In the FX/Disney series, a new adaptation of the James Clavell bestseller, Japanese actress Yuka Kouri (向里祐香) has a nude sex scene in the first episode.
The 33-year-old actress, best known until now for her roles in local TV dramas and low-budget films, plays Kiku, a courtesan.
She enters a room and then alluringly slips her kimono off a shoulder to expose a breast, playing up to every male fantasy of Japanese women in one shot.
She then lies naked on top of a man all while another guy watches from across the other side of the room. With a very knowing look in her eyes, she begins to jerk off the man she is lying on top of while intently gazing at her solo audience.
Let’s hope for more nude scenes in other episodes.
The series also stars Anna Sawai and Fumi Nikaido: the former had a nude sex scene in Girl/Haji, while Nikaido has stripped off for scenes in Tezuka’s Barbara, No Longer Human, My Man, and River’s Edge.
Yuka Kouri also did a nude scene in a 2022 movie called Love Nonetheless (pictured below).
A previous TV adaptation of Shogun first aired in the early 1980s and was a huge blockbuster on both sides of the Pacific. It starred Richard Chamberlain and a then-little-known Yoko Shimada, who went on to release three hair nude photo book, but struggled to rebuild her career after a scandal. She died in 2022 of cancer, shortly after completing her final film. She passed away in hospital and her body was never claimed by anyone, bringing prominence to the growing issue in Japan of “solitary death.”
