Japan has a declining population. The government, in all its wisdom, has decided to do something about this.
Helping women maintain careers after giving birth? Fixing the toxic work culture that requires gruelingly long hours and male-dominated management?
That can wait. The government is hoping robots will fix things.
As recently reported in the mainstream media, the government plans to allocate a whopping ¥2 billion next year for giving out to local authorities that implement programs where residents find love -- assisted by artificial intelligence.
In fact, about half of the ...
The fashion model Koki, the daughter of Takuya Kimura and singer Shizuka Kudo, continues to make a splash.
Despite being only 17 years old, she has posed half-naked for the January issue of Elle Japon magazine.
The highly sexualized and provocative shoot features Koki striking poses with her legs and thighs exposed. In one photo, she is nude from the waist up, her modesty protected by a bag held against her breasts.
We are hardly what you could call conservative, given the kind of themes and content we explore, but we do wonder what her parents, for all their status and experience in the ...
Sumire Yokono of NMB48, the Osaka sister group of AKB48, is celebrating her nineteenth birthday with a braless photo shoot.
Yokono has a hot, slinky body that is sensual and leggy that belies her youth. But we've so far only seen her in lingerie or swimwear.
Now she's gone semi-nude for her first photo book, "Anata no yoko no" (literally, Next to You -- but also a play on her name, meaning "Your Yokono"), which was shot in the sunnier climes of Okinawa and comes out on December 16 in Japan -- shortly after Su-chan's nineteenth birthday (meaning she was a comely 18 when the photos were ...
The AKB network of idol supergroups faces a particular challenge in these COVID days of maintaining revenue when meet-and-greet and even concerts are not realistic.
The idols remain popular, of course, and field requests to appear in the weekly magazines or release photo books.
Mina Oba, for instance, recently appeared in a photo shoot for the weekly magazine Flash.
The lingerie shoot showed off the 28-year-old modest yet sensual bust. Thank you, Mina, for taking our minds off the emerging third wave of corona infections in Tokyo.
It's probably about time for Team K's ...
On November 12, idol Moga Mogami announced that she is pregnant on her personal blog.
This should not be surprising, given that she is now 31 -- an age when many women in Japan would be pleased to start a family.
But she's not married, nor was a marriage announced at the same time.
Unlike a large number of prominent celebrities in Japan, she is not planning to marry the father of the child. Such shotgun weddings (or dekichatta kekkon) are common here, since the need for contraception is frequently ignored, though also because it is sometimes the only way to force the all-powerful ...
As we've blogged before, there are a few cases of sexy Japanese siblings who both work in gravure or modeling.
Now those rare ranks have received a new addition: Nanami is the sister of the model and actress Maki Horikita, though the latter is now technically retired since she married and started a family.
The mononymous choice of name is probably deliberate, as she probably does not want to trade on her older sister's fame. (There is also a porn star called Nanami Horikita, so she surely wants to avoid potential confusion!)
She is certainly carving out a different career path, at least ...
It's a crown that has been claimed before and we always feel obliged to award the title to voluptuous gradol Yuka Kuramochi, but there's now yet another contender for the best ass in Japan.
Recently showcased on Japanese TV (because apparently audiences like this kind of content!) and known for her fitness videos, Khaleda Amin could cut glass with her toned body. And then when she starts posing with her buttocks, you can hear a pin drop in the minds of every male viewer in the land...
This is the ass we need in these gloomy COVID times.
Perhaps inevitably, the ...
We read a report in the UK's Guardian newspaper about the story of two gay men in Amagasaki, just west of Osaka, who were turned away from love hotels.
The male receptionist at one politely informed the couple that men were not allowed.
Not to be deterred from their tryst, the men tried another love hotel in the area, only to encounter an overtly homophobic attitude.
"Gay men don't use the facilities properly," they were told by the female receptionist without explanation.
The two men are in a civil partnership of the kind given de facto legal recognition by local governments in ...
Japanese celebrity Dewi Sukarno (pictured) recently made the astonishing assertion on a TV show that "the foremost cause of infertility is abortion."
Though abortion is relatively common in Japan, it still carries a stigma and the social structures are not in place that you might expect, as Sukarno's ignorance demonstrates.
As Nikkei reported this month, rape survivors must get consent from their sexual predator to have an abortion.
One woman who was assaulted by an acquaintance was told by hospital after hospital that they could not proceed with an abortion without consent from the ...
The transgender community does not get much mainstream attention in Japan as elsewhere, perhaps with the exception of Matsuko Deluxe, and the major debates over pronouns and gender definitions have not dominated public discourse in the same way as they have in other countries.
Nonetheless, transgender sexuality has a long and vibrant history in Japanese culture, and the rights and needs of trans people need to be heard.
Whether out of genuine agreement with this sentiment or out of woke cynicism that spotted a marketing opportunity, Pantene recently showcased the problems that transgender ...
