Eimi Fukada, android sexual relation, makes apology (NOT)

Has it been 8 months since I last wrote about Eimi Fukada 深田えいみ? True I still can’t get a full erection watching her videos, but all these time, I still watch her career with interest and fascination. Amazingly she’s barely 23 years old according to her official birthday. Judging by the various components of her career, with the help of ever-advancing medical technology, it’s easy to think she will remain a top idol for many more years.

In JAV her production rate has cooled down somewhat from the incredible peak of 32 titles a month. But her unmistakable face still graces a large number of covers each month. Her Twitter followers have swollen by 50%, a net gain of 600 thousands, since surpassing Yua Mikami back in July. An amazing feat both in relative and absolute terms. She also has almost 300 thousand subscribers to her Youtube channel (proudly proclaiming "No NG" on the channel banner), over 400 thousand followers on her IG and nearly 150 thousands on Tiktok. What are these numbers about? An average JAV title selling at a few thousands of units (digital and physical) for a month is considered a good result by the industry, that should put her SNS numbers in perspective. Eimi Fukuda almost surely makes more money from SNS than her JAV productions.

Now yours truly is hardly the perfect journalist, so bare with me as I struggle to piece together a coherent story. The immediate event is a formal apology on Youtube. Like me, you could turn on English CC which is auto-translated from auto-generated Japanese CC. Since AI technology is far from perfect, and Japan’s formal apology is a very culturally specific thing loaded with code words, I shall try my best to explain it, I will be bold and estimate the following is 25% accurate:

“... Youtube is the industry leader of international something something, ... mistake... sexual content ... this time the problem isn’t the changing of cloths with nipples (showing), it is not because my nipples and genitals appear, but because of my image and stereotype... I developed this channel to attract virgins (fans) and make some extra income... educational conversation about sexual knowledge ... make men’s pe-(BEEP) bigger and make women pu-(BEEP) wet ... I posted contents that drive away (sexual) frigidity... for all of the above, I, Eimi Fukada, make this apology to everyone who wishes to hear an apology...”

So what’s going on? It appears this channel is already her second or even third incarnation on Youtube.  In fact it’s just been opened two months ago. She had open a previous channel in December 2020, which was banned by Youtube after only 2 months of operation, it seems. I think if you are fluent in Japanese you would work out what was happening before, perhaps her second channel was too visually explicit (nipples?) and got banned. Now it appeared YT has demonetized her channel or at least some contents. Here are two educational videos of her demonstrating sexual positions and technique that still is available (click to play):

The key point being, she might be being demonetized not for the content having crossed a line, but for who she is and how popular she is, being a JAV idol with approaching two million fans and over a million views for several of her videos. You see, there are plenty of sex talk videos, it’s well within Japan’s community standard (e.g. night time TV talk shows), there are also many active and retired JAV idols profiting on YT. But the combination of sex talk, JAV identity, and her huge popularity may be attracting too much conservative pressure on Youtube. So... she’s pissed, and like a good Japanese, she expresses her pissedoffedness by make a public formal apology.

Ahh yes...  that unique Japanese culture thing, a formal apology comes in (only) two forms, one slices open his own belly with a knife designed and made for only that one purpose (if one has no dignity left, s/he may choose the shameful way out: jump off a tall building), or one bows and reads aloud a meticulously composed formal declaration of regret. A Japanese formal apology has the magic property that absolved the guilty and wipe out any opportunity for the injured party to pursue “just” compensation for the involved matter. Sometimes, like here as used by Eimi Fukada, it’s an outright F-U to Youtube.

You might ask, well who the fuck is Eimi Fukada? A second rate JAV idol dares to challenge the Established International Order? The thing is YT may need Eimi more than Eimi needs YT. A hint is the number of views of her top videos is very close to her Twitter fan base, but her YT subscription is just around 15% of that. Since she post all her YT upload to Twitter, and she she knows how not to get banned on Twitter, most of her fans has little reason to subscribe to her YT channel. Which means, losing a YT channel is a tiny penalty to Eimi, she just open another new one and instantly count on hundreds of thousands, even up to two millions views per upload, for a good one.  

Another little story gives a hint how Eimi operates. There’s this company that international fans have no reason to know or care about, except for once in a while a reveal of industry dynamics. Evelt イベルト is a company that operate in-person events with JAV idols. March is that time of the year to update their banner and, typically, rotate some or even all the girls on the banner. In this video, Evelt reveal their banner girls for 2021.

Curiously, as of today, Evelt’s website still display their 2020 banner:

Notice the difference? Shoko Takahashi 高橋しょう子 and Akari Tsumigi 明里つむぎ are rehired for 2021, but Eimi Fukada has been switched out by Riri Nanatsumori 七ツ森りり (whose debut was reported here). Now don’t you for one minute take this as Eimi’s stardom fading. What’s happening here is that Evelt has found Eimi’s service too expensive and opt for a slightly newer, significantly cheaper idol in Riri Nanatsumori. Well I hope Shoko Takahashi doesn’t have a fragile ego, upon hearing the change. Would she be upset by Eimi’s power move, Shoko as the once-high-flying top idol who left behind as the face for a event company.  

Anyway what are we left with? Eimi Fukada's problem is she's too successful for her own good, she's where she is because she can provide what the fans want, but the powers that be who claim to promote free exchange, cannot in fact tolerate the full implications of their own rules. In turn Youtube's problem is exactly the same, they provide a platform for what the fans want, which turns out to be cleavage and sex talk.  They are all great and wonderful when the profits stream along with the views, but then it got too popular and attract the attention of Big Brother. Such is life.