Here’s a nice little (late) Christmas present for you.

The Japanese tarento and music idol Ourin (王林) is branching out into gravure with the release of her first solo photo book.

Born in 1998, the Aomori native made her debut way back in 2007 and has been part of several idol groups over the years.

One Chance was released by Shueisha on December 20. We love its flamboyant, bubble-era look.

She has previously released calendars, so gravure is not a completely new career path for her, but the swimwear photos definitely seem to indicate a conscious step up in the sexy stakes compared to the 25-year-old’s past shoots.

Here are some preview images to whet your appetite.

Despite the name of the photo book, we hope it’s not the only chance to see Ourin’s slinky body in swimwear.

As the year draws to a close, it’s natural to look back on the past months and get a little nostalgic.

Present-day Japanese gravure idols dressed up and photographed in the style of vintage pinup models? Yes, please!

That’s the basic concept behind a new photo book called Pin-Up Girls Selection, which is attempting to conjure up the image of “American porn from 100 years ago,” according to the promo spiel.

There are nine participating models: Rin Takahashi, ENA, Hinano Ayakawa, Miku Oshima, Miyako Sono, Miyu Nakagawa, Aya Hazuki, Haruka Bando, and Saki Yanase.

Bando and Oshima are better known as music idols.

You choose which model you want and then get the photo book of only her pics.

If you order the photo book, you also get a behind-the-scenes DVD.

This is actually the fourth entry in this Pin-Up Girls Selection series, which has obviously proved successful. They always have the same format: nine contemporary gravure models dressed up and photographed in a vintage style.

The series started in 2022 and has involved some of the most popular gradols in the industry. How many do you recognize?

Past entries series, though, seemed to have all the models in one book, rather than letting fans choose a whole book with just the one model they want.

The gravure model and actress Yuka Someya has reached that ripe thirties jukujo age when every role she gets offered is erotic (previous occupants of this type included Mitsu Dan and Minami Hashimoto).

In the first episode of TV drama Are kara Doshita, she plays a woman who is having an affair with a securities company.

Someya is playing to type here as a seductive woman who has an affair. It seems the way into someone like that’s heart (and panties) is to arrive at her day bearing an expensive gift.

This being mainstream TV and not a streamer, there’s no actual nudity on display. (Probably the sexiest shot is when her lover is shown kissing the inside of her legs.)

For actual flesh on display, you need to turn to Yuka Someya’s many nude photo shoots and books that show full-frontal nudity, or her recent appearance in the film Shrieking in the Rain, which featured a great nude sex scene.

Are kara Doshita started showing on NHK from December 26 and continued for three nights in a row. It’s an anthology show, with each episode telling a different story.

2023 was another busy year for us, publishing an article almost every weekday. We hope you enjoyed reading our content.

With just a few days of 2023 left, let’s look back on the year through some of the major developments in the gravure industry.

In January, Ichika Miri announced her retirement (though since she’s just 24 years old, we hope she might return under a different name and new management).

One-time top gravure princess Anri Sugihara released her first photo book in over six years. She is now a charmingly mature 41 years old.

In March, Memo Oba retired. Gravure is brutally competitive, with newbies debuting every month and just as many idols leaving the industry to pursue other careers.

In April, Aoi Fujino announced she is battling cancer.

In happier news, former gradol Rina Nagai was elected to the Saitama municipal assembly. We imagine her presence among the dull ranks of mostly male politicians could be a very welcome distraction!

In May, Ai Satsuki — a completely AI-generated gravure idol — appeared in an issue of Weekly Playboy, but the accompanying photo book was canceled.

In July, former AKB48 member and gravure stunner Satomi Kaneko retired. Her nude shoots will linger long in our memory.

In December, J-cup bombshell Airi Ikawa relaunched her career under a new professional name, Airi Shirakawa.

The New Year period in Japan is traditionally a time when celebrities announce marriages. Despite being overshadowed by tragic events in Noto and Haneda, this year proved to be business as usual in that respect: the actress Aya Hirano announced her marriage, and gravure idol Tomomi Morisaki confirmed her long-rumored coupling with baseball player Shota Hiranuma (and the fact that she was pregnant to boot).

And another celebrity story emerged: that the former TV announcer Minami Tanaka, who has made a wildly successful transition into modeling and acting, is dating the KAT-TUN singer Kazuya Kamenashi.

