By Ryann Connell Staff writer & Eric Y* Distributer

Hirokazu Shizuku was one of Osaka's top education officials, responsible for ensuring the prefecture's educators maintained the high moral and professional standards expected of them.

Now, notes Asahi Geino (9/2), the 47-year-old elite educator is on remand awaiting trial for breaking the law banning child pornography.

"He took a 15-year-old schoolgirl to a love hotel in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, where he performed indecent acts on her and then used his digital camera to take nude photos of her," a source close to the police investigation tells Asahi Geino. "A raid on his home unearthed over 10,000 pornographic photos or videos of schoolgirls. That saw him arrested for production of child pornography."

Changes to the child pornography law that came into effect in early July meant that anybody who takes even a single indecent picture of an underage child can be arrested for producing kiddy porn, a crime previously restricted to large-scale producers.

"Shizuku has paid for about 150 prostitutes all across the country up until now. He paid for an 18-year-old about three years ago and had been hooked on younger girls ever since. In the past three years, he used the services of over 90 child prostitutes," a reporter for an Osaka-based newspaper tells Asahi Geino.

Former pupils spoke of a "by-the-book" teacher who rarely strayed from Education Ministry guidelines and was difficult to relate too.

Neighbors concur about Shizuku's distance.

"He was really rude all the time," says an associate near the teacher's home in Mannaka, Osaka Prefecture. "You'd greet him and he'd just ignore you."

Osaka education officials were shocked by Shizuku's arrest.

"He never missed a day of work and was always plugging away at his job. He never got into small talk and just chipped away at whatever he had to do," says a spokesman from the Osaka Board of Education. "He never looked at weird sites or made nuisance phone calls. I have never heard of any work-related problem about him. When I heard about his arrest, my first thought was 'unbelievable.'"

While pen pushers in the hallowed halls of education administration may have been surprised, those who knew Shizuku at a more intimate level hardly find the news of his legal troubles to be earth-shattering.

"Before every game we played, he used to make us go out on the tennis courts and practice. He used to watch us with this really lecherous look in his eyes. It was almost as though he was eyeing us off deliberately," says a former female pupil Shizuku took charge of while serving as a school tennis coach. "Shizuku was really bad in his treatment of girls depending on their cuteness. He didn't think twice about making a fool of a girl in front of everybody if she was ugly or a bit plain. At least one girl stopped coming to school because of the way he treated her. But then, if a girl was really cute, or she had big boobs, he could be unbelievably kind and he'd let them do whatever he wanted in his classes."

Despite his penchant for pubescent prostitutes, Shizuku insists he never let his proclivities interfere with his profession.

"He swears," the Osaka hack tells Asahi Geino, "that he never laid a hand on any of the girls he taught."

By Ryann Connell Staff Writer & Eric Y* Distributer

A movie director's arrest last month for using a 12-year-old prostitute has opened up a can of worms exposing sordid details of the past of Ayumi Hamasaki, the undisputed queen of Japanese pop, according to Shukan Gendai (5/22).

Hamasaki got her first big break in the Japanese showbiz world as a support actor in the 1995 film "Sumomomomomo," directed by Akiyoshi Imazeki, the over-amorous auteur nabbed because of his preponderance for the pre-pubescent.

"Sumomomomomo" was one of Imazeki's most highly regarded works. The large number of teenage girls in the cast, including then 16-year-old Hamasaki, earned Imazeki the moniker of "Maestro of Cute Little Girl Movies."

Hamasaki played a central role in "Sumomomomomo," acting as star Maki Mochida's younger sister. One scene in the movie features Hamasaki's character sniffing her sister's skirt, then advising her older sister to refrain from sex with her boyfriend, or at the very least insisting that he wear a condom.

During her mid-teens, Hamasaki played several brazen hussy roles, such as in "Nagisa no Sinbad," where she played a schoolgirl who taunted a boy she despised by slowly rubbing a vibrator across his face and neck.

"At a time when most teen idols would strive to present a pristine image, Ayumi stood out because of her willingness to play tough girl roles," Idol watcher Fuminori Takakura tells Shukan Gendai. "She was the type you could imagine really see roaming the streets of Shibuya. She was a cute girl and had a realism that was sexy."

Takakura says she was a natural choice for Imazeki, the maestro of cute little girl movies.

