The gentrification and renaissance of Yoshiwara, the former licensed red-light district (and today, an unlicensed red-light district), continues.
After a designer souvenir shop we saw earlier in the year now comes a new book shop, Kasutori Shobo. The store opened on September 3rd in the heart of Yoshiwara, selling books reprinting valuable resources and history about Yoshiwara and the adult side to the Showa era.
Alongside other publishers' titles, the shop also publishes its own books. The owner, Goh Watanabe, raised money via a crowdfunding service to do this, achieving his target ...
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 ...
A new exhibition in Tokyo focuses on the controversial issue of underage enjo kosai, or compensated dating.
The "We Were Bought" exhibition runs from August 11th to August 21st, featuring the photography, text and diaries of junior high or high school students (JK, joshi kousei) who have engaged in enjo kosai, a euphemism for prostitution
The exhibition is organized by 24 students and Colabo, a support group for female high school students. The students and other girls are aged between 14 and 26, and live all over Japan from Hokkaido to Kyushu.
There are around 100 exhibits on ...
Following a sex scandal (alleged prostitution!), the gravure idol Shoko Takasaki has made her porn debut on the Muteki AV label, which specializes in porn featuring former idols and actors.
Ahead of her debut as "Shoko Takahashi" (changing her names for legal reasons after she left her previous agency), our voluptuous lady posed semi-nude for some ravishing shots...
Though there was some confusion over the rumors of Takasaki's switch from gravure to porn, the naysayers have been proved wrong and these images reveal what a delight the results appear to be...
Behold some initial ...
What are the dark secrets of the entertainment industry in Japan? Here is our subjective list.
1: Sex
Despite the control exerted by talent agencies over idols' private lives (who they can and cannot date, or in the case of some groups, not letting them date or have sex at all), the truth is that there is plenty of sex happening -- it's just not all that pleasant or consensual.
Makura eigyo (sleeping with people to get ahead, like the casting couch) is rampant at many levels of the gravure and idol industry, with female models and entertainers frequently having sex with older male managers ...
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 ...
Known for her perfect body and gorgeous G-cup bust, Shoko Takasaki was until late last year one of the top rising gravure idols in Japan and a potential star in the general entertainment industry.
But the gravure world is a fickle one and idols are sometimes more desperate for money than you might think, plus quickly learn that their looks and bodies are their top advantage in a ruthless industry where management expects to sleep with new talent.
In September, images surfaced that seemed to show her engaging in enjo kosai (compensated dating, a euphemism for prostitution), causing her to ...
Vice seems to have a bee in its bonnet over Japan's so-called "JK industry" of schoolgirl prostitution.
After its provocative and criticized article and video last year, now it reports on a police crackdown on "businesses that exploit underage girls".
The article is written by Tokyo Vice (no relation) author Jake Adelstein, who has made a career out of presenting himself as the gaijin expert on all things Yakuza. Recently he has tried to talk a lot about teenager prostitution too and linking it to AKB48, getting a lot of flak for it.
When a UN investigator visiting Japan ...
Ever hired a lady of the night and then changed your mind? Tried to cancel and had trouble with the girl or her handlers?
One man had such a problem in Kabukicho but ended up on top, legally speaking.
Yukie Shimoyachi, a 30-year-old prostitute, was arrested earlier this week for extortion. She had forced a man to pay her a "cancellation fee" of ¥50,000 ($410) in the early hours of September 27th.
The man had been lured by a street tout in Kabukicho (lesson of the day: DON'T trust those guys) with the promise of a lady who could provide full penetrative sex services (technically ...
Takaya Muto has already been forced to resign over a money scandal.
Now he might have to contend with a sex scandal too.
The 36-year-old Lower House member of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party already made a lot of enemies when he took to Twitter to brand activists protesting against the government's immensely controversial state security bills as "selfish" and "fooled" by "propaganda and false information".
That was late July.
Fast-forward a few weeks and Muto is not looking so smug now.
He has been forced to quit his party after tabloid Shukan Bunshun exposed ...