Minami Tanaka, who is as popular with women as she is with men, is now 37 years old and we expect keen to get married ASAP and start a family. Kamenashi is also 37 years old.

Their relationship, which apparently began after the pair worked together in the autumn, is being reported as “serious,” so perhaps wedding bells will be ringing before not too long.

It will, though, surely bring Minami’s recent habit for doing (non-nude) sex scenes, lingerie modeling, and erotic photo books to an end, which will be a shame for people like us.

Kamenashi has waited a long time to settle down. His former band member Jin Akanishi, on the other hand, got married relatively young — and to none other than the gorgeous Meisa Kuroki. The couple have two children but announced their divorce at the end of 2023.

The year-end period really is the season for celebrity romances, both beginnings and endings.

At least Akanishi didn’t turn out like another former KAT-TUN member, Koki Tanaka, who has faced legal troubles for possession of drugs and sending sexually explicit videos.

We spend a lot of time on this blog looking at the latest developments in gravure models, music idols, Japanese porn, and general sex- and adult-related news.

But it’s occasionally good to take a step back in time and explore the older content that’s out there.

We have been looking at an obscure 1989 film with the improbable yet enticing title of E-Cup Honban II: Hojuku. It stars the well-endowed Satsuki Fuji (藤沙月).

The 59-minute softcore porn (pink) film has multiple nude sex scenes.

The best ones include a bed scene in which her lover kisses her amazing breasts while fingering her. He then slips her panties off and starts to fuck her. In addition to those tits, her rear is also very shapely.

There’s another awesome scene in which she gets fucked on all fours from behind.

We love the Eighties-style haircuts and panties, though Fuji’s beauty is timeless.

We can’t find a lot of reliable information about Fuji but she seems to have been active in the adult video industry at the time.

E-Cup Honban II: Hojuku also includes a nice nude sex scene with Anri Inoue, which starts with her and her lover in the 69 position.

Start 2024 in the best way possible with some adult fun, courtesy of the amazing onaholes and other toys produced by Japan.

Our friends at Kanojo Toys, your one-stop online source for all Japanese adult toys and pleasure items, are currently running a New Year sale.

You can get 20% off any toy. Use the promo code NEW to claim your discount.

The offer is valid on absolutely anything, from the latest releases to classic bestsellers.

Kanojo Toys has thousands of toys currently available, including the best onaholes and hentai masturbators, Japanese porn DVDs, sex dolls, powered masturbators, used panties, personal lubes, smell fetish items, vibrators for guys and girls, lingerie and cosplay, BDSM gear, and much, much more.

The sale is running until January 8, so don’t miss your chance to order something at a great discount. Kanojo Toys also tell us that the code is valid on multiple orders, meaning you can actually order more than once and use the same code throughout the period of the sale.

Visit Kanojo Toys to claim your discount and get your toys.

Japan’s Noto Peninsula was hit by a huge earthquake on New Year’s Day, causing massive damage to roads and buildings, and triggering a tsunami. Over a hundred have died, with many more still missing, and Ishikawa and surrounding prefectures have suffered almost immeasurable levels of destruction to property and infrastructure.

As locals subsist in evacuation centers or try to leave the area, and emergency services pour in to bring supplies and rescue those still trapped, the authorities have specifically requested that people outside the region not come as volunteers yet to ease the burden on the heavily affected transport network.

That hasn’t stopped some celebrities and politicians from going. No doubt these people have good intentions, but the same cannot be said of some prominent YouTubers who have inevitably arrived in the area.

Yesterday, it became apparent that one of these was Rengoku Koroaki. And while people need water, food, gasoline, and so on, he chose to bring a very different kind of relief item: Tenga Eggs.

As regular readers will know, these compact masturbation toys are designed for wrapping over your penis and enhancing stimulation as you stroke. They are one of the most popular and longest-running such masturbators in Japan.

The 40-year-old Rengoku Koroaki, who is also a failed right-wing election candidate, even had the nerve to request donations from his followers to cover the costs of transport and accommodation for his trip, despite netizens finding evidence that he has millions of yen in his account.

Another YouTuber has also claimed he will take thousands of yen’s worth of the latest Tenga toys to the disaster zone.

