This is a question we often ask ourselves about Japanese pornography.

With tens of thousands of actresses working in the industry, said to be the biggest in the world, which star has appeared in the most titles?

Apparently we weren’t alone in wondering this, since some Japanese netizens have done the maths. Naturally the results steer older since the longer a career, the more titles you would have under your belt… though we never have any objections to a sexy Japanese MILF or two!

1. Yumi Kazuma (1,646 films)

2. Tsubomi (1,370 films)

3. Rio Hamasaki (1,201 films)

4. Reiko Sawamura (aka Honami Takasaka) (1,150 films)

5. Kokomi Naruse (1,101 films)

6. Yuu Kawakami (1,097 films)

7. Misa Yuuki (1051 films)

8. Ryoko Murakami (1,001 films)

9. Akiho Yoshizawa (957 films)

10. Chisato Shoda (913 films)

Runners-up include Elly Arai (aka Yuka Osawa, aka Elly Akira) (871 films) (#11) and Haruki Sato (838 films) (#12) and Hibiki Otsuki (690 films) (#20).

The numbers may not be fully accurate — either way, every week most of these ladies will be adding one or more to their tallies! — but certainly go some way to indicating the incredible career that major stars have, as well as the stamina and skills they must possess in order to stay at the top of their game.

It is also interesting to note that the kind of Japanese porn stars most popular overseas (Maria Ozawa and Sola Aoi) are not necessarily the biggest stars in their game when it comes to domestic performance.

Sometimes models and actresses get a little bit of help to look better and further their career.

But this is an extreme case.

Japanese porn star Rina Nanase/Rumi Kanda has been having a series of plastic surgery operations to her eyes, nose and chin because she believes having a very spade-like look makes her look cuter.

Similarly to how former curvy Gravure idol Yuuri Morishita has turned her face into a weird shape, Rina/Rumi has also become not so much “glamorous” as emaciated.

The result? See for yourselves. She looks like an alien or even Dobby from Harry Potter.

She has also been publicly documenting her changing beauty with regular posts to Twitter.

She used to look like this.

And then she began to experiment with surgery on her nose and eyes.

To be fair, many of the pictures she has been posting to Twitter are ones taken immediately after surgery and when she is not looking or feeling her best (which begs the question why she would want to publicize them). She doesn’t look so bad in these shots.

At least she’s being honest, though. The widespread use of plastic surgery among Gravure idols and actresses and models is one of the industry’s open secrets but no one talks about it in the mainstream media.

Good old Ikebukuro. That big hub of sleaze. The last gateway of Tokyo before the descent into the burbs of Saitama et al has more than its fair share of sex clubs and Chinese hookers prowling the streets.

And now comes news that three years ago a 24-year-old man had sex with a 14-year-old junior high school girl in a love hotel in Ikebukuro. Japanese schoolgirls in trysts with older guys in Ikebukuro… Why does this not surprise?

But it gets better.

The unemployed Shun Ikeda has been arrested recently not only for committing indecent acts with a minor in the summer of 2011 but also for selling pictures of his exploits online.

News reports are saying he was even quite prolific, having sex with at least 10 girls and photographing 35 girls naked. These were discovered by Osaka’s cops, which led to the end of Ikeda’s career as a pornographer and deflowerer of teenaged girls.

Of course, he used the normal deai-kei websites (a type of dating site) as the way to meet his victims and we can assume that money changed hands at some point.

Apparently he had quite a fetish for schoolgirls and his home in Setagaya Ward in Tokyo had school uniforms and maid cosplay outfits, says Tokyo Reporter.

Quite a hoard!

Where to start with a girl like Kyoko?

Kyoko Fukada (深田恭子), born 1982, is an actress, model and sometime singer, known for her cute looks and very nice chest.

Though she has gone way beyond the age of most active Gravure idols, she still maintains her popularity with the boys and the girls with her maturing looks and ravishing body. Recent photo shoots are ample evidence of this.

We’ve included a good selection of some older as well as recent pictures here.

Still unmarried!

We all know that plastic surgery is a dirty secret in Japan and an open practice in Korea.

But what about China?

Well, here’s a demonstration of the perils of tampering too much with with what nature gives you.

Fashion model Li Ying Zhi has had some work done on her face, especially her chin, as can be witnessed by comparing her appearance in 2012 with a recent one in 2014.

