Three years on from the passing of the controversial porn law, the situation for the Japanese adult video industry remains complex.
Prompted by a desire to curb the issue of coercion in porn that had led to numerous scandals and arrests, as well as fears that the lowering of the age of adulthood to 18 needed safeguards to protect teenagers from exploitation, the porn law gave performers much stronger rights, including cooling-off periods after a contract is signed and a production is filmed.
It seemed to usher in a real shift in the discourse, to such an extent that some pushed to end ...
Top Japanese adult video performer Momona Koibuchi recently gave an interview to Japanese tabloid Spa!, discussing her career and her unusual background as originally a civil servant in Yamagata, northeast Japan.
Here are some highlights from the interview with the 26-year-old porn princess.
Q. You went from being a civil servant to being a porn actress, but did you originally want to become a civil servant?
Momona Koibuchi: Not at all. Actually, I like clothes, so I wanted to work in the apparel industry, or as a fashion designer. I like talking to people, so I wanted to work in ...
K-pop star Ju Hak-nyeon has been kicked out of The Boyz for a private meeting with former Japanese porn star Kirara Asuka. He is also accused of paying for sex with her.
His agency announced on June 16 that the 26-year-old was taking a break for undisclosed reasons. He was then fired from The Boyz on June 18. His agency has also let him go.
On June 19, Ju issued a hand-written apology for his liaison with Asuka, though denied paying for sex after it was first reported by Japanese tabloid Shukan Bunshun (it seems that these are initial reports of a scoop, though Bunshun has yet to publish ...
The former porn star Emiri Okazaki has announced she is pregnant.
Now 36, Okazaki made her adult video debut via Muteki in 2011. She also worked under the name EMIRI and was a member of the JAV idol music group Pinkey, which was produced by the late Kishin Shinoyama, famed for his nude photography, and active from 2012 to 2015.
Prior to her porn career, she was gyaru-style model. Since her retirement in 2016, she has been a YouTuber and entrepreneur with a business selling supplements.
Okazaki's announcement was accompanied by some maternity photos (weirdly also featuring her dog, ...
Given the huge volume of porn produced in Japan and, thus, the large number of women involved, it is inevitably that many of the performers will have families after they retire from the industry. The question of former or current adult video stars raising families is one that occasionally appears in the media, often with a degree of sympathy (for the abuse they can suffer online) and curiosity.
Spa! recently featured an interview with AiRis, an up-and-coming gravure idol and singer who is also the daughter of 46-year-old former porn star Mariko Sata.
Single mom Sata was active in the ...
As regular readers will know, we have a strong interest in the afterlives of music idols, gravure models, and porn stars.
The situation is particularly tough for the latter, who face discrimination and criticism if they go public with personal details like pregnancy or attempt to branch out into more "respectable" professions.
The former adult video star Yua Mikami had one of the most successful careers among performers of her generation. She already reinvented herself once, graduating from a career as a music idol in SKE48 to JAV, where she known by her birth name, Momona Kito.
Since ...
Japanese adult video often employs referential parody formats, from recent cultural productions (anime, TV shows, etc.) to incidents (scandals, crimes, etc.).
In a culture where parody and satire is not as common as, for instance, the West, JAV frequently feels fresh and exciting in this regard, and the potentially limitless source of scenarios that can be parodied is another reason that porn is so prolific in Japan.
The most recent example of porn parody we have seen is an AV starring Rima Arai that parodies The First Take, a YouTube channel in which singers record a song in a single take ...
Regular readers will remember the porn star Riasu Mizutani, the translator who moonlights in adult video (or vice versa).
She was recently included in a book about intelligent JAV performers but also announced her pregnancy, which is likely to mean the end of her career (about 17 credits and counting).
Bunshun Online recently published a two-part interview with Mizutani, who was born in Boston, was raised partly in the UK (where her father was working), and made her debut in the industry in 2023.
In it, she talks about her comfortable upbringing and what she was like as a child, which ...
The head of a video production company has been arrested for not providing a woman who appeared in a porn shoot with a performer's contract.
According to Tokyo Metropolitan Police, Daichi Iwai is suspected of failing to give the female performer a contract when she worked for him last year. He was arrested on April 14.
The 35-year-old suspect explained to her verbally in May 2024 that "no one will know it's you and we can delete the footage." However, the actual release did not conceal the twentysomething's identity, nor did Iwai respond to requests for him to delete the video.
It is not ...
It might sound like a contradiction in terms but Japanese adult video is transnational. By which we mean that Japanese women aren't the only ones working in the industry. There are plenty of foreign performers too, including white women (especially if they look exotic).
Though Caucasian and biracial beauties often have the most success, you can also regularly find examples of women from other parts of East Asia.
The latest in this long and alluring lineage is Tiny Lu (胎尼), the fun-sized Taiwanese influencer and model who is making her Japanese AV debut this month. Tiny Lu's first ...