2023 was a year of reckoning for such “nuisance YouTubers” and live streamers, who specialize in outrageous or antisocial behavior to gain clout. The police arrested some high-profile figures, including the notorious foreign streamer Johnny Somali.

Rengoku Koroaki was himself arrested in November for defamation, but is currently out on bail. He is also one of several anti-feminist YouTubers and streamers who have led the campaign of harassment against the nonprofit organization Colabo, which tries to help young women in need.

Rengoku claims that delivering Tenga will help prevent sex crimes from occurring.

While it is true that staying at an evacuation center can be very frustrating due to the limited resources and lack of privacy, and there are incidents of sexual assault sometimes that are perhaps caused by this frustration and stress, we doubt the locals will appreciate this gift.

It is highly doubtful if Rengoku is actually distributing these Tenga Eggs to evacuees in shelters. We guess he just bought a few boxes of toys, travelled to Kanazawa or thereabouts, and posted a picture online for clicks. Rage-baiting in a time of need has become the new norm of our strange times.

Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama has died at the age of 83.

As regular readers will know, Shinoyama is regarded as the king of the hair nude (full-frontal nude), and is largely responsible for establishing it as a publishing genre in the early 1990s with his photo books of Rie Miyazawa (Santa Fe) and Kanoko Higuchi (Water Fruit), though Shinoyama and others had already done nudes in the previous decade (notably, a lovely shoot with Aki Mizusawa).

Others quickly dropped their clothes in front of the camera (not least, Yoko Shimada and Saki Takaoka), hoping to replicate Miyazawa and Higuchi’s success. The hair nude quickly became a high-profile vehicle for relaunching a model’s career. Shinoyama’s photo books made nudity, even full-frontal nudity, respectable and commercially viable.

He made a whole career out of photographing beautiful women, especially nudes. Before his success in the 1990s, he was a regular photographer for weekly and monthly magazines, including Weekly Playboy, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Other subjects along the way included Mitsu Dan, Haruna Yabuki, Saori Hara, Hijiri Kojima, Chiaki Kuriyama, Manami Hashimoto — and Japanese silicone sex dolls.

His non-nude photography includes the famous shot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono kissing, and Yukio Mishima shortly before his death.

Misato Maeda (前田美里), a former face of Nippon TV, is to make her porn debut on Soft on Demand this month.

The 27-year-old from Tokyo has already made a nude photo book, released by Kodansha in September.

Here are some highlights (which first appeared in the weekly Friday in August), showing off her D-cup breasts and her curvy body.

Here are some pics from a semi-nude shoot she did for Flash to promote her first photo book, which came out in February 2022.

While her body might not be to everyone’s taste, we love the curves.

Maeda was the Nippon TV’s Nittelegenic pick for 2014. This was the channel’s “image girl” campaign, where a pretty lady was chosen to publicize the broadcaster. Not exactly feminist, but such marketing tactics remain common in Japan.

She has been around since 2011, active also as a music idol for a while in the 2010s, and doing gravure shoots too, as well as some film and stage acting.

Now with her entry into adult video, she’s got the triple whammy.

For more pics of Misato Maeda, see our tumblr page.

A new survey has found that a third of unmarried Japanese adults in their twenties, thirties, and forties have never been in a relationship.

As reported by Kyodo News:

At 34.1 percent, the ratio of single men and women who have never had a romantic relationship was at a record high since Recruit Holdings Co., a staffing service group, began conducting surveys on people’s views on marriage in 2017.

The figure of 25.6 percent for people not seeking marriage nearly matches the finding in last year’s gender equality survey by the Japanese government, which has been struggling to deal with the country’s low birth rate and labor shortage. But Recruit said the number was notably up from 2021 when it stood at 21.1 percent.

Never having dated is, of course, far from the same as not having sex. After all, what are sex workers for, and Japan has a huge number of them, and we also wonder if compensated dating would count as “dating” (which would change the numbers considerably, we imagine).

Surveys are always problematic and we have no detailed information immediately to hand about the methodology of this one (other than the fact that it was conducted in September and that the sample size was 1,200 unmarried adults). They should always be taken with several pinches of salt.

The fact that these surveys about Japan’s putative sexlessness continue to appear in the mainstream media (see the one in December that claimed almost half of Japanese men in their twenties have never dated) either indicates that, for all their problems, the research is backing up a general trend, or that such surveys are being molded to fit this existing media narrative (and perhaps surveys that reveal a subtler or alternative situation do not see light of day when they cross an editor’s desk).

