Meet Chihiro Midorikawa, the gravure idol who writes to prisoners
When you’re languishing behind bars, there’s probably a lot of things you miss from your life on the outside. Nice good and booze, for a start. Sex and intimacy too.
No doubt you’d find yourself thinking a lot about hot girls. Without a phone or access to the internet, you’re probably starved of stimulation in this regard, but perhaps the occasional magazine or newspaper might provide glimpses of attractive models to give your fantasies food for thought.
And how about a letter from a gravure idol?
Chihiro Midorikawa is a 31-year-old gradol who won the Miss Tokyo Sports Grand Prize in 2020.
And it was around then that she started corresponding with convicts. She has to date written letters to almost 30 prisoners and has also appeared as a guest speaker at an exhibition of items made by prisoners (in Japan, prisoners have to work and this usually means manufacturing products like bicycle saddles).
If this sounds a bit random, the basic facts of Midorikawa’s background might help it make more sense: her father is a cop.
She started a career as a model when she was 25, after first graduating university and then working in a regular job for a while.
She also did gigs as a race queen for a while.
Midorikawa likes visiting prisons, with her favorite being one in Chiba, according to a recent interview she did with Spa! last month.
Why that one in Chiba? “It was designed by Keijiro Yamashita, who also made four other prisons.” One of those includes the famous brick prison in Nara that is set to become a luxury hotel in 2026, run by the Hoshinoya resort chain.
After Midorikawa wrote a column about prions, she received a fan letter from someone behind bars. “It made me so happy. I then started exchanging letters with convicts. They write the letters by hand, so you can really sense their feelings in what they write, and it makes you think about a lot of stuff.”
She has faced criticism of being too nice to toward convicted criminals.
“I am neither defending criminal acts nor am I lenient toward criminals. However, I do wonder about the way society as a whole tries to exclude people who once made a mistake. Of course, I can understand that victims feel angry and may not be able to forgive the criminal. But if we, as third parties, lose our cool and resort to criticizing, it prevents people from rehabilitating themselves.”
Given how crowded and competitive the gravure industry is, each model has to have a “thing” that makes her stand out from her peers and rivals. Chihiro Midorikawa has certainly got one!
