...Backdoor View of Japan's Porn Biz

jugulear

Akiba Citizen
Jan 20, 2012
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On an old (2008) thread called "How Much JAV Get Paid Per Movie?" I noticed two links Akiba-Online Emperor Chompy pointed to, both of which are now dead. The second one was reproduced at another porn forum, and I thought it may be good to reproduce the article here as well. While outdated, most of the information is probably still relevant for those of us who enjoy learning of the wheels that turn out JAV.

On the porn forum (regarding the lines from the article, "Famous actresses can get paid 1 million yen or more per movie. For actresses on studio contracts, though, the rate is more like 80,000 yen to 100,000 yen per flick"), a user named Bad Habit helpfully offered: "After converting Yen to Dollars the girls seem to average $450 to $900 with top girls getting close to $9500." Today's rates conforming to the figures presented in the article would be more like "Famous actresses can get paid $9,250 or more per movie. For actresses on studio contracts, though, the rate is more like $740 to $925 per flick."

The article:



Behind-The-Scenes Babes Offer Backdoor View of Japan's Porn Biz

Dealing with phone calls from literal jerks, picking out color coordinated condoms and selecting materials for simulated semen are just some of the duties of women working behind the scenes at adult moviemakers, according to Friday (5/9-16).

"I work in admin," a female office worker from an adult movie production company tells Friday. "My job involves everything from dealing with guys who call the company while they're masturbating to selecting condoms that aren't going to stand out on screen during filming."

Friday interviews the admin worker, a female assistant director and an adult actress to see what it's like from a women's side behind the scenes of the stick flick caper.

The picture the women give of the adult movie industry in Japan is a detailed one, with answers to 50 questions posed by readers of the magazine's mobile phone site.

Sexual harassment is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a part of their daily working lives.

"I'm used to the sexually abusive phone calls or requests for sales of adult items," one of the women says. "The problem with this job is dealing with the prejudices of the people around you. Many of the women working in this business never tell their boyfriends or parents what line of work they're really in."

Job interviews are also somewhat out of the ordinary.

"Women get asked questions like 'Do you enjoy sex?' or 'Do you masturbate?' and it's normal to be asked to flash your breasts," one of the women tells Friday. "It'd be sexual harassment in any other workplace, but for this job it's vital information the company needs to know."

Payment is an issue that seems high on the minds of most readers.

"Directors get paid according to how well their movies sell. It can run into the hundreds of thousands of yen per movie in some cases. Editing work is all done on a contract basis, so editors get paid pretty well," the adult video company employee says.

"Famous actresses can get paid 1 million yen or more per movie. For actresses on studio contracts, though, the rate is more like 80,000 yen to 100,000 yen per flick. The more popular an actress is, the more she's likely to get paid."

Appearances in direct-to-video porn are likely to be made by ordinary women.

"We get university students, office workers, part-time workers, housewives, nightclub hostesses, the works," one of the women working behind the scenes says. "It all depends on how well talent scouts have talked them into it. One thing all the women have in common is a tendency to be unable to say 'no.'"

In a business where companies disappear overnight, it's surprising to learn that payment is not always immediately done in cash.

"It really depends on the production company," one of the women says. "Some places only pay on a certain day each month."

The women also provide insight into what shooting schedules are like for the adult video market.

"The movies are all basically shot in a single day. If there are dramatic scenes involved, it might take a few days at most. But the production staff are all paid on a daily basis, so we can't afford to take time," one of the women says before going on to describe typical filming locations.

"Normally, the movies are made in a studio that costs several hundred thousand yen an hour to rent out. There are also studio sets with office, train or apartment scenes in them. The hardest shoots are outdoor locations. We've got to pay to rent out private property and usually have to restrict scenes not easily viewable, like building rooftops."

There are also onerous tasks like watching movies as they're being screened by industry watchdogs to prevent them from incurring the wrath of authorities –- an easy thing to do considering the display of genitalia in Japanese adult movies is regarded as illegal.