We guess the real issue is people in their twenties, who should be ones doing lots of dating. But of these, 19.4% of women and 23.7% of men said having a romantic relationship is “a waste of time and money.”

This response was notably also the case for women in their 30s, up to 23.6% from 14.6% in the previous survey in 2021.

Among the respondents in their 20s, 44.3% of females and 34.6% of males said they would only date someone for the purpose of finding a marriage partner.

This also matches our experience of some women and men, who don’t like the idea of casually dating and instead treat it like a task that should lead to marriage. This affects which dating apps they use — their are ones specifically for finding a spouse — or they may prefer to use a partner introduction service that is designed to result in marriage. Naturally, this affects their attitude toward sex in a relationship too.

46.1% of respondents said they do want to marry, a quarter have no intention of marrying, and even the numbers of those who do are on the decline, down from 55.4% in 2017 and 52.6% in 2021.

Why don’t people want to date? Well, Covid and the acutely online nature of our lives might be partly to blame here. The aforementioned size of the Japanese sex industry might also mean it is too easy for men to satisfy themselves without the rigmarole of dating. Likewise for the huge size of the male sex toys market in Japan.

But why are they against settling down and marrying? Well, the government has to take some of the blame for the stagnant economy, especially low Japanese wages, since 42.5% of men said they don’t want to marry because of the “financial strain of married life.” For the women, it was different, with the largest reason being they did not want to compromise their freedom and independence (though we expect that refers ultimately more to having children, since just getting married to a man should not — in theory — curtail your independence per se in this day and age).

Dating apps like Tinder are ways to meet Japanese girls. There’s always the chance that you will meet the girl of your dreams, your future wife, your next hookup — or even a celebrity.

Former AKB48 idol and model Rina Hirata has shared publicly that she is using dating apps to look for a partner.

She didn’t disclose which one(s) she uses — we imagine it’s not the app for otaku — but she hasn’t had any luck so far.

“I met about 10 guys but none of the dates went well,” the Arizona-born hottie shared at a recent event in Tokyo to launch her latest gravure image DVD, Showa Cherry.

The 25-year-old half-American, half-Japanese Hirata, who was a member of AKB48 from 2011 to 2016, has a delightfully curvy body that we imagine would attract a lot of interest on a dating app. She’s definitely got child-bearing hips!

This comes after the news that sexy fortysomething Chiharu Niiyama is dating a younger guy who she met through a dating app.

Though we expect these female celebrities hide their identities from casual searches, it goes to show that you might just stumble into a relationship with a famous model when you open that app on your phone.

For more sexy pics of Rina Hirata, see our tumblr page.

The biggest entertainment world scandal in Japan of late has been the allegations of past sexual assault made against one of the nation’s most famous comedians, Hitoshi Matsumoto.

The reports first emerged in a tabloid magazine in late December and have continued to unfold. At first, Matsumoto, his agency (Yoshimoto Kogyo), and broadcasters ignored or gave the report a minimal denial, and colleagues offered on-air support, but more revelations are still trickling out in further articles, and 60-year-old Matsumoto has now withdrawn from his television commitments, nominally so he can pursue a lawsuit against the Weekly Bunshun that made the original allegations.

Now the plot has thickened with a veteran porn star coming out publicly in support of the allegations, in which two women accused Matsumoto and others of sexually abusing them in a Tokyo hotel room in 2015.

Mirei Kyono (京野美麗) is an adult video performer attached to LINX. She made her debut in 2014 as a jukujo performer for Madonna.

Kyono wrote on Twitter/X that was also once the victim of sexual assault by Matsumoto, though she makes it clear it was long ago and past the statute of limitations. She said she wants to help with any subsequent lawsuit that the comedian brings against his accusers.

Now aged 50, Kyono has also been involved in promoting fair compensation for performers whose work is distributed and sold in a secondary format (i.e., when AV productions are edited into omnibus and other such secondary releases). Often these practices were one of the ways in which the industry squeezed content out of performers, even after they had officially retired. Saki Otsuka once sued a company over a similar issue.

Nothing about the allegations against Matsumoto surprises us, unfortunately, and the model Marie made a similar accusation about another one-time major comedian in 2021.

