Saika Kawakita is one of the biggest porn stars in Japan and a probably familiar face to most readers of this blog. She has gained global fame more recently because a GIF from one of her porn productions inexplicably became a meme on social media in December 2024. According to a scoop by the tabloid Weekly Bunshun published this week, the 26-year-old Kawakita is having an affair with volleyball player Ran Takahashi. The 24-year-old Takahashi currently plays for the Suntory Sunbirds in Osaka, and has played on the Japanese national team. He is supposed to be in a relationship with the ...

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Chisato Morishita's trajectory from gravure favorite of the late 2000s to mainstream politics is now complete. After the former model won her first election last October, the 44-year-old with the winning smile has now been appointed to new prime minister Sanae Takaichi's Cabinet as Parliamentary Vice-Minister of Environment. It's a junior role, of course, under the main environment minister (a man, of course -- though Takaichi is Japan's first female prime minister, her ministers are always all male), but it represents a major vote of confidence in the one-time race queen (grid girl), ...

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The Japanese interweb is raving over Ai Tano (田野和彩), a 21-year-old employee at a girls bar in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. Netizens are beside themselves at how in the images of her doing the perp walk for the media, she looks just like a model or celebrity (we think there's something of Mei Nagano about her). Talk about a femme fatale! Ms. Tano's attractive face aside, we're not going to sugarcoat this: she's accused of a very unpleasant crime. As detailed by Tokyo Reporter, Tano faces of charge of forcing a colleague to engage in sex work in Okubo Park, currently a hub for street ...

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Here's something we did not expect to be on our radar. The actress Megumi Kagurazaka has made a surprise return to gravure. Now aged 44, the married mother is to release her first photo book in 14 years. The as-yet-untitled book will come out in Japan on December 18. She has kicked off her return with an interview and shoot over 11 pages of the October 24/31 issue of the weekly magazine Friday. And this isn't just a gravure comeback. It's a nude comeback -- and a full-frontal nude shoot (known as a hair nude in the industry). It almost feels like we are back in the 2000s! Age and ...

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Readers with long memories may recall the story we published in 2015 about Rie Saito, the beautiful hostess who happened to be deaf from childhood. At the time, Saito was a single mom, Ginza hostess, and author of a bestselling memoir that was turned into a TV drama in 2010. She was also an aspiring politician. She successfully ran in an election for Tokyo's Kita Ward Assembly in 2015, serving her full four-year term. She had national ambitions and was subsequently selected as a proportional representation candidate for the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan in the House of ...

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Legal website Bengo4 recently considered a question sent in by a reader: Are there legal repercussions for not having sex on a trip with the person who paid? This isn't just a question of guys left horny, lonely, and disappointed, forced to jerk off in an expensive hotel room they booked in the expectation of getting sex. More than just sour grapes, there's also the issue of romance scams, where people pretend to be interested in you, even to the extent of agreeing to go to Tokyo Disneyland just because they want a free trip to the resort, not because they want to spend time with you. The ...

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We all know about Japan's penchant for used panties. They're not just an urban legend. They're real and for sale. But what about used panties as a fashion accessory? Well, Shibuya-based JennyFax essentially offers this. Not exactly used panties, but it does treat underwear as something that's not at all "under." It's very much "over." Over the head, that is. JennyFax's "panties" are designed to be worn like a hair accessory. Yes, as first reported on Oddity Central, you wear these panties on your head. We haven't seen these "panty ribbon bow" items in the wild, but there must be some ...

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On September 29, Tokyo Metropolitan Police referred a 19-year-old male first-year university student from Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office on suspicion of distributing obscene images and gambling, among other charges. He allegedly sold posters featuring obscene images created using an image-generating AI, and then used the proceeds to gamble at online casinos. According to a senior Tokyo Metropolitan Police official quoted by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, the student is suspected of making and selling AI-generated obscene images obtained from ...

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Maebashi is a small city in Gunma, a short distance north from Tokyo and rarely in the news. That all changed this week, however, with the intense media response to reports that the female mayor has been allegedly conducting an affair with a male staffer. Society seems to respond more strongly to adultery claims when it involves a woman. A male politician having an affair would result in nary an eyebrow raised (opposition party leader Yuichiro Tamaki quickly recovered from his scandal), but it's a very different situation for women in her early forties. It should be noted from the start, ...

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Hikaru is one of Japan's most popular YouTubers but the 34-year-old has hit a blip in his career after publicly declaring that he was in an open marriage in a video posted on September 14. Within 24 hours of posting the video, his channel had bled thousands of followers, dropping to below 5 million. In a single day, he lost around 120,000 subscribers. Comments on the video total over 56,000 at the time of writing and views over 4 million. In the video, Hikaru appears with his 30-year-old wife, Shingeki no Noa (Minori Maeda), a former hostess turned businesswoman in Osaka. She once made ...

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