ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the reader inside the mysterious, convoluted world of actresses, the major protagonists in Japanese adult videos. It is widely reported that hundreds of thousands of new AV actresses are entering the adult video industry in Japan every month (Nakamura 2012) so much so that the term AV actress does hold sociological sway in modern Japan. To better comprehend ‘AV actresses’, we shall begin with an exploration of who the AV girls are by examining a set of data we collected from a major adult video studio in Japan in the early 2010s. These data centre on the background of a group of AV actresses, including their age, marital status, family background, educational background, birthplace, occupation, life goal, age at first sexual experience, number of sexual partners, dreams and aspirations and so on. Relatedly, we shall look into why they aspired to be AV actresses, amid a wide range of job choices. The major aim of this exercise is to spell out some of the common characteristics of these AV actresses, with an eye to finding out how such characteristics are related to socio-cultural and economic contexts of contemporary Japan and ultimately how these have shaped and informed their choice of becoming an AV actress.