This is the stunner in 2012 at the Beijing Motor Show, promoting BMW.

But these days she looks rather different (admittedly the quality of the images is also somewhat to blame for the contrast).

What’s that about putting the chin into China?

This has amused Japanese netizens no end, though they might remember the adage about throwing the first stone. After all, a surprising amount of the Japanese celebrity population is said to have gone under the surgeon’s knife in the name of beauty.

At just under 18 years old.

At least, the national average is 17.7 years old for when women in Japan get their first kiss, according to a new survey by LC Love Cosmetic.

In April this year the researchers asked 2,350 women from all over Japan and compiled the results into a handy map.

The kinkiest ladies, the ones most keen to get started on their smooching careers, hail from Tokyo (#1) at 16.3 years old, chilly Akita (#2) in the north at 16.6 years old, and then warm but typhoon-struck Nagasaki (#3) in the south at 16.7 years old.

In these prefectures, first and second graders in high school are busy sticking their tongues down each other’s throats in between cramming for the college entrance exams.

Intriguingly, in these three prefectures the first kisses were actually with cousins and (female?) friends more often than in other prefectures, which boosted the overall average. However, it also indicates perhaps that the girls either have very close relations with their chums or they were getting some practice in before the real deal came along.

The slowest ladies to get their foot on the kissing ladder hail from Nara and Aichi prefectures, where the average age was a mature 19.1 years old. Next up was the small Ishikawa (18.7 years old) on the Sea of Japan coast.

So there is a difference of 2.8 years between the fastest and the slowest prefectures. Think what the girls in Tokyo have achieved in that nearly three year window while the ladies of Aichi are still warming up their lips!

Not all Japanese sex toys are for the boys, you know.

The Atushi Japanese Male Body Dildo is a flatbed-style torso body dildo. It gives you a muscular, sexy Japanese man’s chest as well as an erect cock and balls for you to ride.

The title is a cheeky reference to Atsushi, the hunky guy from the idol band EXILE. Japanese sex toys often use wordplay and parody in their titles, often riding along a thin legal line in the process. We wonder what the real Atsushi would think of this tribute?

Actually, though, this is for the boys as much as the girls, since there is an anal hole so you have some fun with that while your partner gets active with the dildo. And of course, there is also nothing to stop a man using the dildo for his pleasure.

Actually one of the things that Kanojo Toys suggests is that Atushi could be a nice toy to have a threesome with!

You can have your partner (male or female) riding on Atushi’s cock while you occupy yourself with other things or enjoy Atushi’s chest and anal hole.

Taro, where you are? I need you for a few minutes!

There are fetishes and then there are fetishes. This is one of those extreme ones.

An Osaka taxi driver has been arrested for drugging a female passenger. We are familiar with unpleasant tales of taxi drivers and female passengers, but this is something new.

Toshihiko Nishi (41) was arrested on May 7th on suspicion of giving a passenger snacks laced with a powerful diuretic. He then steadfastly refused to let the passenger out even as her situation grew more and more desperate.

Nishi has apparently admitted the charges and said the reason was he gets sexually aroused by women displaying a need to go to the toilet.

This is not so new — there are even sub-genres of Japanese porn devoted to this kind of fetish, called “omorashi”.

On October 29th last year Nishi gave a female passenger crackers sprinkled with powdered furosemide. She soon became desperate to pee but Nishi was by now driving on an expressway and so could not stop.

The eventual sad end is that the girl in her twenties wet herself in the car.

But it gets stranger. Nishi was filming the whole episode. Using the taxi’s security camera, Nishi recorded what happened for his later enjoyment.

Police found the video when they raided his home, along with 120 furosemide tablets and footage of Nishi doing the same thing to around 50 other passengers.

Most were surely too humiliated to follow up on any suspicions they had that something had been wrong with the snacks they ate.

A lesson: Never take snacks from a taxi driver.

Durex, the condom brand, have an interest in things sexual.

This doesn’t just mean marketing their prophylactic, it also means studying global sex habits.

From Durex’s Sexual Wellbeing Survey (2007/2008) and Face of Global Sex (2012), they gained some insights into international bedroom tendencies among heterosexual couples.

The Japan results intrigued us…

The main conclusion is that apparently people in Japan are very unhappy with their sex lives.

