The Japanese actress Yoko Shimada (島田陽子) has died, aged 69, from complications of colorectal cancer. She was best known internationally for her English-speaking role in the miniseries Shogun from 1980, adapted from the James Clavell bestseller. Shimada rose to fame in Japan in the 1970s as an actress and singer, and then capitalized on her role in Shogun and became a star in Japan (though more international roles were few and far between). But it all came crashing down in the late 1980s, when an affair with the musician Yuya Uchida was exposed by the tabloids and all her work dried ...

The "hair nude" is a curious Japanese-English phrase. It refers not just to naked flesh; it's naked flesh with genital hair. What is "shocking" here is the display of pubic hair, the line by which art and entertainment is usually fettered in Japan. It is fine to have plenty of nudity in films and publications, but to avoid the century-old ambiguous obscenity laws, people censored or did not show actual pubic hair. The hair nude set out to deliberately show this was something to be challenged, legally and artistically. While the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki had already made erotic photography ...