A man from New Zealand has been arrested in Japan for attempted extortion after he sent messages to a girl in her teens. The 56-year-old man, who says he is a chef but is unnamed in media reports, was arrested when he landed at Komatsu Airport in Ishikawa, a prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast. He is suspected of sending messages to a teenaged girl in Ishikawa who he met on social media. On April 18 at around 10 p.m., the man is accused of sending the girl a threatening message, warning her that if she ignores his messages he would go to her home. He told her to respond within two ...

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Long-time readers may remember the story from 2019 of Kazuko Iwamoto, the nude model and actress arrested for attacking her lover at a train station after he tried to end their relationship. The 43-year-old had, it seems, revealed to him that she was pregnant, but her lover was a married cad who wanted to make a getaway at the resort town of Atami. It was of the most bizarre stories we have ever run and, to be honest, pure catnip: a beautiful jukujo at the height of her fame seemingly caught in a destructive relationship, turns desperate -- and the result is a sensational (though thankfully, ...

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The head of a video production company has been arrested for not providing a woman who appeared in a porn shoot with a performer's contract. According to Tokyo Metropolitan Police, Daichi Iwai is suspected of failing to give the female performer a contract when she worked for him last year. He was arrested on April 14. The 35-year-old suspect explained to her verbally in May 2024 that "no one will know it's you and we can delete the footage." However, the actual release did not conceal the twentysomething's identity, nor did Iwai respond to requests for him to delete the video. It is not ...

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In a first in Japan, four people have been arrested for making nude pictures of women using generative AI and then selling them online as posters. It is first such time in Japan that an arrest has been made for selling obscene materials made entirely using AI. (Though we have seen at least one arrest before for a man who used AI to decensor porn.) According to investigators, 44-year-old Tomohiro Mizutani and two other men and a 27-year-old woman sold such materials on multiple occasions via an online auction site in around October 2024. The materials were posters featuring printed versions ...

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A cameraman has been arrested for groping a gravure idol during a shoot. The 61-year-old Nobuhiko Namai was arrested for touching the model on multiple occasions on a two-day shoot that he was handling for the production company where he works. The alleged incident took place in October last year during a shoot in Chiba. It was not clear why it has taken so long for the incident to come to light or for police to act. During the shoot, Namai is accused of touching the model's lower body without consent. He was in charge of filming for an image video they were shooting for release on DVD. ...

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Police have arrested a Vietnamese man living in Hamamatsu for the alleged rape of a sex worker. According to a report by TV Shizuoka, the unnamed man has admitted having sex with the woman but claims there was consent. The 28-year-old works in the food and drink industry, and lives in Chuo Ward, Hamamatsu. The allegation relates to an incident at a love hotel in the same ward in late February. It is unclear why it has taken this long for police to arrest him. The sex worker is a woman -- presumably Japanese, though not specified in the report -- in her twenties who works for a ...

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Another day, another grim piece of news from Osaka. Local police have arrested 25-year-old Kaito Takimoto of no known occupation and 21-year-old Hayato Niiyama on suspicion of violating the prostitution law and kidnapping for profit. Last June, the pair are said to have approached a 16-year-old girl by the famous Glico Man billboard on Dotonbori and offered her the chance to make a million yen. Niiyama later drove her to the Tohoku region of northeast Japan, where she did sex work in several prefectures between June 15 and June 25. Takimoto and Niiyama pretended to be women on deai-kei ...

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Police have arrested four people on charges of criminally profiting off acting as go-betweens for women and brothels. In the latest example of a general police crackdown on such brokers, 42-year-old Kazunori Inoue, who runs a beauty salon in Higashinari ward, Osaka, was arrested along with three accomplices, including a 30-year-old Korean-Japanese who runs a dispatching services company. They are suspected of hiding around ¥3.2 million of income, which came from fees gained for illegally introducing women to a brothel in Hiroshima between March and October last year. Park, who was ...

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Tokyo Metropolitan Police have announced the arrest on February 10 of a 40-year-old man from Osaka on charges of violating an employment law while acting as a go-between for an American brothels and a woman he scouted on the street for sex work. The man is of no fixed employ and Korean nationality (probably nothing of note about that -- Ikuno, the area of Osaka where he is from, has the largest number of Korean Japanese, who often nominally retain South Korean citizenship). He is accused of conspiring with others between February and April 2023 to pimp and introduce a woman in her twenties ...

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Police have raided a brothel that offered services to foreign tourists, arresting seven for violating the prostitution law. The establishment in Kabukicho, central Tokyo, provided Japanese sex workers for overseas visitors. Police proudly showed the fruits of their efforts to reporters on February 4, which included English-language information ("Our shop provides Japanese-style service by Japanese girl. The service content may differ from that in your home country"), multiple phones, and cash in sixteen currencies. The 54-year-old Japanese manager and other arrested six members of staff ...

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