Japan was the only country where more people said they were dissatisfied with their sex lives than satisfied.

See the chart here.

(Chart via Vox)

Why? Is sex so bad here?

No, likely this can be put down to the phenomenon of the sexless marriage, a sad state of affairs (no pun intended) which has become ingrained in Japan.

34% of people surveyed in Japan said they had sex weekly, which is the lowest result. Long work hours, regular after-work drinks with colleagues, and easily available prostitution all combine to decrease the amount of time couples and spouses spend in each other’s company, especially intimately.

Surprisingly the facts seem to show that married people in general have the most sex. But marriage is on the decline in Japan and this also then means less frequent sex.

In Durex’s 2012 report it found that over 60% of Japanese people used condoms during their first sexual experiences, which shows that the country’s notorious slack attitude towards contraception likely sets in later. Durex also found the mean age for people to lose their virginity in Japan is relatively mature 20.4 years.

It also said that 75.6% of Japanese had never experienced an unwanted pregnancy, rather countering all the cases of shotgun weddings we hear about (especially celebrities), and 82.6% had never experienced an STD.

Photographer Hal is, as the name suggests, a photographer in Japan. While that may not sound unusual, one glance at his output and you’ll see this is not the stuff you tend to encounter on Flickr.

Photographer Hal creates amazing vacuum-packed photography in which naked couples embrace each other in a plastic bag.

“Photographer Hal started packing couples together in futon vacuum bags to preserve their love forever. The process to achieve this eternal image is very organic and each couple can only be left inside the seal bag for 10 seconds.”

Using futon sealing bags, the images both symbolize what a condom does — protecting while bringing you together — and also the act of sex itself. The effect is both eerie and sexy.

Here is how Hal describes his work:

The image of the power of love was further pursued from the work photographing the vacuum packed couple remind me a tale that the star which finished the lifetime contracted, and it became a black hole, finally it inhaling everything.

That’s why I started to put a couple in vacuum sealed bag with much things used at their daily life or their work, or their favorite thing. When they live like the embryo who lives to nutrition and the figure apparently clothed in the disorderly thing on the body goes amniotic fluid in the interior of the womb, they are required things, and the thing which followed the fate chosen as them like all the things of a nature and which has stuck, and its arrangement are necessary.

Moreover, their personality and beauty were condensed by there where it harmonized completely, and the energy of love is full.

His latest series of “Flesh Love” photos — which have been getting some big press attention worldwide — is for Condomania, the brilliantly quirky mini condom shop on Omotesando, “an iconic condoms shop in the center of Tokyo that strives to promote safe and protected love to its audience.”

Here’s a making-of video.

Photographer Hal’s brilliant other includes “Couple Jam” where couples pose while lying down together in bath tubs.

Parody and sex. Not a typical partnership but one that you can find in abundance in Japan.

Japanese sex toys are always making allusions and references to popular culture.

From the Atushi Male Body Dildo (pop idol Atsushi from EXILE) to the “hi-jitsuzai” unreal Virgin JS First Fellatio (a reference to the “hijitsuzai seishonen” wording in the controversial revision to Tokyo laws for “protecting youth” against harmful manga), there is a host of wordplay and in-jokes just waiting to be unravelled.

The Hyper Dash Rotor Vibrator Kit is inspired by Gakken’s Otona no Kagaku “adult science” (not that kind of “adult”!) assembly kits and especially older science fiction toys. Check out the hilarious old Toho monster movie toy packaging and the vibrator parts that require you to use a pair of cutters to put together.

Is it a UFO? Is it a special airplane? No, it’s the Hyper Dash Rotor Vibrator!

Not just a funny concept, it is a fully functioning bullet vibe that you assembly yourself. It also proves a great way of getting geeky guys interested in a sex toy that is intended to pleasure a woman! Nice!

If you’re a (sex)engineer you can also customize things by switching the motor to something more powerful. Creativity and vibration. A buzzing combination!

Tenga is back and with a whole new kind of product.

The makers of the Tenga Egg and Tenga Flip Hole have turned to convenience for their latest inspiration. Pocket Tenga is now available — it was announced a few weeks ago but we held back to blog about it when it was actually on the market — and is the ideal sex toy to take around with you.