Never short of hawking herself, Hamasaki, according to the teenybopper expert, is not quite as keen to flog her wares when it comes to this part of her career.

"What she did then doesn't really go with the charismatic pop diva image she presents nowadays," Takakura tells Shukan Gendai. "All the details of her time as a teen idol have been eliminated from the bio she's put up on her official site."

By Ryann Connell Staff Writer & Eric Y* Distributer

Kazuhide Uekusa was almost destined to appear in the limelight. An elite student, academic and bureaucrat, he became a celebrity financial analyst widely regarded as one of Japan's finest economic minds.

Yet, when the spotlight was turned on Uekusa, it focused on his perversion rather than his precision, according to Josei Seven (7/8).

Uekusa entered a not guilty plea when his trial for breaking a local government ordinance by peeping up a schoolgirl's skirt opened, but statements from prosecutors left a nation already stunned by Uekusa's arrest feeling even number.

Despite Uekusa's pleas of innocence, working against him is a mountain of evidence, an earlier confession to the accusation and a prior conviction after it was revealed to the court that he had been convicted and fined for groping a schoolgirl commuter in Kanagawa Prefecture back in 1998.

"(Uekusa) has an extraordinarily strong fascination with peeping up the skirts of high schoolgirls and groping," Josei Seven quotes a prosecution lawyer as telling the Tokyo District Court on June 17.

Testimony given by one of the Kanagawa Prefectural Police officers who arrested Uekusa at JR Shinagawa Station in Tokyo on April 8 was damning.

"Whenever a schoolgirl rode on the escalator, Uekusa would jog up behind her and stand on a step two steps to her rear. He would place some baggage on the step between himself and the girl. Then, he would place his right leg on the same step as his luggage and bend down, resting his right arm on his right thigh. In his hand he held a handkerchief, which he folded back to conceal a mirror he used to leer up the schoolgirl's skirt," the officer tells the court.

A raid on Uekusa's home in the wake of his arrest tells much of his proclivities.

"He used to buy schoolgirl uniforms and miniskirts for women, then made them wear the outfits as they crawled around while he photographed them," the police officer says. "We seized 509 photos scantily clad or naked women, 240 of which had been taken with a Polaroid, 238 with a digital camera and 31 with a mobile phone camera."

Several other sordid items were also seized from Uekusa's home, shocking his unwitting wife and 10-year-old son.

In his Mercedes Benz, Uekusa had hidden 2 DVDs filled with footage taken from hidden cameras directed up unsuspecting women's skirts. Nearby were another 10 adult DVDs, mostly with a train groping theme.

"We think the schoolgirl uniforms were also in the car," a source close to the investigation tells Josei Seven.

Another 12 dirty videos were found inside Uekusa's gorgeous home worth over 100 million yen despite having a mere 80 square meters of floorspace. Of these, three were about molesting female commuters and another eight featured sneak camera footage.

"He'd hidden them under lock and key in a room of his own," the police source says.

Chuo University emeritus professor Yasumasa Shimomura says Uekusa is unlikely to be punished severely.

"He confessed soon after his arrest, though he later recanted, but it still means there's a high likelihood of conviction," Shimomura tells Josei Seven. "He's already suffered quite a bit by losing his university teaching jobs and social standing, so even the severest punishment the court would likely hand out is a suspended sentence or maximum three months in jail."

By Ryann Connell Staff Writer & Eric Yong Distributer

Large numbers of Japanese women have recently found something they seem to enjoy getting their lips around, according to Weekly Playboy (8/31).

RU 486, an abortion pill on sale in 16 countries around the globe, is making waves in Japan, even though it still hasn't received government approval for sale here.

"A Shanghai-based company has started making RU-486, making it cheap and easy for sale in Japan. You can buy an abortion over the Internet now for 10,000 yen apiece," Hiroyuki Sata, head of the Sata Clinic and a specialist in RU-486, tells Weekly Playboy. "Of course, the drug can only be imported individually at the moment, but I'd guess there are plenty of companies out there already making cheap rip-offs."

Internet sales of RU-486 price the drug anywhere from as much as 26,000 yen to as low as 9,980 yen a pack. Orders from China arrive within days and include instructions for use translated into Japanese.

Those who've used the abortion pill are amazed by its effects.

