In the current issue of Weekly Playboy, busty Japanese model, cosplayer, YouTuber, and plastic modeler Umi Shinonome discusses how she got into gravure.
When in her third year at university, she was invited to do a shoot with some otaku photographer friends. She says she found the experience enjoyable, not just the shoot itself but the costumes, the location scouting, and the whole process of putting the results together.
Shinonome then started using social media to recruit photographers to shoot her.
After about a year, her management agency spotted and scouted her. She made her official gravure debut in January 2020 and immediately attracted a fandom.
She is quite candid about this: she notes that she couldn’t sing or dance, and her face and body were not suitable for regular fashion modeling. She also says she had no interest in acting.
“I had always liked gravure, so it felt like that was what I should do. That’s how I became a photo shoot model.”
While she liked gravure, actually doing it is another thing entirely. Asked if she had any uncertainties about launching that kind of career, Shinonome says she was pretty confident.
“My mom and grandma also have G-cups. My breasts were quite big, so I thought I could do it.”
The 26-year-old was an F-cup initially. This was, needless to say, large for a student and she got groped by her fellow students a lot at school.
It couldn’t have gone differently if she hadn’t been scouted. She was originally working in sales and was, perhaps for obvious reasons, very good at her job. At weekends she would do shoots with the photographers she recruited online. But eventually these shoots started to take over and she quit her job to concentrate on them. The rest, as they say, is (gravure) history. She is now one of the top idols in the industry.
Shinonome’s highly anticipated second photo book, which has a decidedly summery beach vibe, will be released in Japan on April 25.
