.
A good question indeed. The following excellent article
("Japan's Male AV Actors: A Rare and Special Breed") from the News section provides clues:
http://www.akiba-online.com/showthread.php?t=1206984
Given that there are only seventy professional actors (not counting "amateurs"; I believe the number must be higher, however, based on a male actors'
directory Codegeek pointed to on the
Good, Bad, Ugly and Tubby thread), and they must work constantly given that the industry (as the article goes on to claim) produces some 4,500 titles each month, the actors don't need to work other jobs. (Article's estimate for their weekly intake: about five thousand dollars a week, for ten films.) They would not have the time to work elsewhere, too, at that pace.
Another interesting post follows on the thread, giving an idea of how the American porn actor comparatively fares. There are far more of them than seventy, of course, and we are told in this other article they make a little more than one-third of what the Japanese actor makes. Since the Americans do not work as often, given their greater competition, and since their pay is so low, they most likely would need to supplement their income with other work.
EDIT:
Excellent references from
Paparoach408 in his post below - thank you, Papa. In order to make a better educated comparison between Japanese and U.S. male porn actors' earnings potential, I needed to know how U.S. porn output compared with Japan's 4,500 titles a month. The first article gave perspective, claiming the Japanese industry produces
"twice as many adult movies as the States." This would make pickings all the slimmer, for the U.S. porn studs.
(Important discrepancy; 4,500 titles a month was the claim of the article I pointed to, from
Akiba-Online's News section - that would amount to 54,000 movies a year. Even for never-ending JAV, that sounds like too much. Papa's article says,
"14 full-length porno movies are churned out daily," which would amount to over 5,000 titles a year.
One-tenth the figure, that is one huge discrepancy. In addition, the
Wiki article mentioned below provided another clue as to Japan vs. U.S. annual porn output, at least for 1994: 14,000 vs. 2,500. So in 1994, at least, Japan produced
five times as many pornos as the USA, not twice as many.
LATER EDIT: In the documentary,
9 to 5: Days in Porn, 2008,
Paul Fishbein, the president of AVN,
Adult Video News, claimed that "last year" - perhaps 2007 - 13,000 pornos were produced in the USA.)
Papa's first article was also illuminating with the claim that a typical JAV, at least for the cheaper companies, has a budget running from $6,000-$8,000; it's remarkable they can spend little and shoot so fast, given how professional the production values usually are - especially if a good part of that budget goes toward the female talent. In addition (as interesting side notes), while I hate to refer to flawed
Wikipedia, one of their pages entitled
"AV idol" claimed that the women can command between $2,000 to $40,000 per video, and that the Japanese porn industry is worth about ($4 billion) a year. That's a lot of Miso soup.
EDIT:
According to another
article in the News section
("Troubled Lives of Japan's Male Porn Stars"), the industry "generates 55 billion yen in annual sales." Roughly $550 million, or about
one-seventh of the $4 billion cited above. Another giant discrepancy.)
.
