Nagisa Watanabe is to release her first photo book, published in Japan on June 25. Though still officially unnamed, it is very widely assumed that the former TV announcer is the woman at the center of the Masahiro Nakai sex scandal, which has ended his career and brought one of Japan's biggest broadcasters into disrepute. It came to light late last year that Nakai, formerly of SMAP, had paid a female announcer a huge sum of money as compensation for a sexual assault. This is a common way in Japan to avoid someone pressing criminal charges. The scandal has grown, with allegations of ...

When April Fool's Day pranks go wrong. Yesterday, we posted about the successful April Fool's Day stunt by gravure model Jun Amaki, who teased us that she was retiring. Of course, she wasn't and it was just a prank to get attention, and she even managed to attract news articles and raise her profile. Influencer Sarimaru Kunikida's prank, though, attracted a very different kind of reaction. The mom of one who works in PR and recruitment posted on April Fool's Day not about herself but about a guy from her company called Yuji Mizoguchi, a well-known entrepreneur and wrestler (and former ...

It's almost the New Year holidays here in Japan, a time when everyone gathers with their family, eats nice food, and watches a lot of bad TV. Likely to feature on one or more of those shows was former SMAP singer Masahiro Nakai, among the most famous male celebrities in the country but whose career is now in jeopardy after a scandal and serious allegations emerged this week. In a scoop broken by the tabloid Bunshun, the 52-year-old is accused of paying a massive fee of ¥90 million to a woman as compensation, after a possible sexual assault in June 2023. Nakai was in a relationship for ...

The Japanese female TV announcers who present the news and other shows do pretty well, but some of them branch off to pursue even more successful careers in other fields: as a general celebrity (Crystal Takigawa), as a fashion model (Kasumi Mori), as an actress (Minami Tanaka), or even as a gravure idol (Akane Takiyama). Hoping to emulate these predecessors, the former Fuji TV announcer Nagisa Watanabe has made her first foray into gravure in the current issue of Weekly Post. The 27-year-old left the channel at the end of August after a period of illness suffering from PTSD. A graduate ...