The Japanese actress Yoko Shimada (島田陽子) has died, aged 69, from complications of colorectal cancer.
She was best known internationally for her English-speaking role in the miniseries Shogun from 1980, adapted from the James Clavell bestseller.
Shimada rose to fame in Japan in the 1970s as an actress and singer, and then capitalized on her role in Shogun and became a star in Japan (though more international roles were few and far between).
But it all came crashing down in the late 1980s, when an affair with the musician Yuya Uchida was exposed by the tabloids and all her work dried ...
People have arrested the CEO of famous Japanese secondhand book store chain Mandarake as well as four employees in connection with the sale of obscene material.
Best known for manga but also offering collectibles, doujinshi, and anime toys, Mandarake was selling so-called "vinyl books," a term referring to pornographic photo books from the 1970s and 1980s that showed genitalia. (The "vinyl" part means the plastic that was used to cover the books.)
As regular readers will know, Japan's strange obscenity laws mean it is nominally illegal to show actual genitalia, hence adult video is ...
One of the regular themes of this blog is the after-lives of gravure idols, models, adult video performers, and so on. What happens after they retire? What can do they do after their time -- often only brief -- in the limelight?
We had Reiko Nagaoka (永岡怜子) on our radar for a while in this regard, because she presents an interesting example. And then her story took an intriguing twist recently and we felt it was time to share.
She first worked in gravure in the 2010s under a different name: Una Shirakawa (白川卯奈).
Shen then switched to Reiko Nagaoka in around 2016, ...
The year is drawing to a close: another twelve months packed full of gravure shoots and photo books. But who did the most memorable nude shoot?
Sure, there were plenty of sexy and semi-nude shoots, but who made their nude debuts? Who looked best without their clothes on?
We look at the best nude shoots in 2021 from gravure idols, models, and other celebrities (not porn stars, since going nude is par for the course).
Former Morning Musume idol and singer Maki Goto make a high-profile comeback to live performance and also released a photo book, where she went nude again -- and proved how ...
Like us, you may have noticed that Japanese porn star and stripper Urara Uraraka (うららか麗) had been quieter of late, both in terms of AV releases and her social media output.
In fact, she had retired from adult video and the nominal reason came out on November 3: she's now pregnant, due to give birth very soon.
And she's sensibly capitalizing on her new physical circumstances to make a nude photo book with shots of her pregnant body, which she is selling to fans online. Given how many tattoos she famously has on her body, we can only imagine how hot she now looks while ...
Busty gravure idol and actress Asuka Oda (小田飛鳥) released a new photo book -- her fourth -- in the summer.
We are just catching up with some of the developments we missed and decided also to check out her sex scenes in the film Anticipation (2019).
The movie features some great shots of her large breasts and pert nipples, including a sex scene in which she rides a man. In another scene, her breasts are exposed from under her shirt while her skirt is pushed up and a man fingers her aggressively.
Sorry for the poor quality of the screen grabs.
Anticipation, which is ...
The Japanese YouTuber Powerful Rumi (ぱわふるみ), known for her bakunyu "explosive" breasts, is to make her JAV porn debut as Mirai Asumi (明日見未来).
Rumi, whose channel has 140,000 subscribers on YouTube, is known for her videos where largely does various provocative things while dressed in loose-fitting loungewear. She always wears a face mask to protect her identity, though she is clearly hot (masks have the effect of accentuating a woman's eyes, making them popular even pre-pandemic).
Many, if not most, are shot in her home but she also sometimes ventures outdoors, like ...
We recently reported on the porn debut of name-changing idol Sarina Toyama, aka Sarina Haru, and now working in JAV as Meisa Nishimoto.
Apparently still an active member of the idol group Once a Chance (which just celebrated its first live music event), Nishimoto is also a porn star, a new career that she launched with a full-frontal nude photo shoot a few weeks ago.
Soon after, we got confirmation of her first release (STARSBD-462), which comes out via SOD Star later in October.
Now we finally have some proper preview pictures to share.
The release looks like a standard fuck-on-a-bed ...
What to do when your career as a weather forecaster is faltering? Strip off for a weekly magazine, it seems.
Well, it's hard to say what the precise motives are for Mian Shirasaka (白坂みあん), the 21-year-old beauty who holds a qualification as a weather forecaster (often held by weather presenters) and whose meteorological broadcasting career is surely just starting.
But that hasn't stopped her from moving to her backup plan, which was apparently not only trying her hand at gravure but at a "hair nude" full-frontal shoot as well. Talk about jumping in at the deep end.
The shoot is ...
She goes by many names and her career just took a whole new turn.
Previous active since 2020 as a music idol in such groups as KissBee and Once a Chance under the names Sarina Toyama (外山さりな) and Sarina Haru (春さりな), she has switched to gravure -- and yet another name, Meisa Nishimoto (西元めいさ).
Not such a big surprise here: a large number of idols also pose for gravure shoots on a regular basis.
But for the Chiba native's shoot in the August 27 issue of the weekly magazine Friday, she posed for a great full-frontal nude shoot (hair nude). Now that's what we call ...
