NHK Taiga drama hires porn stars for nude scene

The new Taiga drama Unbound has started on public broadcaster NHK. The period drama is an institution on Japanese TV, running for a whole year and always attracting a lot of attention.

It typically broadcasts in the early evening and is pretty tame in terms of content (don’t expect blood in the fight scenes, for instance).

As such, viewers were surprised to see nudity in the very first episode last Sunday. Japanese TV drama shows on the established terrestrial channels generally features no nudity, even for late-night shows, though there are sometimes bizarrely non-nude sex scenes.

The nude scene involved four actors lying on the ground, playing dead prostitutes.

And three of them were Japanese adult video performers, whose appearance on the credits shocked fans and generated headlines.

The three women were Kanna Fuji (a former ballet dancer and graduate of Osaka University who made her porn debut in 2022), Rin Yoda, and Nene Yoshitaka. The only non-porn actor was tastefully covered.

Given that the majority of actresses won’t do nude scenes in Japan unless it’s for a film that will win them prestige or for Netflix, which pays actors significantly better than the traditional channels, we can imagine that producers turned to JAV performers out of necessity.

We can imagine how the conversation went between the NHK producers and the agency, Eightman (to which all three performers belong). “We need some actresses. No one else will do nude scenes except for Netflix money.” “No problemo. Compared to what our talent usually does on set, this is a walk in the park!”

How hard can playing a corpse be, you might ask. Well, the ladies apparently had to spend seven hours lying on the ground for the shoot in late September at a temple in Kamakura.

To its credit, NHK did not hide the casting and even included the performers’ names prominently in publicity.

Netizens reacted gleefully to the idea of JAV stars on NHK and were quick to identify which body was which performer.

The casting makes sense on another level too, given the drama series’ subject matter: Unbound is set partly in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters of Edo (old Tokyo). One of the courtesans is played by Yumi Adachi, who has previous experience when it comes to this kind of role.