Hey everyone, welcome to this month's report. As I mentioned last month, SOD is now back on DMM / R18! This is great news as we get to see a bunch of our favourites we've missed back on the report (and boy will we ever see that this month). While I'm sure a lot of people moved over to SOD's website during the hiatus, I think probably a large number of people just skipped watching them entirely. I somewhat doubt they'll continue to be as popular in subsequent months, but at least this time around there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. With that said, let's take a look at this month's report.

PS. Don't forget that you can click on the report graphics to view the top 100 versions.

Top Actresses

Can you guys count the actresses on the top 25 that are from SOD? I count a whopping nine of them, from veterans like Mana at the top to newcomers like Seri Mitsuba in 22nd. I think DMM is clearly responding well to having SOD back on their site. Names like Mana and Suzu are pretty well known and it doesn't ever surprise me seeing them on lists. I would be perhaps a bit surprised if they continue to be this popular every month given that they weren't regularly topping the lists before, but who knows, maybe the amount of people who haven't seen them in a while is enough to keep them at the top for a while.

Chiharu is definitely a more interesting actress I didn't pay attention to. I somewhat regret not taking a chance to watch her as a 2021 debut because she certainly seems up my alley. She reminds me a lot of Hotaru Mori with her round face, G cup boobs, and slightly mature face. She definitely strikes me as someone they will play up in the mature realm even if she could get away with being cast in younger roles. I find the industry does like to take some of these actresses right around the 30 year old mark and play them up as a younger mature woman. It will certainly hamper her potential as an actress but at the same time it could also perhaps prop her up as an actress that would otherwise get ignored. We'll have to see if I'm still interested in her as the months go on, since I have some other posts that she might find her way into. How do you feel about Chiharu? Do you like the way they make her out to be mature or do you think she's not quite there yet?

On a somewhat related note, the video listed above is directed by none other than Tameike Goro, the owner of his own studio. It's odd to see him back directing (he hasn't directed in a year) and to see him doing SOD content instead of for his own studio. He's directed literally four videos since 2018 and the last three have been in the past three months and all for SOD.

Mio Ishikawa is a debut we saw late last year for Moodyz. As you might recall, she was touted as being a diamond in the rough they found. I think a lot of people gravitated towards her girl next door look and are continuing to hold steady on that account. Her latest is the 20th ranked DVD this month and the 10th place digital video is an older release of hers. I feel like Mio still needs to have some more interesting content come out before people will really start to pay attention to her, especially if you get content that aligns with her girl next door look. There's a particular series for h.m.p titled The Plain Jane College Girl from Next Door is Secretly a Colossal Tits Slut In Glasses that I think she would excel in, but I'm sure Moodyz can find something similar for her to get the most out of her.

Momo is a 2022 debut that seems to be doing quite well right about now. I thought she great assets from her ass to her boobs and was quite good as a performer when I reviewed her. It's not surprising to see her doing well with assets like that, and we see her starting to get some spotlight now that she's settled into the industry quite nicely. Getting an opportunity with someone like Misono Mizuhara (who is also doing very well for herself) is a great sign of more to come. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Momo on the charts every now and then. Probably not in the top 25 quite regularly, I can't see that happening, but surely this isn't the last we've seen of her.

This month we rather unsurprisingly see Kurea drop eight spots. It's pretty easy to figure out why since we're now in April and she hasn't released a single video this year with no upcoming April videos. Kurea has been instead working at Bar Haru (a concept bar she is a part owner of) every chance she gets. I don't think that Kurea is done with JAV quite yet, especially as she doesn't seem like someone who would retire without any word. Still, she will inevitably continue to fall down the ranks if she continues not to release any content. I really hope she's not done with JAV because she's one of the greatest of all time (especially after her wonderful 2020) but four months of no releases is around when I start considering actresses to be retired. At any rate, I'll just keep praying we get more content from Kurea at some point.

Rika is definitely a bit of an under looked actress. She'll produce five or 10 videos in a month casually and nobody will really pay much attention to it. I think a lot of that comes down to the studios she works for, typically not being the major studios. That's certainly one of the downsides to being a b-tier actress like her where you just don't get the great opportunities. You have to work a lot harder to find success, so instead of being a once a month actress like a Yua Mikami, you just have to work your butt off. This is especially true if you struggle to get solo appearances and have to keep starring in group videos. Sometimes those are videos for studios like Hunter where you're just one of half a dozen actresses starring in a single scene, other times it's just two actresses and you're much more front and center. Regardless, Rika's output is certainly a good thing for her and hopefully she can find herself in some better opportunities in future months.

