Here we are with March's sales report. After last month's with some craziness at the top (remember that we had Rara's redebut and Momo's first creampie) I'm interested to see how this month compares to last month.

Top Actresses

This month we see quite a lot of shifts on the physical side with several actresses coming up to the top of the list. Interesting to see the volatility this month compared to months past, especially with a few unexpected names up so high. There's just so much to talk about so I'll just pick out a few of the names.

In first place we unsurprisingly have Rara Anzai. She's no stranger to the very top of the list of physical sales. She narrowly lost out on first place last month to Momo Sakura's creampie lifting and I'm not surprised to see her back up top. She has much more staying power than Momo has, which is perhaps more so due to how nice the covers of her content look. I think Rara is one of the prettiest actresses out there (as seen in my recent top 10) but when you start factoring in her body as well, oh man. I mean, her huge knockers already set herself so far from the competition that it's hard to compete.

Speaking of Momo, she's still 23rd on the list but dropping 22 points is a lot. I'm actually rather surprised that she didn't drop more knowing the video she's in. I speculated she would show up more frequently on lists as she was open to creampie but her next video doesn't feature creampies. It seems strange to me but then maybe they're trying to use creampie as a 'once in a while' opportunity and not wear out the novelty. It can clearly sell if they utilize it but they just seem so hesitant to do so. I wondered if it was based on the studio making this decision or the actress so I decided to go look at a recent example and compare. Last year Minori Hatsune lifted her creampie ban while at Idea Pocket and her next eight videos for them all featured creampies. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Not only that, Minori's IPX-458 was basically the same video as Momo's, so clearly they opted not to use creampies here where it was very clearly an option. It's a shame she seems reluctant to do creampies but I'm still hopeful.

Ruu Yumemi is this month's big debut actress. Looking at her body she reminds me a lot of earlier Rara Anzai (and I'm not the only person who has thought so from discussions I've had), which I guess explains the popularity. Rara sells like hotcakes and anyone that looks even remotely close to her could do quite well. I must say that Ruu looks somewhat different when it's non-promotional material but she still looks nice. Obviously her huge boobs are what stand out and they look quite spectacular. I'm going to be a bit reserved if only because last time there was an actress like this (Ai Kano for Madonna) she definitely didn't live up to expectations. That being said, I'll still remain optimistic that she's everything I could hope for. Debuting for Moodyz is already a good sign (compared to Madonna) so I'm hopeful. She also comes from gravure (non-nude modeling) so while there's likely some amount of popularity driven by that switch, people should know what to expect compared to an unknown quantity.

Hana Himesaki is also still at the top of the list and remains quite popular. From what I can see she has nine March releases and eight April releases. It's not absolutely ridiculous but it's still definitely more than the average. You're talking about two per week or so at that rate, which actually doesn't sound too bad when you put it in that perspective. I'm still hedging that she will go exclusive at some point but for the time being I have no complaints. I have actually been watching more of her and enjoying it, she's definitely improving quite rapidly. If she does go exclusive I would hope she can keep this pace up for a few more months to get more experience under her belt. Maybe sometime in the late summer would be a good time to go exclusive. She still continues to show up at different studios, next month has her at Venus, GAS, and Wanz Factory, so I'm glad she's really getting around. It seems like with her popularity she'll have her pick of the litter if it comes to that. I still maintain that Oppai makes the most sense given their lack of exclusive actresses (only Hitomi now after Julia and Matsuri Kiritani left). Either way we'll just have to wait and see but regardless I've been enjoying her and would encourage readers to check her out.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't point out my girl Aika Yumeno climbing up a whopping 82 spots. Going from barely making the list right to the top is something. More than that though her April release looks quite interesting as it appears very casual. I've seen some really good results from Aika Yumeno videos like that so I have high hopes for it. It is a bit odd in that it looks like it's all over the place but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. I generally find that Aika's videos depend so heavily on just how good her performance is during intercourse, and hopefully this more casual concept helps her out. Even if there's a random Christmas theme shoved into the video I'll take whatever S1 will give us if it means a good Aika performance.

Yuri Honma is the last here that I'll point out. Don't let that image (on the rankings image) fool you, it's quite an old image of her. Regardless, she's been gaining a lot of popularity over the past year or so. As I've mentioned in other blog posts, she's personally gone up my lists from someone I wasn't paying attention to all the way to one of my favourites. Her career resurgence has been off the charts and there's just so much good content from her to watch. I feel like it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what video has caused the huge increase in her popularity here and I'm instead tempted to say it's just a general increase as people have caught on to something I noticed months ago. If you're looking for videos of hers to watch, be sure to check out part 1 and part 2 of my top 25 videos from last year as there are a number of videos featuring her.

