Above, a colorful poster for Fûten Rôjin nikki, aka Diary of a Mad Old Man, with Sô Yamamura as a man recovering from a stroke and Ayako Wakao as the occasionally towel-clad young daughter-in-law whose presence inflames his libido. Far better and more serious than it sounds. The movie premiered in Japan today in 1962. We have a couple more promo images below, and you can see a few more Wakao posters for a different movie here.

OL nikki: Nureta satsutaba premiered in Japan today in 1974 and starred Aoi Nakajima as a woman named Junko who’s seduced by a banker involved in a scheme to embezzle 900 million yen. That’s like $350 in U.S. money. Just kidding—it’s actually a shade over a million dollars in 1974, we think. We gather that the inspiration for this film was an actual embezzlement scheme at Tokyo’s Shiga Bank. The “OL” of the title stands for “office lady,” and the entire title would translate roughly as “office lady diary: wet wad of money.” Hah hah. Wad. Um, this was the fourth entry in what was a very popular series, with seven made all together, though not all starring Nakajima. We have posters for other OL movies and we’ll get those up down the line, hopefully. 

USA gyaru pâto 5: Karei naru higi premiered in Japan this month in 1983, and it’s an example of an erotic movie made with an American star for the Japanese market, such as this excellent example we shared way back. The top billed actress on this one is Carol Frazer, who was better known in the U.S. as Nikki Randall, and is a veteran of more than 100 adult productions. She also maintained a presence on mainstream network television, and appeared twenty or so shows between 1973 and 1989. She's joined above by Japanese actress Mayumi Sanjo.

Above is a poster for Yukio Noda’s 1975 pinku Seishun Toruko Nikki Shojosuberi, aka Young Turkish Bath Diaries: The Sliding Virgin. This is yet another film that possibly may not have had a western release. It certainly has no IMDB entry, even though Noda is a well-known director who gave the world Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs and a whole raft of Wolves of the City movies. This one stars Reika Yamakawa, who was born in 1957, making her eighteen when the film premiered, but sixteen when it was shot two years earlier. Once word got out she had headlined this effort, child welfare authorities came calling and Toei Studios had to shelve the footage for two years. Why that made a difference we don’t know—underage scenes are underage scenes, even after two years have passed. But of course, pinku films have no actual sex and no pubic nudity, so the problems derived from a provocative “bubble dance” performed by Yamakawa and others. In any case, nobody went to jail, and in fact the movie screened last August at Tokyo’s Shibuya Cinemavera Theater as part of a cult film festival called Mondo Cinemaverique. The promo poster is legally available for sale in Japan, so any problems with that were solved as well, but you can never be too careful in this day and age, so we’ve added pixilation across Yamakawa’s torso. 

Here’s our process: we have scores of these Japanese posters but usually know nothing about the movies. So we pick a nice one and start digging. A simple internet search on virtually any obscure pinku or roman porno film brings up pages of useless results, often empty sites that reflect the search terms back into Bing or Google, drawing clicks. The presence of these sites is something that’s really changed on the internet in the last five years and it makes finding info on obscure movies more time consuming than it used to be. But we take our hobby seriously, and so we keep slogging our way through the digital swamps. And with the help of legit informational pages like romanporno.com and wpedia.goo.ne.jp, as well as visual sites like onesheetindex.com that allow us to confirm we have the art and info matched correctly, quite often we eventually end up seeing a pretty good movie.

Above is a promo poster for OL nikki: Chigireta aiyoku, aka Office Lady Journal: Ruined Lust, and for this one we weren’t so lucky—we found info but we couldn’t find anyplace to download or watch the actual film. But we can tell you it was written and directed by Asao Kuwayama, and it starred Hiroshi Chô, Hiroshi Gojo, and one of our favorite ’70s actresses, Hitomi Kozue, who plays Yuko, an office worker whose boyfriend wants to marry her but doesn’t know she’s a prostitute by night. Naturally, her secret doesn’t last for long. As with many Nikkatsu Studios films, Office Lady was a series, with six entries made between 1972 and 1975, of which Kozue appeared in two. Another Office Lady appeared in 1977 but it seems to be considered non-canonical, for some reason. That’s all we found out, but at least we can offer something new—the quality digital image above. It’s a serious upgrade over what’s out there currently. OL nikki: Chigireta aiyoku premiered in Japan today in 1974.