Parks are not just for strolling around in.

Unlike other cities, Tokyo’s parks are open all night. Photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki used to visit Chuo Park in the early Seventies and search for goings-on in the dark.

At the time, it was common for couples to go the park to have sex. But that alone wasn’t what was interesting.

The couples weren’t alone. People were watching.

In effect, the park was an open-air public happening bar.

After spending months entrenches with the voyeurs so that they would trust him as a “regular” in Chuo, Yoyogi and Aoyama parks, Yoshiyuki then began to photograph the scenes with special Kodak infrared flashbulbs. These are results.

The voyeurs would line up to look at the couple, who were usually too busy to notice. They would dare themselves to touch or fondle the girl when the man could not see. Sometimes this went too far and they might find themselves have to flee an angry lover.

“The voyeurs always approached the couples from behind because they had to be out of the man’s line of vision… There was a kind of community in which the voyeurs lived. ‘To touch up a woman’s body’ was a kind of a competitive game for them in the society. It was risky, but it was something very thrilling for them to do, just like an exciting game to play. So when a voyeur was able to touch the woman’s body, it was a success story among them and the guy could be a hero of the night as a voyeur.”

Of course, as with a lot of these things, once you document it, it becomes public and so everyone flocks there. Sadly this has led to a decline and you’ll be unlikely to find couples enjoying themselves anymore — or voyeurs taking a peak!

Kohei Yoshiyuki’s “The Park” series will be on view at the Venice Biennale beginning June 1.

[Interview via Slate]

A nineteen-year old university student was in the college library when he got a message from his mother.

“Super Sonico hug pillow has just arrived” it read.

The student was obviously very ashamed claimed he wasn’t sure if he should go home or rather fling himself into the nearest river.

Japan’s embarrassed men buying ero manga or ero geemu (erotic games) are frequently defeated by the retailer’s over-enthusiasm for nice packaging, resulting in attractive boxes decorated with images of the featured otaku idol and the like, and making any attempt at secrecy impossible!

Japan’s netizens have not been kind to the guy after he shared his dilemma onlline:

Move out!

It’s certainly not the kind of room you can bring a girl to have sex.

Cases like this beg the question, what happens when the mothers of Japan’s legions of otaku find their son’s precious collection of idol toys?

Sad news, folks. Tarento Jun Natsukawa (32), who has been gracing our screens and fantasies for years, has announced she is five months pregnant.

Jun married a man one year younger than her on January 1st, 2011.

The former Gravure idol graduated to television tarento, though remains probably best known for lying about her age in her official profile (or at least, her agency did, in efforts to elongate her career, no doubt).

Since we are unlikely to be seeing it ever again, here’s a tribute to her gorgeous body!

A man has been arrested for running an online dating (deai-kei) scam that scammed 2,100 otaku out of 210 million yen over the years.

Deai-kei websites are common portals in Japan, usually a ruse for informal prostitution or enjo kosai. In this case, the owner tricked members into thinking they would be able to exchange emails with their favorite AKB48 idols and even go on dates with the girls.

The trial has begun of the 32-year-old man from Chiba who ran the site. He would have his part-time employees send mails to the otaku posing as celebrities and idols. After a time, these mails would begin to cost the hapless fans money for each piece of useless text.

They might even arrange to go on a date with the otaku. The poor guy would think he is going to meet Atsuko Maeda, only to have the date cancelled at the last minute with the excuse that “my manager came”.

One otaku spent 2.7 million yen on the site, more than an average annual salary. With the mails costing him 450 yen each time, it would appear he paid for some 6,000 mails!

Toshiki Hanai, a twenty-eight-year-old assistant district court judge in Osaka, has perhaps not surprisingly lost his job.

When you get caught filming up a girl’s skirt on a train, you might reasonably expect there to be repercussions if you are supposed to be an upholder of the law!

That’s what Hanai was apparently caught doing in August 2012.

Another male passenger spotted the nimble judge squatting down on the crowded commuter train during the morning rush hour, trying to get a good view with his smartphone of the heavenly world up a girl’s skirt.

