Gravure idol Miyu Murashima apologizes for affair with married basketball player

One of Japan’s current leading gravure idols, Miyu Murashima, has issued an apology after news broke that she has been having an affair with a married man.

It came to light that the 25-year-old model has been seeing married Yuma Fujii, following a report on June 12 by the tabloid Bunshun.

The 32-year-old Fujii is a professional basketball player who once played on the national team.

Of course, it takes two to tango, and the man is surely as much to blame, if not more so than Murashima.

There are two issues here.

While not as severely policed as with music idols, where dating is banned (either contractually or tacitly), it is frowned upon for gravure idols to have public relationships, because it spoils the illusion for male fans.

The models are young, attractive, and working in an industry where they meet a lot of people, so of course they do date people, including male celebrities (and indeed, the less famous ones are quite possibly involved in compensated dating with affluent guys), but it is often an out-of-the-blue announcement when they get married because they kept their relationship under wraps so as not to affect their careers, which tend to be short in a highly competitive industry that is obsessed with the next big thing.

The second is the adultery.

While incredibly prevalent in Japan, it is still seen as morally or socially wrong — a stance that is codified in law. The aggrieved spouse is allowed to sue their adulterous spouse’s lover for damages if it can be proved that the lover knew the spouse was married.

We suspect that this will sadly spell the end of Miyu Murashima’s career in gravure and that she will be dropped by her agency. She has been active as a gradol since late 2017, after an initial period in the idol group CHERRSEE.

It is likely that Murashima met Fujii during the 2021-22 season, when she was an assistant MC for his basketball team in Kawasaki. This was also just at the point when her gravure career really kicked off.

On May 29, she already announced that she would be taking time off work to recuperate due to unspecified “physical and mental illness.” It is possible that this was due to the pressure of carrying on a secret affair or that the magazine had already been in touch about the scoop (as is often the case — publications like to give celebrities that chance to provide a quote beforehand).