Regular readers will remember the cautionary tale of gravure idol Miyu Murashima, who was forced to apologize and put her burgeoning career on ice in mid-2024 after her affair with a married basketball player came to light.
She was effectively sacked by her agency and announced later in 2024 she would no longer do gravure, instead focusing on producing her own content on YouTube and TikTok.
The basketball player with whom she had an affair seemed to suffer no professional consequences.
Over two years on from the scandal, what is Murashima doing?
Now 27 years old, the former idol announced ...
Mei Hanada has been sacked by AKB48 for having a personal relationship with a fan, it was announced by the music group's management today.
Hanada has been on leave since May, having suffered mental health issues from the end of last year, which had caused her to be repeatedly late.
Management somehow found out about her meetings with a certain fan while on leave, which Hanada claimed were just chance encounters that happened twice, but management investigated further and determined had actually happened on multiple occasions.
She apparently wanted to return to AKB48 and management claim ...
The Nogizaka46 idol Hina Okamoto is at the center of an online storm after footage of what appears to be a sex tape filmed by an ex-partner leaked online.
The hamedori-style footage shows an unidentified young man having unprotected sex with a woman who looks very similar to Okamoto and who is wearing a blue top very similar to one that Okahina (as she is known to fans) once wore in a photo shoot. It is alleged that the video dates from before she joined the group in 2022.
Not only are such idols for groups like AKB48 and Nogizaka46 contractually banned from having relationships, the ...
The idol Agehasan Bot has been fired by her group for having a romantic relationship with a fan. Another idol in the group, Ruki Kirinaga, was also fired for the same offense.
The group, Sora kara no Shinryakusha (literally, Sky Invaders, but written with characters for "space"), made the announcement on January 27, and immediately removed the two idols' social media accounts.
The same day, the five-member group announced it would be disbanding on March 8 at a concert in Kanda, Tokyo. The group had been active for a year (with modest results) but with the loss of two of its members, a ...
And she's back. Just weeks after she was forced to resign over a sex scandal, Akira Ogawa has won re-election as mayor of Maebashi in Gunma.
Ogawa resigned in late November after a series of love hotel trysts with an older, married city worker were exposed by a tabloid scoop.
The 42-year-old Ogawa tried to claim the hotel meetings with the 54-year-old subordinate were just that, meetings related to work, but the public was unconvinced, and both she and the unnamed senior male civil servant resigned their positions. We speculated at the time that her career was then over, but she clearly had ...
The Japanese music industry was rocked on Friday by the publication of a scoop by the tabloid Weekly Post alleging that singer and producer Mitsuhiro Hidaka has received nighttime visits from an underage idol to his home.
The 39-year-old Hidaka is a rapper, actor, dancer, and member of the J-pop group AAA, and also works as a solo artist under the name Sky-Hi. He is also president of the entertainment production company BMSG, which represents many famous idols.
Weekly Post has learned that Hidaka repeatedly "summoned" an underage idol to his home late at night.
Sadly, it should come as a ...
One of the biggest media stories in the autumn was the salacious scoop about the female mayor of Maebashi, a small city just outside Tokyo, and her love hotel trysts with an older male staffer.
After admitting the meetings and in the inappropriateness of them, but continuing to denying she was having an affair with the married man, 42-year-old Akira Ogawa eventually resigned as mayor in late November.
Most voters interviewed by the media found Ogawa's explanations unconvincing and it was clear that her position was untenable. The city set up a special hot line and received over 12,000 phone ...
Last week, it was revealed that attractive 21-year-old female golfer Reika Miyako was dating a man 30 years her senior.
That nugget of info was enough to merit a flood of articles in the tabloids, but more details have since emerged about the 51-year-old lucky gent who is her boyfriend. It's none other than her married coach, Shinobu Ishii.
She has since apologized on December 1 with a handwritten letter posted on social media that confirmed that she was breaking up with Ishii and ending their professional relationship.
"I have been dating my coach, Shinobu Ishii, since last year. ...
Saika Kawakita is one of the biggest porn stars in Japan and a probably familiar face to most readers of this blog. She has gained global fame more recently because a GIF from one of her porn productions inexplicably became a meme on social media in December 2024.
According to a scoop by the tabloid Weekly Bunshun published this week, the 26-year-old Kawakita is having an affair with volleyball player Ran Takahashi.
The 24-year-old Takahashi currently plays for the Suntory Sunbirds in Osaka, and has played on the Japanese national team.
He is supposed to be in a relationship with the ...
Maebashi is a small city in Gunma, a short distance north from Tokyo and rarely in the news. That all changed this week, however, with the intense media response to reports that the female mayor has been allegedly conducting an affair with a male staffer.
Society seems to respond more strongly to adultery claims when it involves a woman. A male politician having an affair would result in nary an eyebrow raised (opposition party leader Yuichiro Tamaki quickly recovered from his scandal), but it's a very different situation for women in her early forties.
It should be noted from the start, ...
