The graduation of various leading members and the restrictions placed on live, in-person events by the pandemic have greatly reduced the presence of AKB48 and its sister groups in popular culture. The groups retain strong followings, of course, but the days when AKB dominated advertising and TV shows seem over.
As such, even the little scandals seem to pass us by. We missed that Yuka Suzuki (鈴木優香) was forced to graduate AKB48 last September due to an alleged romance (oh, the horror!) that first emerged in spring 2021.
Following her ignominious departure from AKB48, Yuka Suzuki ...
Yuka Kuramochi has returned to gravure with her first shoot since she gave birth to a child in 2021.
Kuramochi, who is married to a very successful esports player, chose to make a splash with her comeback. After all, landing a shoot with Yuka Kuramochi alone would be sure to shift copies, but Weekly Playboy elected for a whammy for its May 23 issue.
Joining Kuramochi are Jun Amaki, Fumina Suzuki, Saki Yanase, and Saki Suzuki. So we get five of the most voluptuous ladies in the industry, all in one shoot.
And what a shoot, as the preview images and the behind-the-scenes pics reveal! It's ...
A reader recently chided us for not writing about the Yumi Sugimoto's return to gravure (though we did post pics on tumblr). The truth is, even with "gravure comebacks," there are simply too many idols to keep track of, let alone write about in detail on these digital pages.
But here's one comeback that is certainly worthy of note.
Yuka Hirata (38) made a very welcome return to our lives with her first Weekly Playboy gravure shoot in 14 years, first published in the March 19 issue of the magazine.
Now on the cusp of 40 and steeped in jukujo territory like a finely aged wine, the former ...
Welcome back, Shizuka Nakamura. We've missed you.
We can't think of the last time that we saw a new shoot by the former top gradol. Thankfully, building on the momentum of her role in the high-profile Netflix adultery drama Fishbowl Wives, in which she appears in a sex scene, Shizuka Nakamura has returned to her first career: gravure.
Shizuka Nakamura appears in the March 25 issue of weekly magazine Friday with a nine-page, winter-onsen-themed shoot. Now aged 33 and as a slim as ever (if anything, a bit slimmer than before?), the Kyoto native has matured into a sensual jukujo. (If we're ...
She promised. She delivered. Now this is what we call a comeback -- and a way to celebrate entering your thirties in style.
As teased in January, veteran gravure idol Ai Shinozaki has returned to what she does best.
And now that her new photo book, "IDEA," is out in Japan from publisher Kodansha, we can share the highlights. Fans have been waiting over four years for a new Ai Shinozaki photo book. They won't be disappointed.
It features a milky-bath shoot that is about as nude as you can get without showing actual nudity. Ai-chan is famous for her huge bakunyu breasts -- hey, this 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, ...
She's back. And though in the interim, there have been thousands of Japanese gravure and music idols to keep us more than entertained, we didn't realize how much we missed the slinky charms of former SDN48 idol Serina (芹那) until we saw her again.
And we see a lot of her this time.
Since in her first photo book release in 10 years, Serina has gone semi-nude -- showing off her more mature and experienced, 36-year-old body.
She graduated SDN48 -- remember, the sexier version of AKB48? -- way back in 2012, after which we heard little about her.
Now she's making a jukujo comeback with a ...
It always feels good to welcome back an old favorite.
The gravure idol Ayame Misaki was a regular on this blog in the early 2010s. But then she got married in 2016 (only to divorce the following year) and also started working as a "serious" actress, landing a role in a film by art-house auteur Naomi Kawase.
But she didn't forget her gravure roots, even if her days of doing nude scenes in low-budget movies are sadly behind her.
Now aged 32 and teetering on the edge of youth and jukujo territory in the most alluring of ways, Misaki made a gravure comeback in late May with a shoot for the ...
Former NMB48 idol Rina Kondo (近藤里奈) has delighted fans by slipping off her clothes and lying nude on a bed, her modesty preserved only by a slinky pair of panties.
The 24-year-old has released a digital photo book in which she shows off her sweet girl-next-door features, but with a healthy degree of sex appeal thanks to her naked back. Who says cute girls cannot also be sexy?
Intended to preview and promote the digital photo book release, the gravure shoot was published in an issue of Weekly Playboy in late June -- her first appearance in the magazine in eight ...
A drugs scandal has spelled the end of many celebrities' careers in Japan. Only a lucky few have managed to crawl back into the limelight and it took a lot of time.
As we blogged in late March, the gyaru model and tarento Yukipoyo (Yuki Kimura) seemed to run into an insurmountable snag in her burgeoning career when her apparent boyfriend was busted for drugs -- with her in attendance.
The Japanese-Filipino recently made a tearful apology on TV and, even more effectively, landed a new promotional gig with a gym chain and launched a photo book with even more provocative shots than before ...