Mayuki is definitely an actress that doesn't get enough love in Western circles. She's got all the right qualities she's just missing that certain spark that puts her right at the top. It's nice to see her just squeak into the top 25 this month. I don't even have to tell you what makes her nice, the covers do such a great job of it already.

Hitomi is up some spots, no doubt people hopping on the bandwagon as she's about to retire. Some might pose that it's really not unusual to see her fluctuate a bit, and while I would agree that she can fluctuate, the fact that she is on DMM's physical list at 67th place tells a different story. People might not remember that Hitomi actually was domestically popular once upon a time, but I think a lot of people got bored of her content as it became quite repetitive and bland as the years went by. Still, we're gearing up for Hitomi's retirement this month (please nobody remind me) and it will be interesting to see just how high she places in the next month or two as the sales roll in. Especially with her last month including a VR release, it wouldn't surprise me if she was actually first in the near future.

Rena Aoi is an interesting addition to the top 25. I feel like fans are starting to realize that she's about to retire and are deciding to give her a bit more attention. Her retirement video is set to come out later this month (April) and then she's off to her job as a director (and interestingly enough, her director debut is her retirement video). It will be extremely interesting to see how she fares as a director because we don't really see actresses moving into that role. The only one I can think of is Nao Masaki and she's literally my favourite director, so it begs the question what Rena can do. This is especially true given that Rena is such a well known actress (compared to how popular Nao was) and that she was the kind of actress who would perform in Nao Masaki style videos. I could easily see a world where she becomes a Nao Masaki type director and that excites the hell out of me. At any rate, she's had a few good opportunities lately and this one is no slouch. VR + lesbian is a winning combination I tell ya, and she has two fantastic costars in Yui Hatano (1st place) and Mao Hamasaki (11th place). I'd wager that's partially why Mao is on the list (Yui's always at the top), but Mao has been doing quite well in recent months. We actually have to go back all the way to August to find her outside of our top 25, so quite an impressive feat that she's been consistently in the top 25 for over half a year now. Mao seems to have really found her groove balancing being an actress and being a DJ and I think she's just living the good life right now. Hopefully she can continue to be a dominant force.

Julia is an actress we often skip talking about because everyone already knows her. I find she's such a known quantity, whether that's her physical qualities or her performing capabilities. Julia doing two videos a month and rotating between a few studios (Chijo Heaven, Wanz Factory, Honnaka, Premium) gives her a lot of variety. I find I quite enjoy this as it makes studios have to be a bit more unique in the videos they produce rather than just the same boring, generic nonsense each month. That brings us to the video highlighted above, a March release for Honnaka. This video is absolutely amazing, one of Julia's best videos ever. I've reviewed it here and I would highly recommend checking it out. Julia's releases might be a dime a dozen but the good videos stand out a lot and this video is great.

Top Videos

In second and sixth we've got Mana Sakura videos. The sixth place video is particularly interesting as it's both a 10 year anniversary video for Mana and a 25th anniversary for Magic Mirror, according to the title, plus it's got Yuna Ogura as a guest star. At any rate it's interesting seeing Mana literally at the top with her March and April releases. It makes you wonder a bit if this is perhaps due to Mana hitting her 10 year anniversary. She actually had an omnibus with 15 hours of content come out in February that includes even some brand new content, and she's got sales going on to celebrate her milestone. Looking at DMM as I'm writing this, basically everything is on sale for her. It seems like this month is a bit of an outlier as a result of that perfect storm trifecta: 10 year anniversary, sales, and recently coming back to DMM. I would wager she'll still be popular next month just not quite this popular, but we shall see.

Our 9th place video is worth talking about because of the "Re:start" text at the top. You might not recognize the 本郷愛 text but you'll probably recognize Yume Nikaido's face. As I mentioned recently, Yume changed her name to Ai Hongo. I'm still too used to it being Yume Nikaido, and I made the reports still have her name pop up as Yume, but it's really all the same. What's most surprising to me is that they went back to a generic film as if she was a new actress or coming off some sort of hiatus. Yume hasn't taken any time off and the whole career restart really doesn't seem to apply. I might get it if you did it for someone like Ruri Saijo, who just did a video after a five year hiatus, but not for Yume. It's not like any of us forgot about her or didn't recognize who she was, so it's just really strange to me. Regardless, Yume, or should I say Ai, is still sticking around and still as popular as ever. Hopefully she doesn't end up in generic land for too long and can go back to more interesting videos like before.