Ideal because you can literally slip it in your pocket and Tenga have even considered the disposal process!

Pocket Tenga is super stretchy and works like an Egg. Just open up the sachet, pour in the lotion (included) and then get to work with your member. See how flexible it is.

Once you are done, just slip it back in its sachet. Tenga have thought of everything in the experience. They have even included a sticker on the packaging that you can use to re-seal it, making it easier (and more discrete) to throw away.

There are three versions. Wave Line (white) is “the curvy, more graceful experience”. Block Edge (black) is harder, “for the guy who likes it sharp and strong”. Click Ball (red) features nubs and bumps that will tickle and stimulate.

KanojoToys is currently selling a set of all three versions.

The sweet 26-year-old Hatsune Matsushima (松嶋初音), known by the nickname Hachu, was born in 1987.

Her cute aura combines with a pure eroticism that is at once fragile but compelling.

Okay, enough poetry. Here are the pictures.

Wow, this is big. We have been worried about police crackdowns for a while, especially with the upcoming Olympics likely to become an excuse for exerting state power.

Could this be the tip of the iceberg?

Police have raided one of Tokyo’s top BDSM clubs, KUNKUN. The Ueno club is pretty big (we’ve been there) and also fairly new (it opened in mid-2012). It is the base of one of Japan’s best-known shibari (kinbaku) rope bondage art masters, Kinoko Hajime (Hideto Hiramatsu).

Of course, there is a thin line between being bondage club where a show may take place and being a “happening” place where patrons indulge in sexual activities. KUNKUN certainly trod that line in best possible way, though happening bars are illegal. Popular and foreign-friendly ones such as Silk in Shinjuku have closed down in recent years.

They tend to have a limited lifespan and have to shut and move on when the cops get wise. It counts as “public indecency”, even though the sex happens behind closed doors. Of course, the cops don’t touch the Yakuza-controlled sex clubs, so this is very much a case of double standards.

It was announced on May 16th that police in Ueno had raided KUNKUN, arresting Hajime and two other staff for abetting public indecency, and four patrons. They also seized the massive cache of costumes that customers could borrow.

The club opened in August 2012 and has made sales of around 330 million yen in that time. Male patrons would pay 15,000 JPY to enter while it was free for girls.

Kinoko Hajime is an acclaimed kinbakushi and has been the subject of much press attention in the past. Vice also once did a documentary on his work.

Free Kinoko Hajime!

Do you like getting a handjob? Sure you do.

How about from a Japanese high school girl? Her 18-year-old delicate hands wrapping around your member, giving it a two-handed shake…

Giving a new definition to “hands-on” reporting, we tried out the Yojo Senpai Her Small Hands, which is a Japanese sex toy designed to replicate the gentle pleasures of a schoolgirl’s handjob.

This isn’t just a gimmick.

The two hands really do wrap around you very snugly. Be sure to apply plenty of lotion before you slide yourself in, as the hands do make for a very tight cupping effect.

Not that we’re complaining. Quite the opposite — the palms of the hands are lined with stimulating ribs so her handjob will grip and stroke your member for instant pleasure.

Now all you need is the girl in the uniform to complete the experience. Well, that can be arranged…

Yojo Senpai Her Small Hands is now available from KanojoToys.

We all know that college students have a lot of sex (if they’re lucky) and that it’s an age when you explore things. After a few drinks you might even try some kinky stuff with your new partner.

Well, that’s all going to stop at one Japanese university.

Kinki Daigaku used to call itself “Kinki University” in English, an apparently harmless reference to the name of its region. Well, maybe they were more innocent times back in 1949 when the university was founded and the English name decided.

However, being pronounced “kinky” and spelt almost the same, the name naturally causes a lot of mirth and embarrassment for staff who speak English or when pictures of the name appear online. And an away game for any of its sports teams in foreign countries is basically out of the question.

“The word kinky also means perverted,” university dean Hitoshi Shiozaki told reporters. “We have no other choice than to change the English name because we are serious about pursuing a more international school culture.”

So in other words, they were literally advertising themselves as the university of hentai.

Apparently they worried that they were becoming a figure of fun — and that potential students were even being put off by the name. What? Going to a university called kinky or hentai would have been top of my list if I had known about it back when I was applying for college places!

The new English name is going to be the more innocuous Kindai, a contraction of Kinki (the Kansai area) and Daigaku (university).

