Former figure skater Marin Honda looks stunning in gravure debut
Not all heroes wear capes and not all gravure idols enter the industry through the usual agency and competition route.
And while we are used to certain other celebrities moonlighting in gravure, especially music idols, but also wrestlers, actresses, fashion models, and sports athletes, it is relatively rare for a figure skater to dabble.
But Marin Honda is a rare thing indeed, as her gravure debut impressively demonstrates.
The 24-year-old showed off her slinky, toned body and cute girl-next-door beauty in a great series of pics that would make many music idols green with envy.
Her first photo book, Marin, came out on August 21 from Kodansha, and features, in part, a Calvin Klein underwear theme.
She shows off quite a lot of her slim body, especially in the underwear pics, but otherwise keeps things safe, with no actual nudity — though she gets close in at least one pic with her naked back on display.
There is a well-established precedent for Japanese women in sports doing gravure, including nude shoots.
The best-known example of a figure skater who did/does gravure is Mai Asada, though she started posing for gravure shoots many years after her career on the ice was over.
To be fair, Honda is also now retired, having left the rink in January 2024 after an award-winning career that began when she started skating from the age of two. In that time, she was a junior world record holder and even found time to graduate from the prestigious Meiji University. In other words, she’s smart, beautiful, and talented.
One of the pictures among the previews we have seen has a ballet theme, which reminded us of the ballerina Tamiyo Kusakari, who is probably known in the West most of all for her role in the crowd-pleaser Shall We Dance?, but her career is actually quite diverse and adventurous: she also had other film roles, including at least one nude sex scene in her forties, and did a full-frontal nude photo book. Let’s hope for a similar career path for Marin Honda too.
