Behind the scenes on a Japanese porn shoot

“A hard day’s grind for porn’s professionals,” as the newspaper has it. The Japan Times has posted a nice, long article about shooting a Japanese porn film.

As bloggers who have experienced some Japanese porn shoots ourselves, we were particularly interested in the article.

It starts with a factoid we have long boasted of…

Japan comes in a distant second in per-capita spending ($157 in 2011) on pornography after voracious South Korea ($527), but when it comes to comparing the sizes of the countries’ homegrown porn industries, there’s no contest. So prominent is Japanese porn online and on DVD that claims of Japan, with a population less than half that of the U.S., producing twice as many adult movies as the States are not hard to believe.

It’s true… and that’s only the legally produced and released material!

The article highlights Mumin, an actor with 2,000 titles (and 1,500 girls) to his name, who makes 6 films a week. Something like 14 full-length porno movies are churned out daily in Japan.

With the recent retirement of Taka Kato in mind, we were also interested in Mumin and the writer’s observations about the disparity between male and female performers.

Some of the male actors in Japanese AV are literally only along for the ride — working for free — according to sources in the Japanese industry, with others even paying to appear in movies. A male talent who does manage to make the payroll can expect to earn a paltry ¥1,000 per movie at best for his first 10 or so productions, with payments increasing to between ¥10,000 and ¥15,000 for those who consistently deliver the goods. Only the cream of the crop can expect to take home in excess of ¥50,000 per session.

Stars on the female side, on the other hand, such as Maria Ozawa, Aoi Sora and Yuma Asami, with fervent fan bases in Japan, much of Asia and even farther afield, were reportedly able to command several million yen per movie at their peak, depending on content.

Production budgets among smaller independent companies are around ¥600,000-800,000 and this sounds about right for us. Even for bigger SOD-produced titles, the extra slush essentially goes on the stars. The main budget itself is always pretty tight, resulting in very slick, professionally-run shoots.

The article mainly goes behind the scenes at a shoot in a rented apartment with Shiori Tsukada, a 19-year-old college student, part-time cafe waitress and 10-porn film veteran.

The fiftysomething director of the shoot, Akira Takatsuki, is famed for the large-breast (kyonyu) subgenre, shooting 50-60 titles a year, and 5-6 scenes a day (typically a whole film).

Perhaps the highlight of the article is when the male performer finally makes his appearance in the afternoon:

The couple exchanged bows and the obligatory salutation of “yoroshiku onegaishimasu”. This was the first time they had met, and in all likelihood they would never meet again, such are the unwritten rules surrounding work in the AV industry. Afterward, there would no exchange of numbers, e-mail addresses or friend requests on Facebook. They didn’t even exchange names.

Positions were taken for the corridor-encounter scene, filming began, and in just three takes it was a wrap, albeit with a break for the actor to simmer down so that he didn’t peak too soon, thereby leaving the director with too little material to fill this particular portion of the DVD.

Throughout the filming, up to four individuals were never more than two meters from the action, with the cameraman and his boom-holding sidekick invariably the closest. An assistant director with a basket of tissues, drinks for the actors and condoms sat just off to the side beside Takatsuki.

As the cameraman intermittently shuffled in for tight close-ups, Takatsuki took these opportunities to convey instructions to both actors by way of messages scrawled on a small whiteboard held behind the camera.

Read more over at The Japan Times.