This has actually been proposed for some time now but was finally confirmed this week. It will take effect in 2016 when the university’s international studies faculty opens.

The government has made a lot of money available to Japanese colleges willing to make “international drives” in the near future. There is a scramble for the funds at the moment, with lots of colleges seeking to rebrand themselves as global institutions with international faculties ready to welcome armies of exchange studies and overseas researchers. This will no doubt lead to some cultural clashes, much more interracial sex, and the occasional issue of naming like this.

It’s election time and we don’t mean for a new prime minister. It’s AKB48 “General Election” time.

But with the biggest stars (no more Mariko Shinoda, Yuko Oshima or Atsuko Maeda) already out of the world’s most populous music group, AKB48′s star is beginning to wane and recent album sales have been lower.

In the annual general election, fans can buy votes — yes, vote-rigging is legal in the music industry in Japan — that come with CDs. This encourages the crazies to go, well, crazy.

One fan of minor member Juri Takahashi has allegedly gone so far as to purchase ¥31,502,400′s ($311,905) worth of CDs, as apparently this image of random piles of boxes in a nondescript office shows.

Even by AKB48 otaku fans this sounds a bit much and might just be an internet rumor. That’s ten times the average salary, so economically we think it just isn’t feasible. Plus the original Twitter account source and image has both now been deleted.

We have no proof except for this picture and we are inclined to think this time the story is actually fake. Sure, there are fans who bulk-buy out there but we have to be realistic!

This is Juri Takahashi. Is she worth $300,000?

Last year’s election was surprisingly won by a resurgent Rino Sashihara, the disgraced sex-liking idol. Her comeback is complete, it seems, since she is currently leading the votes again, perhaps proving that in the end the fans WANT an idol who has a sex life rather than the false “virginal” image that the management crafts.

As we know, AKB4 hottie Haruna Kojima is a face (and body) of Japanese lingerie brand Peach John.

The latest exploitative ad campaign features Haruna — officially, according to the AKB rules, a virgin — getting frigid in the ice. She freezes a foreign guy trying to make advances on her.

In the end, Haruna is seduced by a dashing foreigner who takes off her clothes. She then goes off arm-in-arm with the gaijin, no doubt to break some of those AKB rules on no sex before graduating.

The whole ad is a sort of pastiche of the Disney movie Frozen, which has been a phenomenal success in Japan.

Haruna is playing an ultimate “ice queen” role here, a tsundere girl who plays hard to get but ultimately wants to curl up with you.

Kojiharu, as she is known to her fans, would appear to enjoy stripping in front of foreigners. This isn’t the first time.

The question now is: Will all this gratuitous quasi-nudity help Haruna finally win the AKB48 election? Votes are now being collected!

This time it’s not fake.

After blogging a few days ago about the obviously fake “fan” who claimed to have spent $310,000 on AKB48 CDs, the internet has responded.

Now the real stuff is here, a deluge of cringing photos of boxes and piles of actual AKB48 CDs.

The fans buy bulk loads of CDs in order to extract the “votes” you can get from each CD. These can then be used in the “election”, which is currently happening (and which Rino Sashihara looks set to win again, despite not even being a member of AKB48 any more).

This practice is encouraged by the AKB48 money men, who of course see large profits to be made from such consumer obsessions.

Normally with a competition you say something like “may the best man or woman win”… but in this case, it’s more may the girl with the most obsessive fans (with deep pockets) win!

Still, if we are worried about the sanity of these AKB48 fans, there are apparently even more crazy (and homicidal) ones out there.

Schoolgirls, lesbians and bondage. Put these together and you might just have box office gold.

At least, that’s what the producers of the film adaptation of “Chotto Kawaii Iron Maiden” are hoping.

The low budget movie is exactly those three things. Originally a cult manga by Makoto Fukami, it stars Noriko Kijima and Yuki Mamiya as student members of an official school club that is actually a BDSM circle.

Cue lots of groaning and young schoolgirls looking angsty.

What starts off as an exploration of pain and submission (the students are actually “training” to become secret police and military interrogators) turns into a love affair. The torturing is done by senior student Haruna Yoshizumi.

This is a “rather cute” (chotto kawaii) softcore porn film is being released this July in Japan.

Looks great!