Japan hasn’t had the same level of #MeToo reckoning that other countries have. While it is an open secret that sexual harassment and the casting couch are rampant in various parts of the entertainment industry, from fashion models to music idols, gravure idols, voice actors, and more, only a small handful of cases have emerged, such as film directors Sion Sono and Hideo Sakaki, the actor Houka Kinoshita, and photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.

Last year’s high-profile downfall of Johnny’s, the industry grandee in terms of entertainment agencies, was decades in the making and, in a sadly all too familiar pattern, required “outside pressure” (gaiatsu) in the form of a BBC documentary.

Haruka Ayase is one of the most famous models and actors in Japan.

Before she made the transition into mainstream acting and modeling, and seemed to appear in almost every TV commercial or brand campaign, Ayase was briefly a gravure idol. She’s got the looks for it: a cute, girl-next-door face, slim body, and (by most Japanese standards) large breasts.

This shoot in which she stands alluringly against a window, her body on display except for skimpy swimwear, is one of our all-time favorite gravure pics.

She even once shot some sort of video in a bath, and you can find nude grainy screen grabs from the pre-Web 2.0 days.

We thought we would never see her in a bikini again, but the Shinto gods work in mysterious ways. Now in her late thirties and ripe jukujo territory (though she hardly seems a day older than when she first became famous in the mid-2000s), Ayase has made a surprise return to the swimwear shoot.

The unmarried 38-year-old has done a splashy gravure shoot in Hawaii for Weekly Bunshun.

There’s sadly no midriff on display, and her impressive bust is modestly kept under wraps, so don’t expect any serious cleavage to get things stirring in your groin.

That said, she looks as lovely as ever and we hope there are most pics to come.

And if you think Haruka looks good (and frankly, anyone with a pulse would think so), check out Kyoko Fukada’s stunning beach shoot when she was 36.

We usually report on FetiFes after it happens, but this year we wanted to offer a quick preview of the upcoming edition of Japan’s largest fetish event.

Some of the highlights this year are a pole dancing show, booty-tastic performances by four ladies with lovely butts, a gymnastics show by three porn stars, and a shadow play act by male JAV star Riku Mukai.

The upcoming edition of Fetish Festival is the 24th and features booths and attractions over four floors of a building in east Tokyo.

We have noticed that the event’s English marketing has been seriously ramped up, and we suspect that bilingual AV star June Lovejoy or someone in her circle is behind this.

In fact, as we were putting together this short writeup, we noticed that June Lovejoy’s Tokyo Love District site has just published a comprehensive English-language guide to all the booths and other practical details about the event (including even Japanese phrases to use when buying something), saving us a lot of time and effort.

As the guide shows, FetiFes is a fair at heart a bit like a fetish version of Comiket: most of the booths are vendors (individuals, circles, etc.) selling fetish and erotic fantasy subculture goods like leather, underwear, art, shibari, urethral sounding, and so on, but there are also various idols, models, and porn stars offering merchandise and photo ops.

Some attractions are interactive experiences, like a vacuum machine, plus there are small shows and stage performances like those mentioned above.

Participants who we particularly look forward to seeing include the comely porn star Mion Hazuki. June Lovejoy herself, of course, has a booth.

The last edition of FetiFes took place in September and attracted around 2,000 visitors. FetiFes 24 promises to be just as big.

See you there on January 21 at the Mensho Kaikan in the Nihonbashi-Ningyocho area, just a bit east of Tokyo and Kanda stations. Tickets cost ¥3,000 on the door or ¥2,500 in advance.

We’ve written before about Aya Takanashi and her columns providing her insights on Japanese porn. As a former AV performer herself from 2016 to 2018, she is in the know about such things.

Her latest column for Spa! deals with the question of why so many underground idols (chika aidoru) are seemingly making the switch to porn?

It’s true that porn retails sites like Fanza do seem chocker-block with chika idols of late. One example is Ichigo Nekomiya (pictured), who is meant to be a member of an Akihabara underground idol group and is making her debut (4HMN487) this month on the Honnaka label.

Why is this happening?

Takanashi identifies several causes.

Perhaps most obviously, the chika idol will already have an established fan base to a certain extent (and let’s be honest, a fan base of otaku who are likely more inclined to watch and buy porn), so her debut AV is guaranteed to sell a certain amount from people who want to support their oshi (and are probably really excited to see her naked and having sex).

