Another week, another adult video debut. Another month, another gravure or music idol quietly switches to porn.
Recently we had Rin Arai (Rin Asahi), Shizuku Taiyo (Minamo), and Ruu Yumemi.
Here's the latest. The 25-year-old, angel-faced Moko Nakagawa (那珂川もこ) launched her career as a gradol in 2018 but the G-cup minor star seemed to vanish in April.
Then came the reason: she had joined the T-Powers agency and was relaunching her career as a porn star, now called Kanan Amamiya (天宮花南).
She celebrated with a nine-page hair nude (full-frontal) spread for the weekly magazine ...
Things don't happen in a vacuum: even if the new porn star isn't already famous and making a switch from gravure modeling or another career to JAV (e.g., Ruu Yumemi or Shizuku Taiyo), the chances are she was doing something beforehand.
And being an underground (chika) idol is one. These young women inhabit the groups that etch out a precarious living doing small gigs and events, attended by a modest but devoted following of fans.
The chika idol group Miramajo (みらまじょ) made a sudden decision to disband in January of this year, giving no formal reason -- meaning it was probably ...
What is is like to be the father of a porn star?
We once blogged about an interview with the wife of a prominent Japanese male porn performer as well as the brother of two gravure idols.
Now the 32-year-old retired top Japanese porn star Kirara Asuka has released a video on her YouTube channel -- it seems that many of the big JAV names are also becoming YouTubers -- all about her dad.
The 20-minute video (only in Japanese), which is the first time her 55-year-old father has made such a public appearance, was published on April 28 and has racked up nearly 750,000 views.
It takes a while ...
In our continuing survey of what gradols and porn stars do after leaving their jobs, we now have the example of one of the most prominent JAV performers of recent years: Ai Uehara.
Having just won a high-profile diversity award, Ai is wasting no time in launching the next stage in her working life.
She has just started a crowdfunding campaign, aire (pronounced "eye re"), for a new of health and beauty supplement brand called AminoR-20+Zn. As the name suggests, the supplement contains zinc and 20 types of amino acids. The project is produced by Ai in partnership with a corporation, ...
Former top adult video star Ai Uehara is about to kick off her second career with a crowdfunding campaign later this month. The details are still a little slim, though it seems to involve launching her own photography brand. We hope to report more next week.
In the meantime, Ai has been in the news for another reason: she won the Miss iD 2021 award.
The 28-year-old was selected from 2,676 candidates and 194 finalists for the prize, which is now in its ninth year.
The finalists had to attend interviews to win over the the judges. Following auditions held online last August, the event to ...
It's a crowded market for minor celebrities and idols, especially if you come from the competitive ranks of AKB48 or its sister groups.
While a few former members have gone on to have major careers -- mostly the original generations of idols -- hundreds of others have faded from view or pursued careers like porn that they perhaps did not expect (but for which we are grateful).
That said, we think this is the first time we've heard of a former idol from the AKB-related groups turning to crime to make ends meet.
Juna Yamada (山田樹奈) was arrested on March 16 in Nagoya for fraud, ...
What can gravure idols do after their careers dry up? We have chronicled many intriguing responses to this classic conundrum. But how about becoming a politician?
That's what the one-time gradol and tarento Chisato Morishita is apparently trying to do.
Originally a race queen, Morishita was a big star in the gravure world and a fairly regular face on TV in the 2000s, winning popularity in bikini shoots that accentuated her slinky body and F-cup bust. After several photo books, however, her career stalled as she entered her thirties. She instead started teaching golf and published a novel in ...
Nayuka Mine is one of the most high-profile ex-porn stars in Japan.
She worked as an adult video performer for five years from 2005. She has since become a popular manga artist. Her latest book, a semi-autobiography, came out in December last year.
In a recent two-part interview with the Bunshun online, 36-year-old Mine explained her past.
She was scouted for AV at the age of 19. She hadn't appreciated that she had big breasts until then, when her assets were praised by the scout. Rather, at high school, she had been teased for being "fat" by her male cohorts. At the time, she had come ...
While most recent news about Japanese porn has been dominated by the very welcome return of Asahi Mizuno, we wanted to highlight another example we found that shows how part of the industry operates.
Once again, a minor idol from a group relatively unknown in the mainstream has been persuaded to switch from music to porn.
In this case, it's 19-year-old Sayaka Takayama (高山さやか), formerly of Girl's Horizon (aka Garuhora), who has made her AV debut under the name Nana Yaotome (八乙女なな) mere weeks after leaving the group.
The 180-minute release (MIFD00140) comes ...
Detailed detective work on the part of Japanese netizens have identified newbie porn star Sora Minamino (南乃そら) as Miyako Torase (虎瀬美也子), a former member of idol group Oyasumi Sekai.
Torase was active in Oyasumi Sekai from November 2018 to April 2019. If the netizens are right, it would seem that she struggled to find a post-idol career or otherwise specifically chose to enter AV with the right offer.
Sora Minamino released her first adult video title on September 1 with a splashy 149-minute feature (MIDE-812) from Moodyz.
The video, which nominally follows ...
