The former AKB48 idol Haruna Kojima has returned to gravure with her first shoot in six years.
She appears in a cover shoot for Young Magazine's May 1 issue, which went on sale this week.
As you might expect, the return of the model -- now aged 34, well into luscious jukujo territory -- known for her pale skin and slinky body has generated reams of media coverage. The magazine shoot, which was done in Okinawa, features Kojiharu in alluring, summery swimwear.
We've included some highlights here.
Her last bikini gravure shoot was for Young Magazine in 2017. The comeback is ...
One of the most popular members of NMB48, Yuzuha Hongo made the surprise announcement on April 4 that she would be graduating the Osaka group.
Alongside her singing, Hongo pursues a burgeoning career in gravure (as reported before), having released her first photo book from Kodansha in 2022.
A second photo book is set for release at the end of May, shortly before she will graduate from NMB48.
Known as Yuzu to her fans, the idol is still just 20 years old and seems very young to graduate (though she joined way back in 2015, so has devoted eight years of her life to the Namba-based group). ...
Japanese television is a strange place: a world of shoddily acted dramas and asinine variety shows, where the aim seems to be seeing how many minor celebrities can be squeezed into a single airing, and where everything seems to come down to food and guests extolling how delicious a dish is.
And then there are the shows about breasts.
Tamori Club, the late-night TV Asahi show whose decades-long run recently ended, aired an episode in March in which the male guests ogled a woman naked from the waist up except for two carefully positioned leaves over her breasts. Of course, they tried to blow ...
Ayame Misaki is one of those Japanese models and actresses who seem to have been a part of our life forever. We were a little surprised to learn that she is still only 33, but if you make your debut at the young age of 16, you can have a long career before your thirties.
The Kobe native carved out a gravure career in the late 2000s as a "Heisei-born F-cup" beauty.
We first wrote about her on these digital pages back in 2012, when she was our "idol of the week."
In 2013, she did a nude sex scene in the film Judas that showed off her beautiful breasts.
Her acting career was mostly roles in ...
The non-fungible tokens boom seems to have petered out internationally. Prices of NFTs skyrocketed but then plummeted over the course of 2022, and many believe the market is over (not coincidentally, the crypto markets has also experienced a crunch in 2022). The art and photography industries may soon move onto the next fad, if they haven't already.
In Japan, NFTs are still something of a thing, though, even if the haven't reached the heights of fame and fortune that they (briefly) attained in other countries.
In 2021, shibari artist Hajime Kinoko created an NFT rope bondage art ...
We've written before about the wonder that is Japanese gravure idol Sayaka Nitori, who has proven adept at building her own fandom on social media (1.1 million followers on Instagram!) and releasing products independently.
She isn't attached to a talent management agency and so has to go the extra mile to promote her releases and run her own online fan club.
Last year, she released her debut photo book with a major publisher -- and it was semi-nude, giving us stunning glimpses of her naked G-cup breasts.
The book was a bestseller (it recently entered its fifth printing) and now the ...
In the current issue of Weekly Playboy, busty Japanese model, cosplayer, YouTuber, and plastic model maker Umi Shinonome discusses how she got into gravure.
When in her third year at university, she was invited to do a shoot with some otaku photographer friends. She says she found the experience enjoyable, not just the shoot itself but the costumes, the location scouting, and the whole process of putting the results together.
Shinonome then started using social media to recruit photographers to shoot her.
After about a year, her management agency spotted and scouted her. She made her ...
On Monday came news that Yua Mikami is to retire from porn after a stunning eight-year run in the industry.
The announcement isn't a huge surprise, given her age (she turns 30 in August) and length of time in the industry, plus Mikami had also done other things in parallel with her adult video performing, such as being a member of a K-Pop music group (comprising only porn stars), selling NFT art, and designing her own apparel.
As regular readers and JAV fans will know well, Yua Mikami used to be a member of the AKB48 spin-off group SKE48. She is one of many AKB-related idols who branched ...
As regular readers will know, one of our preoccupations is the afterlives of idols: what happens to music, gravure, and adult video idols after they retire?
Aya Takanashi is a freelance columnist and writer. She claims she made her debut as a porn star in 2016 because "I had nothing else to do" and then left the industry after two and a half years. In a recent article for Spa!, she says she was able to return to the "daytime world" (meaning the non-porn world) as if nothing had ever happened.
After her AV career ended, she worked for a while as a scriptwriter for social network games before ...
The fantastically titled I Want You, Nana-chan, Give Me a Bite was released in Japan in 2021 and stars porn star Yura Kano and musician (and ex-AV star) Toko Namiko. After its quiet release in just a few theaters, we are finally catching up with it now.
Directed by Hideo Jojo (who also made the very explicit Believers starring Yui Kitamura), we're not sure the 70-minute film is technically classified as a pink movie but it bears many of the hallmarks of sexploitation.
The low-budget film is about the eponymous Nana (played by Yura Kano), who has to move back home after being fired for ...
