Adult retail giant DMM.com announced on September 7th that it would no longer sell content in which performers are under 18 years of age. This will apply to "image video" DVDs and so on featuring idols and tarento. DMM also said that since July 25th it had stopped selling adult content that had not been screened by industry bodies like the euphemistically named Intellectual Property Promotion Association (IPPA). Moreover, it said that it had never sold any pornography involving performers under the age of 18. DMM also said that the non-adult DVDs featuring performers under the age of ...

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The Japan Times recently published a long and sympathetic article about the sex industry in Japan. It superbly shows how the women who ply their "trade" in the sex industry often do so because of economic hardship. For the past six years, 47-year-old single mother Kasumi Endo has lived a double life. On weekdays, she works all day as a temp-staff office worker to raise her teenage daughter. But with wages hardly sufficient to keep the household afloat, Endo (not her real name) takes a surreptitious trip to Tokyo’s downtown Ikebukuro district on weekends to earn extra money. As ...

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The Japanese AV industry is under a lot of pressure right now. Just today we heard that top porn star Nozomi Aso has been arrested on drug charges. Then there have been all the reports and criticisms about alleged coercion and exploitation in the industry, which even led to the arrest of porn industry staff and an official industry apology last month. Now the arrests have led to new charges. This time, the president of production company CA, Yoshihide Murayama, is one of 52 people -- 9 actresses 24 male performers, plus crew -- accused of indecent exposure during a shoot a camping ...

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Japanese porn star Nozomi Aso has been arrested on drug charges, according to the July 21st Shukan Jitsuwa weekly tabloid that went on sale today. The 27-year-old AV star is a graduate of Senshu University and made her debut in 2012. She left Soft on Demand in 2014 and then joined MAXING. Since then she has switched again to chacha promotion. She appeared in many releases in 2015 and 2016. One of her films from December last year was aptly called "Fucking Machine Sex Nozomi Aso". As well as enjoying commercial success in Japan, the slender actress with a G-cup is also popular in China. She ...

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A woman who fell asleep on a train woke up to find herself abducted and trapped in the home of a man she did not know. The 28-year-old company employee from Adachi ward in east Tokyo was allegedly confined between June 4th and June 5th after she fell asleep on a train. The suspect is 33-year-old Yoshifumi Kurita, a temp from Sagamihara, who was arrested by Kanagawa police on June 18th. According to police, Kurita is maintaining silence, though there have been five similar cases in the area around where there crime took place. The victim had been out drinking and was riding on a JR ...

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A panel of experts advising the National Police Agency in Japan has issued a report on so-called "JK business", which is the name given to the various euphemistic services offering sex with schoolgirls. Similar to the more general enjo kosai (compensated dated), there has been a lot of media and police attention on the growing JK business industry in recent years. Some of the services include osanpo (walking dates), where you pay to have a walk with a schoolgirl. It may end at a love hotel. Other services include sleeping side by side in a "soine" cuddle cafes or getting a massage. ...

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The stalker who stabbed music idol Mayu Tomita may have appeared anonymously in Japanese porn as an uncredited, amateur performer. The 27-year-old Tomohiro Iwazaki stabbed the underground idol in around 20 places with a 8.2cm knife after taking the bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo to wait at a station near where she was holding a concert. Tomita reminds in critical condition while Iwazaki is in police custody. The case has generated a storm of negative press about the police response and Japan's problem with stalking. After the horrific murder in 2013 of high-school student Saaya ...

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A Yokohama court has ordered a transsexual parlor to leave a residential complex in the city after a group of residents got together to sue it on grounds of violating the terms of usage. Locals were annoyed about the large numbers of employees and customers coming and going in the elevator. Police were unable to do anything about Hanatsuki Yokohama because it was a classed as a gay service. In Japan, paying for penetrative sex is illegal, so prostitution services get around this by officially not offering "full service", though this is frequently a mere camouflage maintained to ...

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Talk about being hoist by your own petard. A man in Japan apparently rang up police to ask them if it was against the law to date a 15-year-old girl? This led to police investigating him and finding he had naked photos of a third-grader in his home. The unemployed Hisao Okazaki (45) was arrested by Kanagawa police on suspicion of violating laws against child prostitution and child pornography, after he was found to have taken pictures of a half-naked female junior high school student with his smartphone and saved the data. Okazaki has apparently admitted the charges. "I certainly ...

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Be warned. Be careful what you have in your drawer or on your phone, hard drive or cloud. While the government was pressured by mangaka and animators to exclude comic book and drawn images from the new pornography laws passed in 2014, it seems the courts do not agree. The Tokyo District Court has found an artist "guilty of violating the child pornography law by creating and selling realistic computer graphic images of a naked girl," reports the Asahi Shimbun. The court on March 15 sentenced Akashi Takahashi, a 55-year-old computer graphic designer from Gifu city, to a one-year ...

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