You might remember Chika Yuki (or Yuuki) (結城ちか) from back in the late 2010s. The formidably busty gravure idol made her debut in 2014 (when she still at school) and enjoyed some initial success, but then left her agency and switched to another name -- Chika Takahashi -- in 2020, followed by yet another name -- Maiha Hinata -- in 2021. All this seemed to suggest her gradol career was in free fall. Despite her obvious talents and assets that made her more than qualified for the job, it's a competitive industry that favors the flavor of the month for cover shoots and big gigs. She ...

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Japan's much-publicized, controversial new porn law that passed last year was ostensibly conceived to introduce safeguards against performer coercion. Is it actually doing its job? It's perhaps too early to say, though many major adult video stars were publicly opposed to the legislation. The newly established rules on contracts and paperwork quickly claimed its first victim, when a production firm executive was arrested in December for misleading performers and uploading uncensored material. Concerns, though, were soon raised about the potential loophole in the law regard private and ...

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We have grown used to Japanese porn stars' prior careers as music idols, gravure models, and so on. What's often so exciting about their entry into adult video is that those worlds generally don't allow the women to have relationships publicly (because it spoils the illusion that you could date the idol). This is similar with the Takarazuka Revue, a long-running all-female company that puts on musicals in Osaka and Tokyo. Some of the most famous actresses in Japan started off life as members of the company, though it is something of a closed eco-system, putting on a very particular type of ...

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Aya Takanashi, the former porn star turned columnist on all things JAV, is back with another article about the porn industry. This time, she's spilled the beans on why some performers have rules about which other performers they are willing to work with. In her latest column for the monthly magazine Spa!, she enumerates some of the major reasons for why co-performers are "banned" by certain AV stars. This is not insignificant, since while the AV industry is flooded with thousands of female performers, the number of men performing regularly is tiny. If you get on the bad side of one of ...

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Last year, police in Hong Kong cracked down on foreign sex workers, arresting several women including former Japanese porn star Noa Aizawa. It's well known that active and former adult video performers do sex work. It can be especially lucrative to engage in such work outside Japan, particularly other parts of Asia, where JAV is immensely popular. If your career is flagging in Japan or you want a change of pace, you can enjoy a good lifestyle with affluent clients abroad. It seems that situation in Hong Kong is much the same, with media reporting the arrest on September 5 of 11 members of a ...

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The tabloids are all of a flutter over rumors that recently retired top porn star Yua Mikami (30) is sleeping with not one but two boy band singers. According to the Weekly Bunshun, Kento Senga (32) of Kis-My-Ft2 spent around three hours at Mikami's apartment on the night of August 31. A few hours later, he was apparently followed by Kento Nagao (21) of Naniwa Danshi. The report ignited something of a Twitter firestorm in early September. It's not the first time that Mikami has found herself at the center of such romance rumors. She was previously said to be dating singer Yuya Tegoshi and ...

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Japanese adult video fans will probably already know who June Lovejoy is, one of the most successful foreign performers working in the JAV industry. Lovejoy made their porn debut in early 2020. Not content to sit on her AV laurels, Lovejoy newest passionate project is now up and running. They have launched a rival to Tokyo Kinky. Just kidding. Tokyo Love District is (in Lovejoy's words) an online "guide of Tokyo and Japan in general with a focus on people working in the Japanese adult industry, JAV industry members, fetishists, artists, models, and anyone that is working in the unseen scene ...

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Another week, another new Japanese adult video debut. This time, the newbie porn performer who has caught our eye is Ruu Totsuka (十束るう), who used to be known professionally as Shiho Nagisa (渚志帆). Her debut (code STARS-901-T) came out on SODstar digitally on August 30, and then on DVD on September 21. Apparently, she's been working as a voice and stage actor since the age of six! She's meant to be currently a gravure model, though we had never seen her before. Regardless, her 20-year career just entered a whole new chapter. The 26-year-old native of Kumamoto has incredible ...

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Earlier in the year, we wrote a short profile about Aya Takanashi, the former porn star who is now a columnist. Her articles in Spa! are always worth a read, usually introducing certain aspects about the adult industry and her insights on them. We spotted her recent piece about street scouts (known in Japanese as "scout man"). Such suited, flashily dressed figures are often seen hanging around certain neighborhoods of a big city. In Tokyo, this often means Kabukicho. They go up to women and try to entice them with offers of well-paid work. Sometimes this is porn work, though the true ...

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The Economist recently reported on the Japan's porn industry as it continues to respond to the coercion scandals that (belatedly) came out in the 2010s, and the legislation that politicians have introduced, in part, to tackle the issue. Claiming that Japan's porn industry is "coming out of the shadows," the article claims that the 2022 law targeting coercion and allowing performers to withdraw from contracts brought the industry out of a gray zone. We are not sure that's fully true. The industry still operates in murky waters, both in a good and bad sense, and the new law was ultimately ...

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