Of course, chika idols are by definition underground, so don’t have the kind of extensive fan base that mainstream music idols enjoy. It’s probably not enough to justify a decent AV production, but even just being able to market the release as a chika idol’s debut gives it an edge and a boost that may attract curious viewers among the many who have never heard of the idol in the first place.

“Former underground idol” has more marketing impact, Takanashi says, than other common tropes like “amateur” or “college student.”

The presence of an in-built fan base, albeit modest, also means you can hold in-person promo events to support the release.

Takanashi notes that about half of these chika idol porn stars fail to sell, but that’s not a big surprise in a competitive industry in which beautiful ladies are making their AV debuts all the time. Some will inevitably fall between the gaps and even quite successful performers don’t have the commercial longevity to continue for more than a few years (to say nothing of the demands of the work on them physically and mentally).

She describes the “hiring” process a bit too: scouts will approach idols at their agency or there are even cases when a porn production company may have an affiliate company that manages gravure and underground idols, making it easier and quite natural for such performers to switch industries.

For a while, with the arrival of Unpai, Ichika-sensei, and Okogetan, it seemed like TikTok was new bountiful source of AV debutants, but that hasn’t quite developed into the huge surge we were expecting.

In fact, there hasn’t been a really big debut for a while. For the most high-profile right now is the upcoming release of the first porn from Misato Maeda, a former TV promo girl and gradol who is now working under the name Ema Yano. Let’s hope 2023 is full of other great debuts, from chika idols and many others!

For all the constant media brouhaha about people not dating or having sex in Japan, it seems that at least one guy is determined to boost the national average. And challenge the laws about polygamy at the same time.

It’s a case that’s surely not typical and shouldn’t be used as a brush to paint all Japanese guys, but what a story it is.

As featured in late December on Abema TV (sorry, folks, we missed it at the time), Ryuta Watanabe in Sapporo has four “wives” and three kids, and seems to live happily with them.

In fact, 35-year-old Watanabe doesn’t even work but is a househusband taking care of the cooking, etc., and living off the wages of his four “spouses,” who seem to believe he’s a good catch.

Taking turns to sleep with his partners (having given on sleeping with all three at once because it was too physically difficult on the futon), he hopes to gradually increase his offspring and household.

His roost currently comprises: his first wife, Hisaki (22) and their two kids (aged two and one); his second wife, Ayaka, with whom he presently has no children; a third wife, Chiharu (27) and their five-year-old son; and a fourth wife (24), Chihiro, who did not appear on the show, and does not live together with the others.

Watanabe is actually married legally to just one woman; the other women are common-law spouses. Whenever he wants to marry another woman, Watanabe technically has to divorce the previous one first, since Japan does not allow polygamy. A polyamorous relationship, on the other hand, is fine, and that’s what’s going on here.

Watanabe hopes to change everyone’s surnames to his so that even after a legal divorce (and the wives and children revert to their previous or their own separate household and name in the Japanese family register system), they would appear to be one family.

The arrangement might bring to might old kings and their wives and concubines, and Watanabe is indeed a fan of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and hopes to best his 53 children.

The women also help look after each other’s children, which makes a lot of sense considering their offspring are half-siblings and all live in the same home in Sapporo. (There’s also a dog, just to make things more crowded.)

Watanabe began his marital adventures a few years ago. He met his fourth wife on a dating app when he was 31 and also starting dating his first wife at this time. The three of them began cohabiting.

When he was 33, he started dating his second and third wives. They also moved in with Watanabe and his harem. His fourth wife moved out (we wonder to what extent he maintains a relationship with her) and his first wife gave birth to their first child.

When he was 35, his first and third wives became pregnant and gave birth to the latest batch of children.

Watanabe is currently on the lookout for his fifth “wife.” Ladies, if you fancy living this kind of life in Sapporo, you know who to call.

Love hotels seem like calm, even deserted places where, depending on the layout of the hotel, you may not see anyone at the reception, let alone the people who get the rooms ready for you.

But there’s a small army of staff working behind the scenes, with six cleaners for every 20 rooms.

Spa! recently spoke with a former love hotel cleaner to hear more about these unsung heroes of convenient pleasure.