The valiant passenger grabbed Hanai while he was red-handed and he was taken into police custody at a station. He admitted during questioning that he was interested to know what kind of underwear the woman had been wearing. Perhaps he should have just asked and saved everyone the bother?

His phone apparently included other images taken up women’s skirts. Habeas corpus, indeed.

He has been dismissed from duty and fined half a million yen.

We wonder if he had ever served as a judge on chikan trials?

On April 7th the Kanamara Matsuri was held in Kawasaki, near to Tokyo, and one of the most popular of Japan’s penis fertility festivals.

The highlight of the festival is the parade of the giant cock through the streets as it is processed between two shrines. This is stroked and touched by the crowds as it passes.

This year saw the largest number of visitors ever, around 50,000 people and ten times more than the crowds were ten years ago. It is said to be now the largest festival of its kind in Japan.

There were times when television channels would pixellate images of the penis float, due to Japan’s bizarre century-old and ambiguous law on protecting public morals by not showing genitals. However, this was opposed by the shrine organizers themselves since it is not actually a penis, but a shrine itself.

As many as a third of the visitors were foreign, according to media reports. (We find this very unlikely given the number of foreigners in Japan.) Two British girls in their twenties who work as English teachers apparently said, “We heard about the festival in a bar at Asakusa.”

The festival also famously comes complete with penis-shaped sweets, snacks and even radishes for visitors to nibble on!

Any excuse to show some girls in skimpies.

Ravijour, the Japanese equivalent of Victoria’s Secret (or Peach John) for gyaru, has launched a new range of sexy lingerie.

Basically we saw the photos, thought they were super hot — and decided to blog about it just to indulge in the images!

The models include Elli Rose, Liv, Mai Miyagi and Azusa Koizumi.

Better than porn!

Never, never let it be said that pornography isn’t cultural. Far from it. JAV is high art!

We’ve known this for years and now there can be no denying it with the Naked Sex Art Museum, which we have been “visiting” recently.

The Soft on Demand (SOD) title features Anri Suzuki, Ryo Akanishi, Satsuki Kirishima and Reira Serikawa in a series of scenes that recreate famous paintings… in the most artistic way possible.

The cover of course is Sandro Botticelli’s Venus.

Another major obvious one is Manet’s “The Luncheon on the Grass”.

The original painting in itself is great (and quite erotic) but we prefer the JAV version.

Can you spot your Impressionism from your Renaissance? This is one way of learning about different art styles that is much more effective than a regular education can provide.

And the best thing? This is high art so no one can criticize you for watching it over and over again!

Another day, another celebrity lady bites the dust.

Despite having split up with her boyfriend in January, popular fashion model Maki Nishiyama has announced that she is five months pregnant.

After a few days of will-they-won’t-they, she and her actor ex-boyfriend Taichi Saotome have not only got back together, but are getting married.

Perhaps she announced the pregnancy to put pressure on him to do the honorable thing?

Still, this is another case of dekikkon, proving that even famous girls are not the kind to say not to a man who doesn’t like to use condoms — and unfortunately has poor timing when it comes to pulling out.

Saying that, the twenty-seven-year-old did manage to bag herself a much younger man. Taichi Saotome is just twenty-one, so perhaps it’s no surprise he was a bit inexperienced with his technique — plus understandably hesitant to tie himself down so early in life!

Taichi Saotome is also famous for acting as a woman. Yes, perhaps Maki is a lesbian? He acts in a form of Kabuki and has starred in some films, such as Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi.

So, no more Maki Nishiyama on the front of magazines. Maki, you were lovely while you lasted. We salute you!

Former sweet and innocent Gravure idol Risa (aka Lisa) Goto has graduated to the big time at last.

After a career that began with drink commercials when still a teenager, Risa has since then had an up-and-down professional life, with bits of acting and prematurely retiring at least once.

So far that most spectacular thing was the “hair nude” shoot she did in 2012. This alone raised many an eyebrow for the former cute girl-next-door idol’s fans (and no doubt raised a few other body parts as well).

