Pro-porn Tokyo governor election candidate uses naked woman image on poster
Extract from Tokyo Kinky SexTJune 21, 2024 by Tadashi Anahori
A candidate for the upcoming Tokyo governor election is using a naked female model on his campaign posters.
Yusuke Kawai’s schtick is cosplaying as the Joker and doing provocative stuff, though this might be the most extreme of all his stunts to date.
The model is Miu Sakurai, a gyaru model, music idol (with the group Devilsis), and race queen who has appeared in beauty contests and who appears to have Filipino roots. She describes herself as the “world’s top will-do-anything gyaru” and has also been helping Kawai put up the posters of her naked body on boards around Tokyo.
Various media reports have described her as a porn star but we have not seen any proof of that. It might just be a presumption based on her nude images and her gyaru fashion. It seems she actually works mostly as an “image girl” (like a brand ambassador) but has had to step down from her roles due to the controversy over the posters.
His posters not only use pornographic images but also announce his opposition to the recent adult video legislation as well as “mosaic” (pixellation used in adult video censorship). He also says in one poster that he wants to legalize prostitution (it’s actually not illegal per se in Japan).
We’re not sure how legal these posters are. Only a tiny image of Kawai as the Joker protects Sakurai’s modesty. The posters are on display on boards featuring all candidates for the upcoming gubernatorial election on July 7, and their locations are typically near neighborhood parks. The police have apparently issued Kawai with a warning about the nude posters, which are likely to be taken down.
The 43-year-old Kawai, who also cosplays as the Mask, is running on an extreme freedom-of-expression platform. Other posters include ones that suggest building a nuclear power plant in front of the National Diet.
He has run in various other elections before, and claims to be a graduate of Kyoto University. In 2022, he finally won an election — for the municipal assembly of the city of Soka in Saitama. Kawai’s other policies include support for the revision of Article 9 of the constitution (which renounces the right to war), opposition to foreigners receiving social welfare, and the legalization of polygamy to solve Japan’s declining birthrate (he is not alone in this opinion). In the poster for the latter policy, Kawai appears in the guise of the Mask surrounded by three ladies, one of whom is Sakurai.
There are 56 candidates for the election, including incumbent Yuriko Koike (seeking a third term) and opposition parties candidate Renho, who is now a political veteran known for her pantsuits but had a former career as a gravure idol. She is probably the most prominent ex-gradol to carve out a second vocation in politics, though Ayaka Shiomura is also a famous example, and a prominent gravure model from the 2000s, Chisato Morishita, continues to campaign for election to the Diet.
This election really feels like a circus, even more so than usual, with some fringe candidates hijacking the boards to put up multiple posters instead of just one in their assigned spot. It seems that the NHK Party, which (despite the name) campaigns against the national broadcaster, is selling its poster spaces to advertisers.
Some posters also feature a cute girl and a QR code, which takes you to a potentially spammy compensated dating or deai-kei website. Nonetheless, fringe candidates with weird policies and provocative posters are nothing new.