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 ...
Kazusa Okuyama is one of the top gravure idols in Japan right now, though she went quiet for a while from the end of last year with few social media updates. The last major gravure-related thing she did was release a 2023 calendar and hold an exhibition with top gravure photographer Chikashi Kasai (both in December 2022).
Her absence was essentially explained on February 14 (yes, Valentine's Day), when there came the shock announcement that one of the most eligible ladies in the land had got married.
This typically would mean the end of a gravure career. (She also does occasional acting. In ...
Asuka Hanamura (華村あすか) has continued with the wet, semi-nude streak she started in early 2022. Following on from her first photo book, the actress is back with another lingerie and bikini shoot that showcases her slinky body.
The 23-year-old Yamagata native is known for her alluring mole and sun-kissed skin. In her new photo book, which comes out on March 18 from Kodansha, she is seen in the shower holding her hands over her nude chest (a variant on the tebura "hand bra" pose that's a gravure standard), or lying on her front with her naked back on display.
Alright, ...
Last month, we wrote about the second photo book by the ravishing Amazonian beauty that is Fumika.
As in her previous shoots, the former Miss Japan finalist and University of Tokyo alumni was showing off plenty of her athletic legs and svelte buttocks, while apparently hiding her actual breasts and nipples despite some very wet clothing in some of the shots.
We are pleased to reveal that Fumika has also revealed: the photo book is a proper nude shoot, including full-frontal nudity.
It's a hair nude, then, though you can't actually see any bush. Whether from very careful grooming or ...
Remember Fumika? How could you forget?!
In 2021, she smashed her way into the mainstream of gravure with a photo book shot by acclaimed Hajime Sawatari that showcased her stunning, athletic body -- and as nude as it's possible to be without showing actual nipples or more.
Now she's back with a very welcome second photo book, which comes out February 10 from major publisher Kadokawa. It's again shot by Hajime Sawatari and is also nude, though this time has a kind of "wild nature" theme with 28-year-old Fumika cast adrift, naked, amid the savage beauty of the landscape. It really accentuates ...
It's a dangerous thing to make your gravure debut in this day and age, when netizens have so many tools and resources at their disposal to do research on your background.
And so when the comely Rio Niita's (新田りお) gravure debut was announced with some fanfare, including an image video DVD release before she had even appeared in the usual gravure magazines, people got interested.
Who is she? Where did she suddenly spring from?
And the rumors are that the 19-year-old model already has a secret past career in porn.
Like most such "image videos," her new DVD (out January 25) ...
Ai Shinozaki made a gravure comeback initially in late 2021 and then again in early 2022, and the resulting semi-nude photo book was one of the highlights of the year.
Now aged 30, the famously busty (bakunyu) babe is a very welcome re-entry in our orbit. (In fact, she had been absent so long we presumed she had retired from gravure and entertainment.)
Her 2022 photo book was about as nude as it's possible to be without actually showing tits or ass (besides hints of her butt and plenty of side boob).
She's not resting on her laurels, it seems. Her latest shoot continues her gravure ...
The 25-year-old gravure idol Minami Haruna (春名美波) has just got a career boost with her first photo book release at the end of last month, plus she has made a splash in the weeklies by going nude for it.
The former race queen looks ravishing in these shoots, which range from a hotel room to a ship, a swimming pool, and what seems to be a random spot in the countryside.
"Harenchi na watashi" (Shameless Me) is a genuinely nude photo book, though it's not full-frontal nudity and it's a little disingenuous with the breasts nudity.
We get to see Haruna's butt in all its bare glory, but ...
One sure-fire way to promote condom usage is to use a sexy girl as your brand ambassador, right? Well, we're not sure. It will certainly get the punters thinking about sex but will they then reach for a prophylactic when things get going?
Condom usage in Japan is notoriously low, with men preferring to pull out (and often do a money shot on their partner, particularly their face -- a technique learned from Japanese porn). Obviously, this is not the safest method of having intercourse (and, we presume, for the female partner not the most comfortable way to end things).
So Sagami continues to ...
As we were in a bookstore recently perusing the crowded lineup of idol photo books released in the autumn to catch the end-of-year season, we found ourselves returning again and again to the stunning new offering from Yuka Someya.
As regular readers will know, Someya has featured multiple times on this blog.
She has recently established herself as the queen of the hair nude -- the full-frontal nude shoot that is usually allowed in spite of Japan's nominal legal ban on showing genitalia, including bush -- with several such shoots.
Someya is now aged 30 and as sultry and curvy as ever. She ...