Matsuda-san (a pseudonym) apparently worked at an unnamed hotel when he was a third-year college student. It wasn’t one of the hotels that crowd certain districts of Shibuya and Shinjuku, but a more rural place where most of the staff were actually housewives working part-time.

They would work in pairs to clean a room, each handling a different area: one taking care of the bathroom and toilet; and the other dealing with the main room. Finally, they worked together to make the bed and prepare the final touches.

They would lock the door upon entry to make sure other guests did not enter by mistake or hear them at work. So this young college kid would find himself in a locked room with a much older women, working to clean up after couples have had sex.

What kinds of weird shit did he encounter during his tenure as a love hotel cleaner?

Well, guests often use tissues to wipe up their semen and so on. But one occupant of a room used as many as two boxes of tissues, Matsuda explains. How much cum did they produce?

The hotel had a denma wand-style vibrator in every room. Matsuda would apparently take a moment during his shifts to use one of these to massage the shoulders of his fellow cleaner!

It should be noted, though, that not all the staff at love hotels are as conscientious as Matsuda-san. As described in a previous article, the baths are often wiped down with used towels and the cups are best avoided.

Why did Matsuda become a love hotel cleaner? He says he mistakenly thought it would mean he could have sexual experiences at the hotel!

The residents of a condo block near JR Nakano Station in the west of Tokyo started to become suspicious about some of the apartments in their building.

Every day, different men seemed to come and go out of the apartments. Those well-meaning but perhaps a little nosy neighbors even went so far as to contact the cops, who promptly investigated.

Sure enough, those gentlemen callers were up to no good — at least, in the eyes of the law.

A business called Nakano Men’s Esthe Renga Spa was operating out of 33 apartments in the building, providing sex services to male clients.

The police pounced and arrested 13 men and women, including several male employees, on suspicion of illegally offering sexual services for sale last October.

“Esthe” (short for “aesthetic”) is a common euphemism for places that offer sex services of various kinds.

The Nakano Mens Esthe Renga Spa website is no long online but it seems the basic “course” was ¥14,000, plus various optional “extras” were available. We found an image of the menu and are particularly intrigued by the “sexual harassment training” option, which is advertised as a “Nakano specialty.”

According to police statements in media reports this week, the business earned over ¥1 billion in a year.

An All Nippon News report showed the yield from the police raid: menus and dozens of keys for all the rooms the business was operating.

It was quite a mini business empire. From what we can tell, there were actually several related “spa” establishments.

Brothels are legal in Japan if registered with the police — there is a prominent soapland right next to a police substation in the heart of Shibuya’s commercial district — and provided they obey the fuzoku law, which prohibits payment for penetrative sex.

If you want to recover from a scandal and rebuild your career, one tried-and-tested method is to reinvent yourself: take a different kind of acting role, do something more provocative.

Previously, female Japanese idols, actors, and models in a career slump have dropped their clothes for sexually explicit roles or have appeared in nude shoots. Angelica Michibata’s nude photo book after her scandal is a case in point, as was Maki Goto’s after her rumored affair.

Former AKB48 Mariko Shinoda found herself in a personal and professional pickle when her alleged adultery was exposed in 2022. The mother-of-one eventually ended up divorced and struggling to recover her reputation.

A year on, the 37-year-old ex-idol has turned to acting to restore her fame, though in a savvy way that plays on her newly acquired notoriety.

She plays the lead role in a new adultery-themed TV drama Rikon Shinai Otoko (The Man Who Doesn’t Divorce) in which a married mother — a former idol — has an affair with an idol/entertainer agency manager. It’s almost like art is imitating life.

Like most Japanese TV dramas, it’s acted in an exaggerated style closer to anime or kabuki, which is strange considering certain scenes are aspiring to be genuinely erotic.

This being mainstream Japanese TV — it’s broadcast on TV Asahi — we should also provide a disclaimer that there is no actual nudity on display (at least, so far). But Mariko Shinoda is shown in several sensual and sexy scenes with her lover (played by Teppei Koike), giving him a nice tonguey kiss or letting him take her from behind.

Netizens have been quick to share these scenes and closeups of Mariko’s “sex face,” imaging this is what she looked like when she was allegedly cheating on her ex.

The first episode of Rikon Shinai Otoko, which is based on a manga published by Kodansha from 2022, came out last weekend. We look forward to catching the next one, which promises to have a scene in which her lover goes down on Mariko!