Retiring actress complains about media silence over gravure idol casting couch

A retiring actress has complained that the mainstream media is ignoring the open secret that is the casting couch in the entertainment industry.

Though the sexual abuse that took place at Johnny’s has now received the media attention it deserves after decades of silence, Misa Hayashi (林美佐) has said that there are still major issues of abuse in the industry.

In an interview with Daily Shincho, Hayashi relates how she was told to sleep with people when her DVD sales were poor. This was when she was working as a gravure idol in her twenties.

As we have noted in the past, the casting couch — pressure to sleep with influential people to get ahead in the industry — is something of an open secret in the gravure, modeling, voice actor, and music idol worlds.

In Japan, it is known as makura eigyo (literally, pillow business).

Certain managers and producers will even approach young and impressionable women trying to make their name in the industry with the offer to help if they sleep with them, as Ayana Kobayashi recently described.

Now aged 33, Misa Hayashi appeared in a play at a theater in Shinjuku in which she played the lead role. It was her final official role as an actor. In the past, she did gravure and released seven image DVDs.

Another exploitative aspect of the industry is that some management agencies charge fees for training their idols. In the end, Hayashi had to pay to join an agency through its training scheme.

And the agencies also don’t always pay their talent properly — or at all. In the interview, Hayashi gripes about how her previous management agency didn’t pay her at all for her DVDs. She had to make money from working in restaurants at night or borrowing money from her boyfriend.

And when her DVDs stopped selling, she was told to sleep with the president of a certain company to prevent her gravure career from fizzling out.