Now she’s thrown in her towel on the “other side” of the industry and jumped over to the more interesting world: Japanese porn.

We can expect Risa — freshly divorced — and her JAV debut in June, just as she hits thirty.

We can’t WAIT!

The old favorites are the best.

We are pleased to welcome back to the big screen actress Saki Takaoka.

Now 40 years old and still a stunner, Takaoka will be performing her first nude scene in seventeen years in a new film, “Monster”, to be released in Japan on April 27th.

She is well known for her nude scenes in films in the Nineties and the “hair nude” photo book “one, two, three” she released in 1995 in her heyday. (Such celebrity “hair nude” photo books were really popular in the mid-Nineties.)

She stopped performing major roles in recent years but of late has suffered money troubles and a divorce, so the mother-of-three is making a welcome full return to our lives… and fantasies.

For now, let’s take a look at how she used to look. We wonder how much has changed.

With fame and sudden popularity comes unwanted side-effects.

Curvy over-thirty sexpot Mitsu Dan is not afraid of stripping off and revealing all, but she has acquired some undesirable fans among her legions of admirers.

After her home was shown on a TV program, she has had men apparently hanging around in her neighborhood.

Most celebrities and idols move to luxury condos when they hit the big time, but Dan (32) has continued to live in her modest apartment since her break happened almost over night and she hasn’t had time to catch up with her new-found lifestyle.

She found her mail was disappearing from her postbox. This included her gas and electricity bills, meaning she couldn’t pay them in time so she got embarrassing reminders from the utility firms.

It got to the point where she didn’t want to walk home from her nearest station but would have her manager drop her off.

She has also been having trouble with her agency, who were overworking her (and probably not paying her enough!) so she, the strong gal that she is, dumped them and moved to a rival agency that manages Risa Yoshiki and other top idols.

We’ve long been a fan of Korean actress Bae Doona.

The cutie (33) has been on our screen for years already, including in a couple of Japanese films as well as several major Korean hits.

She is not afraid to strip off either, having shed her clothes for Plum Blossom and Sympathy For Mr Vengeance in some quite explicit sex scenes.

One of her Japanese roles was as a blow-up sex doll, for which she was frequently nude.

Now she is working in America too, with a role as a sexy android in Cloud Atlas, which is adapted from the sprawling novel by formerly Japan-based writer David Mitchell.

It features — you’ve guessed it — a cyborg sex scene between her and British co-star Jim Sturgess (34), and it’s a hot one.

And it seems, we are sad to relate, that Doona and Jim have been taking their rehearsals to heart.

If reports and the press snaps are to be believed, the two are now a couple.

Finally do we have proof that plastic surgery has gone too far in Korea?

Right now the Japanese internet is enjoying just such a gloat as they peruse the entries for Miss Korea.

Why? Because the ladies look so similar it is virtually impossible to tell them apart unless you look at the Hangul names.

It’s no secret that plastic surgery is rampant in Korea — as opposed to Japan, where it is common in the celebrity world but kept an open secret — but does this mean that everyone starts to look the same, with the same kind of generic beauty?

The girls look lovely but give us a true Korean beauty any day!

Let’s hope the judging panel for Miss Korea 2013 are paying close attention to who is who!

An online survey has found some surprising results about identification with otaku, proving that we have come so far since the days of Tsutomu Miyazaki.

137,734 people were asked, “Do you consider yourself somehow an otaku?”

Yes: 42.2%
No: 57.8%

That’s a lot of supposed otakus!

Here’s the breakdown per generation:

Teenagers: 62.0%
Twenties: 55.6%
Thirties: 46.4%
Forties: 44.8%
Fifties: 36.7%
Sixties: 26.9%
Seventies: 23.1%
Eighties: 23.3%

Of course, these days the definition of “otaku” is wider, and can apply to soccer fanatic or just about any passionate fans of some subculture or hobby. “Otaku” has truly now come to mean being kuwashii (knowledgeable) in a subject.

