Former music and gravure idol Mai Endo wants everyone to delete her past pics

What happens to former gravure, music, and porn idols after they retire is a question that often crops up on this blog. We’ve often written about the different kinds of jobs they do and what it is like to raise a family with that kind of past.

But what about the pictures and videos they made during their idol career? On the whole, these remain available and, unless you were working before the 2000s (and even if before), it’s still online for anyone to search and find.

Former Idoling!!! member Mai Endo, though, wants that to end. She left the idol group in 2014 to pursue a solo career. She was also doing acting and gravure, including in the 2000s, before she joined Idoling!!!.

She is no longer comfortable with her past work, though, and recently appealed for people to delete her gravure photos.

“My body is my own and I want to decide how it is shown,” she wrote in a series of posts on X.

At the risk of appearing disrespectful by doing the express opposite, she means images like this.

We personally think her old gravure photos look great and she should be proud of them.

We wonder how widespread Mai Endo’s feelings are among other former idols — and how realistic or enforceable her request is, considering the lack of control of images once they have migrated from their original source online. Her erstwhile Idoling!!! colleague Karen Ishida has gone on to launch a second career in porn, while Rena Sato has no qualms about continuing to do sexy lingerie shoots after leaving the group.

Now 36 years old, Mai Endo these days works as a voice trainer, having announced her retirement from the entertainment industry in 2017. She was also in the news earlier this year after she came forward with her past experience of sexual assault by someone in the industry, in the wake of the allegations of sexual assault against comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto that have effectively ended the career of the nation’s biggest comedy star.