Ex-gravure idol Yuka Kosaka remembers near miss with the casting couch
Regular readers may remember Yuka Kosaka, the former gravure idol who went on to work as a nursery teacher in Chiba.
Kosaka had a turbulent career, hitting the big time in the mid-2000s but then scuppering her future in the industry by gaining a lot of weight. She made a nude comeback in the early 2010s before retiring and changing careers to running her own nursery school (though she does not have children herself).
She makes occasional TV appearances these days. The 40-year-old former gradol is now married (to a former actor several years her junior) and runs a consultancy business.
During her career, she was once brainwashed, which led to her departing the gravure industry.
She also recently revealed in an interview on a Abema TV show, Hyena of Love 4, that she narrowly escaped a sexual encounter.
It was when she was in her third year as a gradol. She was told, suggestively and vaguely, that her “rivals” were all working hard to get work. She felt obliged to promised that she would also strive to do her best.
She was then told that a businessman wanted to meet her for a work opportunity.
She went to the location, which was a hotel. “I didn’t know who would give me a job,” she confessed. She went to the room and claims that when she opened the door, she say a huge stack of bills arranged in a pyramid.
“I got scared and ran away,” Kosaka said. On the show, she was asked to guess how much money was in the pyramid. Kosaka estimated about ¥6 million. In the 2000s, this would have been about double an average salary.
Was the money there to impress her with how rich and powerful the businessman was? And that she was meant to do anything she was told in order to earn a portion of that money? It seems that Kosaka didn’t hang around to find out.
It is something of an open secret that the casting couch is a thing in the idol world, both for music and gravure idols, and that the women are expected to sleep with male managers, celebrities, and other powerful men to get ahead. The Fuji TV and Masahiro Nakai scandal at the end of last year was only the most blatant example of this. The vast majority of cases, even in these MeToo days, pass under the radar because the women are not famous.
Compensated dating is another part of the job, as the case of Shoko Takasaki showed. She was rumbled and it led to her switching from gravure to adult video, becoming (as Shoko Takahashi) one of the most successful porn stars of the decade.
