We wanted to revisit the nude sex scenes featured in the 1987 Japanese movie Bedtime Eyes, about a Japanese jazz singer and a black American GI, and based on a novel by Amy Yamada. The film stars Kanako Higuchi, who does several sex scenes with her foreign lover, plus one with a Japanese man. Besides one sex scene while standing up against a pillar, they mostly keep things conventional with missionary sex on beds. There is lots of passionate kissing and some nice breast-sucking. It's a relatively obscure film today, with little availability on streaming or home ...

The "hair nude" is a curious Japanese-English term. It refers not just to naked flesh; it's naked flesh specifically with genital hair. What is "shocking" here is the display of pubic hair, the line by which art and entertainment is usually fettered in Japan. It is fine to have plenty of nudity in films and print publications, but to avoid the century-old ambiguous obscenity laws, people censored or did not show actual pubic hair. The hair nude set out to deliberately show this bush taboo was something to be challenged, both legally and artistically. While the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki ...