The casting couch is one of the biggest open secrets in the Japanese entertainment world. Abuse and sexual harassment of voice actors, fashion models, and gravure idols has recently gained a lot of attention. The general acting world is also very belatedly having a sort of MeToo moment with the exposure of male sex predators. The director Hideo Sakaki, for instance, has just been arrested for the fourth time. On the other hand, perhaps we still have some ways to go: the director of the new film adaptation of manga Sensei's Pious Lie sparked headlines when he said he rejected the lead ...

The biggest entertainment world scandal in Japan of late has been the allegations of past sexual assault made against one of the nation's most famous comedians, Hitoshi Matsumoto. The reports first emerged in a tabloid magazine in late December and have continued to unfold. At first, Matsumoto, his agency (Yoshimoto Kogyo), and broadcasters ignored or gave the report a minimal denial, and colleagues offered on-air support, but more revelations are still trickling out in further articles, and 60-year-old Matsumoto has now withdrawn from his television commitments, nominally so he can pursue a ...

A retiring actress has complained that the mainstream media is ignoring the open secret that is the casting couch in the entertainment industry. Though the sexual abuse that took place at Johnny's has now received the media attention it deserves after decades of silence, Misa Hayashi (林美佐) has said that there are still major issues of abuse in the industry. In an interview with Daily Shincho, Hayashi relates how she was told to sleep with people when her DVD sales were poor. This was when she was working as a gravure idol in her twenties. As we have noted in the past, the casting ...

Regular readers might remember Ayana Kobayashi, whose stunning gravure shoot we wrote about in 2019. It was notable because she did an alluring nude shoot with her butt and nipples on display despite being married (to a comedian). She has since released a couple of DVDs. It's perhaps because she's a bit of an outsider -- someone who came to mainstream gravure a bit late and already married with a child -- that she's freer to say certain things. Now in her early thirties, Kobayashi recently made headlines with a blog entry in which she described her own experience with sexual ...

The fashion model and celebrity Marie has stirred up the perennial issue of the casting couch in the Japanese entertainment world. The 33-year-old, who is half French Canadian and half Japanese, has claimed that she was propositioned when she was 18 by the now-retired comedian Shinsuke Shimada. The encounter is being described as "makura eigyo" (literally, pillow business), the Japanese word for the casting couch. Shimada was then at the height of his fame and the implication no doubt was that sleeping with him would further her own career. Marie made the allegation on April 4 and then ...

One of this blog's ongoing obsessions is the open secret in the Japanese idol world, be it gravure, music, porn, or general tarento and celebrities: the casting couch. And it really is rampant, it seems, in almost all corners of the industry. Even among seiyu/seiyuu (voice actresses). The "sexy actress" (a euphemism for porn star used by the mainstream media) Cocona Yuzuki recently shared some of these secrets on television. A former chika (underground) idol, seiyuu, and now adult video star, Cocona (or Kokona) Yuzuki appeared on a late-night TV Tokyo show on June 6. She explained that if ...

What are the dark secrets of the entertainment industry in Japan? Here is our subjective list. 1: Sex Despite the control exerted by talent agencies over idols' private lives (who they can and cannot date, or in the case of some groups, not letting them date or have sex at all), the truth is that there is plenty of sex happening -- it's just not all that pleasant or consensual. Makura eigyo (sleeping with people to get ahead, like the casting couch) is rampant at many levels of the gravure and idol industry, with female models and entertainers frequently having sex with older male managers ...