Maria Nagai is someone who has been slowly gaining more traction since coming back to the spotlight. A lot of actresses had lulls last year due to the pandemic so it's always nice to see some people garner some attention they deserve. I find Maria Nagai particularly interesting because she's not what people think about among Japanese women. Even if some of the women here are quite curvy, like Rara with her massive melons and Kurea Hasumi with her bubble butt, in general we have way less curvy women. Especially for someone like Maria who has a lot of plastic, so few women at the top of the charts are like that (Eimi Fukada being an exception, and she had less work done than Maria in my estimation). Regardless, I'll never argue with people who find her curves attractive, especially when they come out on covers as strongly as they do.

Honoka Tsujii is also back on a list this month having been absent last month. Honoka is someone who I think has a lot of potential to become a huge name but just hasn't quite gotten there. Her performing is still a little underwhelming and she hasn't quite put herself out there, but she's got plenty of other good qualities going for her: slim, busty, nice face, plus an insanely long tongue. Part of me feels like it's only a matter of time but she's been active for two years now and has been freelancing the entire time. She's got a good amount of content under her belt and freelancers tend to blossom much sooner than exclusives. Being able to star with other big names does help her a lot, especially having recently starred with Nene Tanaka (who frequent readers of mine should be quite familiar with). Honoka just feels like an actress where one day we'll realize she's amazing and wonder when it happened. Regardless, I do encourage readers to take a peak at her and if you've got VR how can you go wrong when she's teaming up with Nene?

Arina Hashimoto is someone also back in the spotlight. I can't help but think she was more popular when she was at S1 and that part of that is due to how releases work at Faleno. As a reminder, Faleno releases videos in two parts on their website, with the first release coming out before the video does on DMM. That being said, her release last month was 5th on the physical charts and is 4th on the charts this month. My opinion of Faleno's release strategy is that it's likely not what fans want, and honestly, I don't even know how splitting a video in two even functions. It feels like you might have to split scenes in half or that you might get a first half with none of the good parts. This is all an elaborate way to say that a significant amount of fans likely just wait for the release on DMM anyway so it's not surprising to see her up at the top.

R18 is, as expected, steady as a rock. The new methodology of calculating rankings is really proving to contribute to the same names appearing on the list. Only four new names on the list this month with 35 being the lowest they were at in the prior month. On top of that six different actresses have the exact same position on the list. There kind of isn't a ton to talk about with that being the case but I'll still point out a couple things.

Asahi Mizuno is one of the more interesting names to take a look at. She was on an upward trend from her redebut and this month we see her dropping a bit. I must say that her redebut for Madonna has been somewhat lukewarm in my opinion. I've seen three videos and none of them have been spectacular. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I would have expected as much, but I was hedging fans of hers would come out in full force since she was so popular even after being retired. I wouldn't really be too concerned with her dropping six spots, it's not some absurd fall from grace, but it does at least mean that she probably won't peak right at the top. Even at her peak I don't necessarily expect her to compete with the likes of Eimi Fukada, Yua Mikami, or Yui Hatano, so maybe the 10-20 range is good enough for her. She certainly does have what it takes to compete for a top 10 spot if history is any indication as she's made the top 10 yearly on DMM a number of times, but when you factor in her popularity as a freelancer in her prime compared to a redebut as an exclusive actress, I can't really say that this is bad.

Another name to point out is Touka Rinne. She's become one of my favourite actresses at seemingly breakneck speed but she hasn't really been shooting much lately. She took a break last year and it's been difficult to pinpoint when her return was, if that even happened. She had a release for Prestige back in February that I'm not necessarily convinced is new content (although it appears to be) but that is the only release she's had this year so far. She does have another with director K*West for Waap at the end of the month and perhaps maybe she's back to shooting. I really hope so because I would be sad if she never returned given how good she has become. I took a peak at some of her other videos for Waap and it doesn't look like this is some rehashed content so I'll hope for the best that we'll get more content from her down the road. Pushing all of that aside though, Touka didn't even climb because of a new release, just people looking at her older stuff and compilations. I guess it's hard to ignore someone this attractive when she gets around.

Top Videos

Kaoru Yasui is in 5th place with her newest release for S1. I believe I mentioned this last month but Kaoru switched from Muteki to S1. This is perhaps the most expected result of her debut, it is very common for actresses to debut at Muteki and wind up at S1 not too long after. Yua Mikami, Nanami Matsumoto, Usa Miharu, Ran Niiyama, Yuri Oshikawa, and Hana Haruna are just some of the names that debuted at Muteki and left for S1. People were wondering what was going on with Muteki with a random debut and this is the result. It's unclear if Muteki has anything else up there sleeves, I actually highly doubt they do at this point (no hint of another debut from what I can see), but at least Kaoru is off to a better place now. There's a good chance I'll be reviewing her later on in the year so hopefully she sticks around at S1 long enough to get past the boring entry videos.

