Who is the greatest JAV actress ever? Some data points.

This is all true, but it'd all be post hoc justifications. The truth is I care much less about sweaty, athletic men than about pretty and cute Japanese girls (sweaty is a nice plus, though). This is why I am JavThrowAway, not nbathrowaway or footballthrowaway.

Now, please excuse this short motivation-cum-self-introduction and let's move on to the main topic. This being a subjective field in an industry were girls quickly come and go, it is futile to try to find a single answer to the GOAT question everybody will accept, but there are some objective measures that can at least indicate who could have a legitimate claim on that title, and who definitely doesn't.

AV30

Japanese sensibilities may differ from those from the people consuming their JAV abroad, but they like as much as anybody else to rank actresses.  In late 2011, as a commemoration for the 30 years of JAV in Japan, DMM launched the ambitious "AV30" project to let users vote on the best actress in JAV's history.

The project was organized in a manner similar to the AVOPEN. In order to showcase the work of the most popular actresses throughout the history of JAV, they released around 30 cross-studio compilation videos, segmented by epoch and categories. The studios also made independently over 60 compilation videos with the best highlights from the actresses they'd worked with, under a common "AV30" label.

Users voted on DMM's site for nearly 2 months in early 2012, and picked the best actresses out of 20000. These were the results:

You can peruse the full rankings in the Wayback Machine's archives at
https://web.archive.org/web/20130930022940/http://www.dmm.co.jp/en/av30/-/vote/

While all such polls suffer from recency bias, names like Hoshino Hikaru (retired over 20 years before AV30), Kawashima Azumi (retired in 1999), Koto Hikaru (2004), Nanba An (2008) or Takagi Maria (2004), show a serious effort to honor the "best actress ever" rubric.  Most, if not all, of the top-ranked actresses have become legends at this point.

It's been 8 years since AV30, an eternity in this industry, but surprisingly some of these actresses, and in particular the winner, Tsubomi, are still active and relevant. Tsubomi and Houjou Maki are entering their 15th year in the business, Satomi Yuria her 17th (counting since her 2003 debut as Koizumi Aya), and Yume Kana is approaching 10 years.

I get the feeling Tsubomi is not really appreciated outside Japan (I myself didn't discover her, her qualities hidden in plain sight, and the extent of her technical skill until the second half of her career -- in Japan, she's considered a living legend and has got the title of Honorary Virgin for life), but Asami Yuma, Yoshizawa Akiho, Satou Haruki, Rio, Satomi Yuria, Nishina Momoka, Kizaki Jessica and Yume Kana should be known to most JAV aficionados.

Naruse Cocomi was big at a time as a really cute girl everybody would want as the perfect girlfriend. Ogura Yuzu was a 2011 sensation defined by a rocking body and a most innocent-looking expression. Nanba An, who'd retired long before, was for years Moodyz' ace. She kept a remarkable sense of "cleanliness" despite participating in relatively hardcore play (bukkake, anal, etc.). She was also popular enough in Taiwan to appear in mainstream ads.

Aida Yua was one of S1's early signings, and one of the actresses, like Aoi Sora, who established S1 as the powerhouse it would eventually become. She was incidentally one of my first favorites when I started to watch JAV in 2005.

Historical sales rankings

AV30 does not give us any information about what happened after 2012, but fortunately DMM (FANZA now) publishes monthly and annual streaming, disk sales and rental rankings. This data can be compared to the AV30 results where they overlap, as a sort of cross-validation, and tells us about more recently debuted actresses.

This table shows the top actresses by disk sales, rentals and streaming, since 2005 (DMM only started streaming in 2010):

The rankings up to 2012 are consistent with the AV30 results, with Tsubomi, Asami Yuma and Yoshizawa Akiho ahead. The summarized table doesn't show it, but throughout these years, Akiho came right after Asami Yuma in most rankings, and she would make it to the top 5 in the most important DVD and streaming rankings until 2014. Aida Yua, who was #15 in the AV30 poll, came in second position in both 2005 and 2006.

The amount of information in DMM's rankings can be overwhelming since they give the top 100 actresses, but looking at this very summarized form allows to see that there are roughly four main eras, with some transitional periods:

• the Asami Yuma / Yoshizawa Akiho era (2005-2009)
• the Tsubomi era (2010-2012), topping streaming and rentals
• the Uehara Ai era (2013-2015), where she achieved the triple crown, a feat never equalled
• the ongoing? Hatano Yui era (2014-), were other actresses take the lead in sales & rentals, but Hatano reigns supreme in streaming

Streaming rankings are more stable, as they reflect the popularity of the actress and not the performance of individual movies as in the very front-loaded disk market.

DMM only started streaming in 2010; its DVD rental service is like the old Netflix: you get the disk by mail and then return it by mail too. I have a theory regarding the relative importance of streaming vs. rental nowadays, based on sound psychological theories. It goes like this: consider first the basic Maslow hierarchy of needs you've seen countless times...

Now, add the sort of deep insight into human nature you gain as you become an ossan (old man):

My belief is thus that the rental market is now fairly minimal compared to streaming. If you're not going to keep a physical disk anyway, there's no advantage in renting a DVD (delivered to you) and having to return it later. And if you're shopping online, you have a working internet connection. So why wait for the DVD to arrive when you can get your JAV fix within seconds with a few clicks?

