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 idol Mariko Shinoda found herself in a personal and professional pickle when her alleged adultery was exposed in 2022. ...

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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 ...

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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, ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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