Nagisa Watanabe’s photo book wins major gravure award
Nagisa Watanabe has bounced back from personal hardship to achieve major gravure success with her debut photo book, Horizon, which has now won the top prize at the Weekly Playboy Gravure japan Award 2025.
Watanabe commented: “When I received the offer to do the photo book, I remember repeatedly telling my editor, ‘Are you sure you want me? It won’t sell, you know?’ I was filled with anxiety from my first overseas shoot to the release date, but I am filled with gratitude to all the staff who worked with me to create Horizon.”
Watanabe is a former TV announcer who is generally assumed to be the woman at the center of the Fuji TV scandal that saw the end of former SMAP member Masahiro Nakai’s career. She has never named herself, perhaps for legal reasons related to the settlement she received for an alleged sexual assault in 2023. The scandal is one of the biggest moments in the MeToo movement in Japan. She was absent from work in 2023, suffering from PTSD (with the reason never officially disclosed), and eventually resigned.
She made her gravure debut in November 2024, joining a growing list of TV presenters who have transitioned successfully into gravure modeling. Such women have a different appeal, being a little older than the typical novice gradol and, very importantly, tend to have graduated from prestigious private colleges like Keio, Waseda, Sophia, or Aoyama Gakuin. They become, in effect, brainy gradols, an appeal they can milk into doing fashion modeling too (see Kasumi Mori, Minami Tanaka, etc.).
Watanabe then followed this up with a photo book released in June 2025, which proved a sensation. She was a frequent face in gravure magazines and the mainstream media last year.
She did attract criticism online, though, for “faking it,” with a noisy minority of netizens arguing that a “true” survivor of sexual assault would not pose for such erotic shoots. This top industry award may or may not finally silence those critics.