"I was a bit worried about side effects, but I'm still taking it now and am leading a normal lifestyle. I've had no side effects at all so far," a 19-year-old girl who used the abortion pill to terminate a pregnancy last month tells Weekly Playboy. "After aborting the baby, I did go to the gynecologist just in case. He thought I'd had a miscarriage. I was really surprised that even a gynecologist could tell that I'd used the abortion pill."

Some worry about what might happen if abortion becomes as simple as popping a pill.

"Now, it costs anywhere from 100,000 yen to 140,000 yen to go to a gynecologist and get an abortion. Most unwanted pregnancies occur among financially struggling teens or women in their early 20s. If they know they could get rid of their babies for 10,000 yen, they'll leap at the chance," adult entertainment industry writer Koji Hirose tells Weekly Playboy. "If they can end unwanted pregnancies that easily, there'll be a rapid increase in women willing to allow men to ejaculate inside them. Letting them do that also allows them to charge double the price if they're selling themselves."

Demand for RU-486 is certainly not a problem, with Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare statistics showing that 45,000 teenagers and 148,000 women in their 20s aborting pregnancies in 2002 alone. It's this strong demand that's setting of alarm bells in the medical industry.

"Abortion pills are only something that should be used under strict medical guidance," gynecologist Sata tells Weekly Playboy. "Women could be placing their bodies in danger. There's also the risk of giving birth to deformed children. It is not a pharmaceutical that should ever be taken lightly."

By Ryann Connell Staff Writer & Eric Yong Distributer

Lack of sex was once blamed as a leading cause of divorce. But in Japan, recently, increasing numbers of couples are perfectly happy despite years without sex and the idea of ending their nuptials is anathema, according to AERA (8/2).

A 35-year-old woman identified only as Mrs. A is delighted with her nine-year marriage, though sex has barely factored in it at any time, dwindling down to about once a month before they tied the knot, growing increasingly sparse after that and non-existent for the past seven years.

Both Mrs. A and her husband work long hours and when she did approach him for a little loving, he turned her down, saying he was too tired.

"But we've maintained as close a friendship as ever. We talk about anything and he knows me better than anybody else. He's right by my side every time something goes wrong and I still think he's the perfect guy for me," Mrs. A tells AERA. "We gradually stopped seeing each other as sex objects. I trust him the same way I trust my parents. He's a really important person. We're family, we're good friends and we're happy. We just don't see each other as sex partners."

Mrs. A says her husband is probably playing around outside the home, but adds this doesn't particularly bother her. In fact, she says she'll probably find somebody else for her own fun if she ever gets he urge. Recently, Mrs. A concedes she's started to worry about her sexless marriage, but only because her body clock is ticking and her hubby may be tempted to have children with somebody else. But she adds that her options remain open.

"If we keep on going like this until I'm 40, there's always invitro-fertilization."

Another 30-something couple, this time called the Bs, also cite tough work demands as a major reason for the disappearance of their connubials, but add they're also perfectly content merely with each other's company.

"We're happy with our shared hobbies and work, so there's nothing bad about not having sex," Mrs. B tells AERA, a magazine targeting liberated women.

Mrs. B noticed a sudden change at 36 when she developed an insatiable craving for motherhood and turned the tap on once again.

"Even though we started having sex again, it was only on days when the chances of conceiving were good," she says, adding a prediction that the couple will revert to a sexless state after their baby has come along.

Mayumi Futamatsu, who recently published a bestseller about sexless couples, notes that they're hardly rare in modern Japan.

"Much of the urban intelligentsia is filled with couples that get on great, but don't have sex," she tells AERA. "Cities are packed with activities apart from sex that tempt couples. Getting out of a sexless state is a little harder. You've got to get away from your mobile phones and computers and TVs. Taking a trip is the best way. When I re-married, I spent a couple of weeks relaxing in Tahiti. It was great waking up in the morning and thinking, 'Well, what'll I do with myself today?' That's the way people really should live, I believe."

Toshiki Nishizawa, a counselor with the @ Heart Clinic in Tokyo, however, doesn't see too many positives in a sexless union.

"With sexless couples who remain good friends, I see many that are suffering from a communication problem. They're too concerned with trying to maintain a decent relationship, they unconsciously stifle their anger or anxieties. Emotions aren't something that should be ignored. The anger remains just below the surface," the shrink tells AERA. "People can't have sex with somebody they're mad at. They may not realize it, but sexlessness is an expression of anger and many times it's a way for one partner to attack another."