Sorry, it’s been a while since we did a photographic profile of a idol but we’ve been wanting to do Ruriko Kojima (小島瑠璃子) for a long time now!

Ruriko was born in 1993 and is more a TV tarento than straight-out Gravure idol, but boy, does she look nice in a bikini.

What a cutie. We love her big rabbit-like eyes.

Imagine you are a young Japanese girl. You are on a train. You sit down. You put on some earphones and listen to music. You close your eyes. Probably you are tired and just want some rest on the way home. You have made a fatal mistake.

That’s what one Japanese girl in her twenties found out on a train in Saitama on April 25th. She was rudely awakened from her semi-slumber to find that a stranger’s lips were locked around hers.

While her eyes had been closed, a man, Toshimitsu Ishibashi (49), had decided to kiss her. The man was from Saitama’s Kasukabeshi and worked as a temp.

The train was stopped at a station so after his “romantic” act of train chikan he tried to escape on the platform, but a fellow passenger who had witnessed the kiss gave chase and caught him.

While in prison no doubt he will have plenty of chance to practise kissing on his hands in front of the mirror to perfect his technique.

A 42-year-old man has been arrested for having sex with high school girls

The company employee would approach girls on the street, offer to pay them ¥70,000 or even as much as ¥300,000 if he could also film the exploits.

After they were all finished at a hotel in Taito ward in Tokyo he would then ask them to wait on the street while he went to fetch money. Of course, that would be the last they would see of him.

He has claimed to have had sex with close to 100 high school girls in this way.

Likely if he had actually made good on his promise and paid the girls there would have been no problem at all!

He has been arrested ostensibly for making child pornography and child prostitution — since the girls were underage — though as he did not pay them, he may be able to get off on the latter charges.

Police found dozens of videos in his home when they searched it, many of them clearly with young girls, so likely he can’t escape the first crime, though!

Now Japan’s netizens are speculating on whether the man is the same as the star of a series of semi-professional hamedori porn films.

It sounds like the plot of an ero manga but it’s true, and could it only happen in Osaka?

A female teacher in Osaka working at a prefectural high school has been suspended for work for six months after it came to light that she was moonlighting as a prostitute.

The twenty-nine-year-old educator responded that “there is no excuse” for what she did and resigned.

Having accumulated debts of two million yen (at least two thirds of her salary, perhaps more) on credit card purchases of cosmetics and clothes, she turned to her other skills set to work off her loan.

She actually did pretty well, earning 1.6 million in 105 days from the end of last year to April. Perhaps she should be praised for being so dedicated and enterprising?

She was a call girl, known euphemistically as “delivery health”, sent to answer appointments at hotels in Osaka city. To be fair, she only worked outside her regular school hours, but a disguised picture appeared on the call girl service’s website (there you go — at least some of those images show real girls).

Naturally she kept both her debts and her extracurricular activities secret from her family and work colleagues, but at the end of March her school received an anonymous email reporting that she was working as a prostitute. A dissatisfied customer?

It’s a classic trick. Pretend to help when your motivations are much less pure.

A female high school student (15) was in the part that connects two train carriages on a train in Wakayama prefecture hen a company employee from south Osaka groped her breasts.

The twenty-one-year old’s fantastic lead-in on the busy evening rush hour express from Osaka’s Namba Station to Wakayama City was to be a good citizen.

“It’s dangerous. It’s shaking!” he said as he grabbed her. No doubt he thought that her fear of the shaking carriage corridor would distract her from the hands now on her chest.

The classic the-ground-is-shaking-so-I-can’t-help-groping-you-now technique.

Very useful in an earthquake if you have the foresight to get your handful of bust when the building is collapsing.

He apparently went up to the girl and her friends and asked them which school they were from. Then he asked them for their email addresses. Then he groped one of them, probably hoping he wouldn’t be seen by other passengers. When the girls left and went into the next carriage, he followed. He just couldn’t get enough.

Well, then the girls told the conductor and our not-very-subtle friend got himself arrested.

He is now claiming that he did indeed speak to them but did not sexually harass the students.