If you take a look at the status of the actresses (exclusive vs. kikatan = non-exclusive solo actress), it becomes apparent that in the period from 2005 to 2010 exclusive actresses (marked in yellow) dominated the rankings, and that kikatan rose after 2010:

Only Asami Yuma reached absolute dominance as an exclusive actress. All those after her (and indeed a large majority of all the top actresses throughout time) were kikatan (non-exclusive solo actresses).  Uehara Ai is the only one to have achieved the triple crown, and Hatano Yui has been holding the top position longer than anybody else.

Interestingly, the rankings show two phenomena in the transitions between eras:

• the workaholic actresses who shoot videos at an extremely high pace and dominate disk sales and rentals for a short time (but typically cannot sustain it for long because it's too high a burden for the body): earlier Hatano Yui, and especially Shinoda Ayumi (who left the industry absolutely exhausted) and Kimijima Mio (who slowed down substantially after a record-high release pace, with over 200 videos in less than a year).
• the rise of the exclusive actresses carrying celebrity from an earlier career: Mikami Yua and Takahashi Shouko

Extending this analysis by considering all the actresses in the top 100 (for all disk sales, rentals and streaming rankings since 2005), and granting 5 points to those in the top 20, 4 to the next 20 ones, and so on, yields the following ranking, which accounts for both popularity and career longevity:

Note that these rankings omit actresses who have been delisted from FANZA's site, including popular ones like Aoi Sora, RIO or Mihiro. I will try to use the Wayback Machine to get the pre-purge rankings at a later point in time. Also, actresses like Sakura Mana, working with other groups (SOD) having their own distribution channels, are under-represented in DMM/FANZA's rankings.

Since this classification rewards longevity, it is not surprising that mature actresses with long service sheets like Kazama Yumi (as far as I know the one active for the longest time, 23 years that represent over half of JAV's history!), Kawakami Yuu and Sawamura Reiko are near the top. Yoshizawa Akiho's power as a consistently popular actress throughout her long career shows also. She might have shined a bit less brightly than Asami Yuma at her peak, but she lasted much longer. The fact that she remained so popular through the years without having to move too far from her early vanilla themes is in a way a testament to her greatness.

Tsubomi is, once again, in a top position. She is poised to overtake Yoshizawa Akiho by next year or so, and her career is more "complete" than Acky's in that she had a very robust kikatan period that cemented her popularity. I personally am grateful both to the actresses who extend their career with more comfortable exclusive contracts after being kikatan, and to those who, after a long exclusive phase, explore new things and leave lots of videos behind in a late kikatan stint (like Kasumi Kaho or Meguri before her initial retirement).

Tsubomi might have been the first workaholic actress, and had well over 1000 movies credited to her by the time she got a double exclusive contract (Moodyz x Wanz Factory) in 2013. She also went beyond Acky in terms of play: while Tsubomi has remained true to the boundaries she set early in her career (no anal or real creampies), she has noteworthy tolerance to cum (massive bukkake, gokkun...), irrumatio, rimjobs, the bondage stuff Dogma does, etc.

What about big names from the present era like Mikami Yua or Takahashi Shouko? They rank 35 and 45 (59 and 52 points) and will climb quickly in the classification if they stay around for a few years (which is a doubtful to be honest). Takashou's career (and appearance) is notoriously degrading, but Mikami Yua is the flagship of S1, the most visible studio, and the defacto leader of the Ebisu Muscats 2nd gen (the de iure one, Ichikawa Masami, has a much weaker presence and is on medical hiatus right now), always ranks high (she was #1 in both streaming and disk sales in June, helped by the 5th anniversary campaign) and enjoys wide mainstream recognition. This all makes her maybe the most complete "star" since Asami Yuma in my view. She still needs to keep at it for a while to enter the GOAT discussion, though. She already belongs to the Great Ones.

There's still a lot of historical data to mine, and further analysis of the rankings to make. It would be interesting for instance to create yet another classification with the average weighted ranking of each actress while she was active (this would put the likes of Uehara Ai or Mikami Yua near the top), but this is more than enough for the day. These data points should give you some appreciation of the most important actresses since the mid 2000s, and hopefully you'll find a few names worthy of further research. They certainly filled me with a sense of nostalgia, a desire to watch the first steps of girls who would eventually become legends, and an impetus to buy several Best Of videos. Late 2000s videos are not HD, but the censorship is much thinner than nowadays. Back then the men were men, the pixels were smaller, and the creampies real (often). I wonder how people who got into JAV later judge these girls... Do their videos look aged and unusable to you, or can beauty (and good performance) bridge generational gaps? Are any of your favorites in the AV30 or historical sales rankings?

POSTSCRIPT

This was an early experience with R18, shortly after signing up: I went back to the site to buy a movie I'd added to my wishlist just a few days earlier, only to find the "item was out of print". A couple weeks later, I was luckier with some Uehara Ai compilations: I'd bought them right before they were delisted, and could fortunately still watch them (as per the terms of service, contents can be taken down, but my experience and that from Japanese users of R18's parent FANZA is that you can still watch the movies you bought before even though they're no longer being sold). This made me keenly aware of how quickly movies can disappear without a trace (even if you resort to piracy, old movies are rarely shared), and connects to the topic of this entry: I hastily moved to buy Yoshizawa Akiho's and Asami Yuma's memorial boxes, which are 48H long(!). I wish I'd thought of this years ago, before the removal of Aoi Sora and Mihiro's movies. I now keep an eye on retired actresses I cared about (especially near the end of the 5-year period) and make sure to get at least Best Of compilations to have something to remember them when I'm a really old man.

Some girls, like Tsujimoto An or Hoshimi Rika, have openly announced they intend to send takedowns as soon as possible. Acky looks like somebody who could do it too, and I'm actually surprised Asami Yuma's movies are still around to be honest.