reduced to prostituting themselves in Okubo Park, Kabukicho, allegedly over host club debts, people in Yokohama are apparently upset over a “surge” in trans sex workers.

Before the pandemic, the Asahi reports, just two male prostitutes were detained in 2019. But several male prostitutes presenting as women have been arrested since May this year by Kanagawa police.

The suspects are from Thailand, the Philippines, and Peru. Cameras were installed the monitor the activities on the streets and police went undercover to catch the suspects.

Known in Japanese somewhat euphemistically as newhalf, trans sex workers are able to exploit a curious loophole: the anti-prostitution law only relates to women (as in, people born women and/or who remain legally women). Instead, Kanagawa cops have been forced to arrest the sex workers for violating a prefectural ordinance against nuisance soliciting, nominally designed to stop people pestering passersby to come to their izakaya.

Soliciting prostitution is illegal, which is why streetwalkers put themselves at risk, but only carries a six-month sentence and small fine. These trans women, though, probably face an even lighter penalty (just a tiny fine) but might be held for a few days, which is unlikely to be nice, and then deported.

Yokohama’s main red-light district is Koganecho, but the residents of the quieter nearby district of Wakabacho are furious about the foreign “ladyboys” (to use the term employed by the Asahi) loitering in the neighborhood, trying to pick up men.

“The atmosphere of the neighborhood is bad that residents don’t walk about at night,” said Susumu Ashihara, the 83-year-old neighborhood association head.

This may well be another media-generated moral panic to us. The “surge” is — gasp — as many as five people arrested between May and September!

Police have pulled out all the stops, deploying 57 officers in September alone to round up 17 people. Of these, 13 were reportedly Thai men (we assume trans women), but there were also Thai, Chinese, and Japanese women. Some, of course, claimed to just be minding their own business.

The cops have even taken to badgering guys leaving hotels alone, asking them if they visited a male prostitute.

According to the article, male prostitutes in Japan often came from South Korea until the main pimp running the prostitution ring was nabbed in 2013.

The reporting does not specify and opts to call the sex workers “men” (probably because their legal sex is key to what the police can or can’t do in this case), but we assume these are trans women we would ordinarily call shemale (i.e., presenting as women and with surgically added breasts, but still with a penis).