Gravure idol Momoka Ishida retires

We’ve bemoaned the crowded and competitive state of the gravure industry before. A gradol may grace the cover of Weekly Playboy or Young Jump one week and, just a few months later, be hung out to dry as yet another young lady in a bikini takes their place.

It’s hard to keep up with all the new arrivals on the scene and while many gravure idols try to expand into acting and TV work without explicitly “graduating” from glamor modeling, some do more formally retire. But even this is often done without much fanfare.

Perhaps it gets announced on social media and then that’s it: the idol is unceremoniously removed from their agency’s website and it’s like they never existed except for some corner of the interwebs or on magazine covers that sell for a few yen on auction sites.

Momoka Ishida (石田桃香) is one case like this. She seemed to be one of the most popular and prominent gravure idols of the past two or three years, but suddenly retired from the industry this month at the end of her contract with her agency. (In the jimusho system, idols and entertainers are employed by their agency, not the other way round.)

The 24-year-old Osaka native might possibly return with another agency and under a new professional name, but it is also quite likely we will never see her again.

She posted a sudden announcement on July 1 that she was retiring from the industry after reaching the end of her contract on June 30.

Of course, it could be for positive reasons: marriage, pregnancy, and so on. But gradols are badly paid — because there are so many of them — and we imagine it’s not a job people can do for long unless they feel like they are going somewhere. Likewise, agencies are not likely to keep someone on the payroll unless they can keep getting callbacks for shoots and paid appearances, especially when there is an almost endless supply of young women waiting to take an idol’s place.

Ishida made her TV debut in 2012 and released her first and only print photo book in 2021 (she released numerous digital photo books between 2019 and 2021).

She was first featured on the cover of Weekly Young Jump in 2019. Her final cover (that we know of) was for Flash in October 2021 and also released an image DVD in late 2021 and a 2022 calendar. Things seemed to be happening for her around that time but there are essentially almost no new professional announcements after the start of the year, indicating that opportunities dried up (or she was turning them down). Ishida also made occasional forays into acting and it’s possible she might pursue this next under a new name — but let’s not get our hopes up too much. We’ve been disappointed too many times before!