It is said that half of all sex in Japan happens in a love hotel. 1% of the population uses a love hotel on any single day; something like 1,370,000 couples. A large proportion of the nation's new babies are conceived in a love hotel. There are 500 million visits a year. Room occupancy is 600-700% in some busy establishments -- 78.8 stays per room per month! The love hotel industry has an annual turnover of ¥4 trillion yen, which is around four times the operating profits of Toyota and double the anime industry. And yet it's cars and anime that the government wants to push as the face ...

Hihokan (literally "secret treasure hall") are Japan's sex museums, a wealth of postwar kitsch that fester around the country. Now Atami Hihokan, one of the most famous of them all, has apparently achieved the dubious honor of being the last remaining sex museum. Like a lot of regional facilities in Japan, the effects of a changing economy, cheaper overseas travel and depopulation have meant that the countryside is full of rotting and rusting theme parks and museums. The Hihokan have sadly not escaped this fate. Image of Beppu Hihokan via Hakkaku Culture The Hihokan (sometimes spelt ...

Megumi, Kazuki, Tadashi and I like to scour the streets looking for new adventures in Tokyo. But we also make time to read. Obviously, with the amount of crime and dirty antics we report on in this blog, we need to keep a close eye on the weekly tabloids. But we also like to read serious books. One I've been perusing recently is The Inland Sea (1971) by the late, great Donald Richie. Richie was a famous Japan observer, a writer based her from just after the war and who did a lot to promote Japanese cinema in particular. In the early 1960's he took a long trip around the Seto Inland ...

Sometimes the oldies are the best. We all love our sexy idols today but I also enjoy a good perv over the ladies big in the 1980s and early 1990s. Their bikinis might not be as hot. The shots might be a little old-fashioned. But man, they still look damn fine! Here's a small selection of some of the best of Japan's nostalgic idols! Kanako Nakajo (b. 1973) is a former gravure model who made her debut in 1991. She got married to a baseball player and left the entertainment world in the late 1990s. The actress Atsuko Asano (b. 1960) was big in the 1970s from her teenaged ...