Good Morning, Wood!

It's a wonderful thing waking up with a glorious ... sun.  Hello!  I'm WoodOfTheRisingSun, I will be bringing to you irregular updates from the JAV industry, gossips, rumors, even once in a blue moon some real news!  Here I must give a shout out to Playno1, his online handle is 一劍浣春秋.  Most of my information comes from his articles.

Yeah don't worry if you can't read Japanese (or Chinese), I will include lots of them in my writing (especially names) but I will always make sure anyone can fully understand my stories.  Why I include Japanese names... it's for another post (note to self). 

Oh I would especially like to hear from you the reader, what topics do you want me to cover?  Something about JAV you want to learn more about, like what's the deal with censorship??!  Let me know, and I will climb up mountians of oppai and down valleys of manko to find you exciting (and often true) answers!

Anyway enough banter, today's topic is who is the top dog in JAV?

Who's on top?

Well one answer is found in Fanza's (DMM) Top-100 rankings, the monthly sales for May 2020 just came out (click on the picture to go to Fanza's pages):

The May 2020 ranking by idols is:

1. Ruru Anzai （安齋らら）
2. Nozomi Ishihara （石原希望）
3. Saeko Matsushita （松下紗栄子）
4. Rikka Ono （小野六花）
5. Miu Nakamura （仲村みう）
6. Yua Mikami （三上悠亜）
7. Ichika Matsumoto （松本いちか）
8. Shoko Takahashi （高橋しょう子）
9. Aika Yamagishi （山岸逢花）
10. Sachiko （佐知子）

And the sales ranking by DVD is somewhat consistent with the ranking by idol, at least for no. 1 and 2.  So Ruru Anzai is the reigning queen right?  Well that's only one way to look at it.  And she will be the subject of a future post, but today, let's look at another contender: Yua Mikami, but she's currently only 6th in the idol ranking.  Is she really on top?

Happy Fifth Annevsary!

A couple days ago Yua Mikami (click picture for her Twitter post) celebrated her 5th annevsary since her JAV debut. 

今日でデビュー5周年を 迎えました???? 5年間で出会ってくれた皆さん、 本当にありがとう。大好き???? これからも、 いろんなこと挑戦して 成長していきたいです???? 応援してね♡ 今日はとりあえず、 ゆあにーだな???? pic.twitter.com/jL9XZmPWF3 — 三上悠亜 (@yua_mikami) May 31, 2020

Until 2014, Momona Kitō （鬼頭桃菜） was merely a regular performer for SKE48 (an AKB48 sister group).  Her total income would be about the same as typical OL.  Momona wasn't satisfied with her (minor) fame no fortune status and so got herself involved in some salacious gossips (her full story would take more than one sitting to go through) and unceremoniously expelled from the "grassroot" and "wholesome" pop group.  Along came super agent Ryo Aoki （青木亮）and made her an offer she (and most mortals) could not refuse. So in 2015 with a new nom de porn, Yua Mikami performed in the earth-shaking one-off video (TEK-067), that one video made her so much money she purchased a flat in central Tokyo, one of the most expensive cities in the world. All her hard work during the SKE years (and probably carefully engineered "scandals") paid off big time.  Six months after her one-off, she dropped the mainstream celeb pretention and began a once-a-month regular release schedule. In retrospect, it's pretty obvious she was committed to a full time career as JAV idol right from the beginning. 

By the way, this is the same Ryo Aoki who was embroiled in the notorious "JAV coercion" scandal of 2016.  But Yua stuck with him and developed a comprensive commerical kingdom (calling it an "empire" would be too sensational even for me) for herself.  While her DVD sales figures are merely very good, she has tons of product endorsement deals and promotional gigs in foreign markets (mainly South Korea, Taiwan and Mainland China).  She is a highly visiable member of Ebisu Muscats, and work very hard on self-promotion, making many posts on social media, and quick to adopt new platforms such as TikTok.

So if you put together all her promotional platforms and visibilities, not limited to her DVD sales, then we can argue she is the reigning queen of JAV.  Speaking as a big fan of hers, myself, I am very happy she seems satisfied with her career and already committed to exclusive contract with S1 until at least 2021. 

Yua Mikami's latest vids: (find her vids on R18)