"Normally, what happens is that applicants from a company looking for screening approval will sit down with a couple of old guys from Biderin (the Nihon Ethics of Video Association) in a dark room and watch the movie. If genitalia appears on the screen, everybody shouts out 'Hey, it's on screen,' or something like that and the old guys will tell us to blank it out better with the digital mosaic," one of the women says.

The women hasten to add that the adult video industry is, despite widespread perceptions, not exclusively a man's world.

"There are women adult video directors and plenty of movies made entirely from a women's erotic point of view," one of women working behind the scenes in the industry tells Friday.

"They've normally got these absolutely gorgeous hunks doing all the acting. I don't mind watching these movies at all." (By Ryann Connell)

(Mainichi Japan) May 6, 2008

SDMU-185.jpg

The "Behind-the-Scenes Babes" interviewed in the article undoubtedly came from the ranks of those such as "First-Year Employee in SOD's PR Department, 23-Year-Old Masami Ichikawa - Abused With Toys... (that make her) Cum For the First Time Ever!!" [SDMU-185] (As the article admits, "Sexual harassment is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a part of their daily working lives.")


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I read US A-list actresses could get $3K per scene. JAV usually have 3 sex scenes so pay scale is close to US standards. This was before market was flooded with cheap/free content on internet.
 
The article from jugulear posted is from 2008

Even for big names the pay is nowhere near that anymore unless it's some really special affair (like a retirement title or a 'ban breaking' title).

Someone I know who directs for big studios like MOODYS told me a one-woman title with a pretty big name may cost a million yen total.
 
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That article had been pointed to elsewhere, as I do remember it... but how relevant for the discussion here, so it was good of you to bring it up, Kjamc1982. Once I had collected references to JAV lady salaries in one post, but I can't find it; the information would be outdated, anyway.

Kjamc1982's "Salaries Going Down for Japan’s AV Actresses" article is from mid-2014, making it relatively up-to-date; the two lines of note are:

For uncensored movies, "Whereas an actress could earn 600,000 yen ($5,500) in such a film five years ago, nowadays the figure has dropped to 50,000 yen. ($460)"

So the ladies who "show it all" have really fallen in stature, ironically.

Secondly: "Low-end actresses are receiving as little as 20,000 yen ($185) per shoot. Top performers can garner one million yen, but that figure is 500,000 yen less than that of 2009."

Yet our 2008 article from above claimed, "Famous actresses can get paid 1 million yen or more per movie," which comes across as believable. (Maybe the average shot up to 1.5 million yen in 2009, but that would have been very unlikely.) So the top pay (less than $10,000) hasn't changed much. (At least until 2014; as we have read above, getting this top pay is probably not easy anymore.)

When I looked around to see whether I could find my old post, I came across references for the male actors.

From "Article Two" (2014): "Upper-end performers in the biz earning more than 30,000 yen ($275) per film."

"Article Three" (2014) clarifies there are "300 and 500 male porn stars in Japan, with maybe 30 who have reached elite status," these latter (the "upper-end" ones referred to above) garner "30,000 and 50,000 ($300-$500) yen." (Now $275-$460.)

(Meanwhile, Japan's Most Famous Male Star, Manlet, or Shimiken, supposedly makes 2,800,000 yen, or some $26,000, a week; if he makes around $300 a movie, he would need to appear in almost one hundred movies a week. Maybe he's counting money made from other venues, or more likely, he is bragging.)

As far as the rest of the 300-500 male actors, they are mainly the "soup men," who make from 3,000 to 5,000 yen (roughly $30-$50). That's according to "Article Three," as linked above... which also tells us the strange story of a very special soup man:

"In March of 2012, the 25-year-old submitted an application to an AV firm after seeing an advertisement in Nagoya. He then starred in two films shot in Osaka and Tokyo at a rate of 50,000 to 60,000 yen ($500-$600) for each production."

How he got more than ten times the rate of the usual untried male actor is not explained.


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You know, male performers might not get paid as much as female ones, but the pleasure is all theirs! :P