We do love the gravure comeback. Sure, it's sometimes just a marketing gimmick, a manufactured framing of a return in order to generate headlines. Other times, a comeback genuinely raises a nostalgic smile as we remember when the idol (and we) were younger, and marvel at how good they still are. Recently, comebacks have been popular, with top stars from the 2000s returning to gravure for an anniversary or career boost: Nozomi Sasaki, Megumi Kagurazaka, Erika Sawajiri, and Atsuko Maeda. But most of these ladies are still in their forties or even late thirties. What about those stunners from ...

AKB48's power has waned of late and it takes a scandal to make us sit up and take notice (though the recent sex scandals involving Nana Okada and Yuiri Murayama, culminating in the former quitting the group, added a little frisson to an otherwise dull media landscape). Instead, we continue to follow what happens to the many members of the supergroup after they graduate. Though the majority vanish into the post-idol ether, a lucky few carve out careers in acting or TV, some keep on doing modeling and gravure work, and a small yet notable number move into porn. Makiho Tatsuya ...

As we get older, we appreciate the charms and beauty of older women more. But it's far from the case that we ignored jukujo during our own salad days. Far from it, we have long sung the praises of Japanese cougars and MILF on these digital pages, as regular readers will know. A jukujo (roughly, "mature woman") is rather loosely defined, and is often applied liberally to any woman past her "prime" (i.e., her twenties). This is nebulous, of course, and most Japanese women in their thirties would shirk from the label, though various celebrities have embraced it and turned it into their whole ...