Tokyo Metropolitan Police arrested a 32-year-old company employee on 3 August 2026 on suspicion of using generative artificial intelligence to turn photographs of real women into sexually explicit images and posting them on social media.
The man, from Himeji in Hyōgo Prefecture, was arrested on suspicion of defamation and of violating Japan’s Act on Punishment of Activities Relating to Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. He has not been charged. Under Japanese procedure, prosecutors decide separately whether to indict.
Police allege that in February he took photographs of three women in their twenties wearing the athletics uniforms they had worn at high school, used generative AI to alter them into nude images, and posted them where anyone could see them. He is reported to have paid a subscription of around 3,000 yen a month to a generative AI website to produce them.
Yomiuri Shimbun reported that he created about 300 such images and posted some of them. The broadcaster TBS reported that around 3,800 obscene images and videos were found on his phone, and that police are investigating further offences. The two figures come from different outlets and we have not reconciled them.
The second allegation is the legally unusual one. Police say he also altered a photograph of a woman now in her forties, taken at a school sports day when she was a junior high school pupil, at the request of a 17-year-old boy in Kagoshima Prefecture. Because the original photograph showed a child, child pornography law applies, even though the woman depicted is now an adult. The teenager has been referred to prosecutors.
That distinction matters beyond this case. It means the age of the person in the source image, not the age of the person today, determines which law reaches the offence.
Japan has no dedicated offence covering non-consensual intimate images of adults. That gap explains the reliance on defamation for the first set of allegations, a charge that turns on damage to reputation rather than on the violation itself.
The case also points to a pattern documented elsewhere: sportswomen targeted because of what they wear. In a remark reported by several Japanese outlets, the man said athletics uniforms were easy to process.
Japan’s National Police Agency recorded 123 reports and consultations about sexual deepfake images of minors between January and June 2026, exceeding the 114 logged across the whole of 2025.