So, I stumbled across a Japanese phrase I hadn’t seen before, which wasn’t in any of my dictionaries. From the NSFW context (picture after the jump…), it was modern slang associated with the sex trade, but what did “kami-machi” really mean?

A quick google found a story on a “naughty Japan” site (so, NSFW link, y’know) that cleared it up: runaway and homeless young women who are willing to put out in exchange for dinner and a night in a warm bed.

This is one of those things where you can’t really be sure how much of it is true, how much was invented for dirty books and movies, and how much is “hey, check out our Wacky Japan Site”. But it rang a faint bell, and sure enough, I blogged about this sort of arrangement four years ago, back when I still got tons of spam in Japanese. It didn’t use “kami-machi”, but the subject line was “please become kami-sama to needy girls”.

Anyway, the porn industry certainly pretends it’s a real thing, and promises some first-rate talent (NSFW):

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Am I correct in assuming that someone was fired for not stapling a rhinestone-studded feather headdress to 15-year-old Rikako Sasaki’s head? The outfit just looks incomplete without one.

(via Takitumblr, which includes shots of what was considered matching footwear…)

This photo shoot of 20-year-old Yuzu Matsumoto stands out because it doesn’t rely on any of the common glamour-photography tropes, or any of the common fetishes. She’s just a fully-dressed, extremely pretty young woman, in a little “daily life” sketch.

(most of the other shoots in this series from Weekly Georgia fall into the “ideal girlfriend” category, of course)

To my surprise, I haven’t posted a picture of 25-year-old Moemi Katayama (片山萌美) here. Perhaps it’s because it took so long to find one where she was wearing more than a bare minimum of fabric…

If you want to see her in less fabric and damp fabric, one good source is here.

Her just-released-today Bluray is currently the top-selling female-idol DVD on Amazon Japan (61st in all Bluray discs), and the DVD version is #3.

I’m not particularly interested in the music of the new idol group Niji No Conquistador, but I’ll include a representative sample that features some hilariously bad weapons play:

The only reason I know about them at all is because I recently felt the need to track down the source of Yet Another cute Japanese girl wearing an American flag bikini:

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The Taiwan Girl Tumblr might not be officially approved by the national tourism bureau, but it should be. Perhaps they’re upset that all the pictures are grabbed from another blog, which doesn’t identify the models or photographers. Google Image Search, on the other hand, had no trouble tracking this picture back to its source on Flickr in an album by Taiwanese photographer Robin Huang.

(he has thousands more just like it; a good way to waste an afternoon)

Beats the hell out of a Hallmark card or a box of chocolates.

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There’s nothing more confusing than a loanword that looks too much like another loanword. A “T-shatsu” is a t-shirt, so what is a “Y-shatsu”? A white (wai) shirt. I loved the head-scratching on the Hello!Project forums back when Reina Tanaka covered “Heya to Y-shatsu to Watashi”, trying to figure out what a Y-shaped shirt could be.

But Reina covering a Y-shatsu isn’t nearly as interesting as a Y-shatsu covering Ai Shinozaki…

(more revealing photos here; video and pictures from her lengthy new Maxim Korea shoot: video, part 1, 2, 3, 4, posters)