We also continue to see lots of S1 videos up at the top, including Yua, Rara, and the actress we thought was Rara's replacement, Aka Asuka. I don't know how S1 always manages to dominate the sales charts like this, especially given so many of their videos are bland as hell. Aka's video looks like there's nothing going on and yet people are eating it up. Compare that to Yua Mikami's release which looks like she's fooling around in public. Yua's video looks way more interesting and Yua is a way bigger name than Asuka, and yet Asuka still edged her out. I'll never understand the fascination with newcomers they have. I really don't see any point in watching Aka's but Yua's defintely looks good and who knows, maybe we'll find a review of it on here later depending on just how good it is.

Another person I'll probably keep talking about on sales reports is Yume Nikaido, so long as she keeps popping up. It amazes me how consistently she's been making top video sales. We don't see a ton of newcomers making the list month after month, especially for someone working at a studio that does distribution outside of DMM. This video looks to be a bit more rough than anything she's done thus far and I'm happy to see her branching out a little bit. Sure, it's really not all that much, but it's something compared to the often generic videos she has.

Somehow we see Yuria Yoshine taking the top spot with another video I know I've spoken about  before. As I'll point out a bit later in this post, anything that uses a mask right now seems to be unusually popular due to current world circumstances. It's like a free pass to make a mediocre video into something extremely popular. Whether or not people recognize the manga it was from I think they're just going to be interested in it regardless. It's really not all it's made out to be (at least in my opinion, having seen it) but I certainly see the appeal. Let's also not forget Yuria has a great body and I can understand people wanting to watch it for that reason alone.

Another interesting thing we see is Momo and Rara's videos from last month on this list but only Rara on the R18 list below. As I mentioned before, I did expect Rara's video to trickle down to R18, but Momo not so much. While Momo is still a very attractive woman there's something (or some things I should say) about Rara that make her top tier. More so than that though, which I know I've mentioned, a creampie ban lifting is a much bigger deal for domestic people that follow their careers more closely. People went nuts over Momo's release not because it looked good but because of what it represented. While the same was partially true for Rara (her redebut) we can see that her next release is just as popular, and in general that Rara releases are at the top of the charts. I do find it rather interesting comparing domestic sales to international to see what major differences we can gleam, and this is certainly one I expected.

Mina Kitano is in second place and I must say that she looks quite nice. While it's difficult to judge actresses by covers she's both very pretty and busty (listed as H cup), a winning combination in my book. The cover indicates she's the number one hostess from a club in Ginza, I won't refute it but it could just as easily be a marketing ploy to make people buy the video. I don't really think they need any selling points for her but it does at least give some small amount of direction for the video. Hopefully she doesn't flame out and I'll get a chance to check her out later in the year.

Sakura Tsuji is the final debut from this month I would point out, debuting in 4th place on the list. There are two big things about her debut, the first being the cover embracing mask wearing. I haven't seen any pandemic related videos that have been good, and this doesn't look like it is pandemic related, but it's always interesting to see mask usage in videos at all. Additionally, and perhaps a much bigger note, she was a YouTuber. Seeing people already in some form of public spotlight coming into the JAV industry is always an interesting proposition. Especially with the way streaming goes these days, a streamer could become very popular if there was some nudity available for some curious viewers to inquire about. Either way she does look attractive and I'm interested in seeing how someone who was known before turns out in the industry.

Unsurprisingly at R18 we see Rara's redebut up in a top spot. Knowing the trickle down effect from DMM allowing pre-sales we would have expected this. I wouldn't have necessarily expected her to have two other compilation videos there as well but it's really not that surprising. Especially if you were disappointed in SSIS-025 like myself and Panking were then it might be tempting to go see some of her older content. I can't say I can ever vouch for her content knowing how bad she often is but at least you can get enough content that you won't be too sad at the price you pay for it.

Another interesting video to point out is Hikari Sena's release in 8th place. I had somewhat high hopes for Hikari last year and she just wasn't what I hoped she would be. That being said I'm usually willing to give actresses a second chance and this feels like as good a chance as any. The plot appears to be Hikari seducing her daughter's boyfriend and I'm all about that risky cheating type of video. More so than anything, people being interested in her is a good indication that she's worth checking out again. I couldn't tell you how many other times she's been on the list but I can tell you that she had 11 releases in March. That's a pretty hefty amount and when there are some good studios in the mix like Moodyz, Fitch, Chijo Heaven, and Honnaka, maybe, just maybe, I was wrong about her. If anything, there's been a good amount of videos from her and we'll likely have an indication in this year if she's a top tier actress or some B-tier actress who will get relegated to subpar studios.

With that we have March's sales report in the books. Be on the lookout for the yearly sales report, I'll do my best to have that done in the near future.