Did I say this was the month of SOD? This particular list might convince you otherwise with six different S1 videos in the top 10, including both of Unpai's releases. Unpai still manages to baffle me because these videos are downright awful and somehow it's still flying off the shelves. I know she's a big Tik Tok star and all but it just seems like the novelty has to wear off at some point. I'm sure I'd be all over online celebrities that I know if they went into the business, so I don't blame people, but being this popular despite how little of an effort she's putting in is actually kind of frustrating. I say frustrating because she's lowering the bar quite a lot and I really hope other actresses don't follow suit. At any rate, we shall see how she does next month and especially if she continues long enough to go past the generic video portion and can't do this low effort stuff anymore.

Speaking of S1, we've got Saika's latest VR in 6th place and her previous VR in 4th. It's kind of crazy to see that the older one is doing better than the newer one, especially considering how well the older one already sold over many months. My guess would be that the big difference is the older one being a fair bit cheaper now, being only 500 yen for a 7-day rental versus 980 yen as the cheapest option for the newer one. Especially if you think about the 7-day rental of her older release being in HQ whereas the 980 yen option for her newer one is not HQ, probably most people will wind up with the 1280 yen option for HQ download + streaming. That means that her older video is effectively less than half the price, and that surely makes a huge difference. I'll be very curious to see how the two stack up against each other when we get to the end of the year sales. My guess is that because her first VR came out last November, the two months of sales being from last year will mean the newer one will overtake it eventually. I wouldn't say it's a forgone conclusion mostly because I think a good amount of people won't bother with the second VR. I myself find that I'm far more interested in watching an actress in VR for the first time than the second time and that is very likely the case for many Saika fans as well. I guess we'll just have to keep monitoring and seeing if it can keep pace.

Rena Miyashita seems to be doing well for herself having the first and third place releases this month. If I'm being honest the more casual approach that this video has seems to be working for it. I find a lot of debut videos tend to be very generic so making her seem more like an average person is a strategy that seems to be working. This is especially true when we've seen that from some other actresses recently, like Mio Ichikawa from earlier in the article. She's not the prettiest or bustiest but that sort of cute girl next door look that she's got going for her is always refreshing. We'll see if this is exactly that or if she really was a good debut when we see how she fares in the next couple of months.

Our 9th place actress, known only as Shiori, has been garnering a lot of attention. I've seen people call her Suzu 2.0 (in reference to Suzu Honjo) and I can kind of see it. What they also point out is her G cup boobs, which I certainly appreciate. I don't know if I would say Shiori is quite as pretty as Suzu but a slightly less attractive Suzu with much bigger boobs is certainly something to get excited about. It's obviously only her first release so time will tell how her career shapes up, but I for one am excited to see how it goes.

Up in 4th and 6th we have some group videos with IDs that have PFES in them. It's not the first time we've seen this but it can be a bit weird seeing actresses on different labels than we're used to. This is another DMM marketing campaign that a bunch of different studios participate in. While it's not quite what AV Open used to be it does have a similar feeling (at least from my perspective) given what we tend to see out of it. The end result is that a bunch of studios go out of their way to make notable releases for it and I won't argue. The best part about it is all the videos being on sale. The casts for these two in particular are absolutely insane and it shows.

In PFES-028 we've got Riho Fujimori, Luna Tsukino, Yu Shinoda, and Maron Natsuki. These are all names I know we've seen on the sales report before, probably quite a few times as well. These are also actresses who are known for their asses, especially Yu Shinoda. It's no surprise that the cover makes that abundantly clear and promotes it like no tomorrow.

In PFES-054 we've got AIKA, Mao Hamasaki, Yuri Oshikawa, and Hazuki Wakamiya. I'm pretty sure some of these names are extremely popular actresses that just about everyone knows, so of course it would do extremely well. Especially seeing these lovely ladies in bunny suits working at a bar, can't go wrong with that.

Ria Yamate continues to surprise me with how well she's doing. Three videos in the top 10 is insane, especially with the jump of 70 spots on the 10th place video. Having now seen her I can see what the fuss is about and why people would go crazy over her, but damn is she really doing well. She may end up giving popular S1 actresses like Yua Mikami and Saika Kawakita a run for their money, especially considering that she's above both of them with her latest. She's got a long way to go still considering she's only four videos in but it's impressive to be here this early on for sure. Will Ria continue to dominate a year from now? I might honestly guess she would, but there's only so much room at the top.

Thanks for checking out this month's sales report. Check back in next month for the April report and be on the look out for yearly sales reports. Until next time!