As regular readers will know, we are as interested in the current professional activities of Japanese porn stars as we are in their post-career lives: What do they do are they retire from adult video? What jobs do they do? Can they settle down with a partner and start a family?
An interesting example of this is Suzumi Suzuki, who used to work as a porn star under the name Ruri Satoh in the mid-2000s.
She then got a graduate degree from the University of Tokyo (she also holds an undergraduate degree from the equally prestigious Keio University) and launched a career as a sociologist and newspaper journalist, writing most prominently about the adult video industry.
She has since worked primarily as a fiction and nonfiction writer, twice making the shortlist for the Akutagawa Prize.
She is in illustrious company: porn stars Mihiro and Mana Sakura are further examples of porn performers who who published novels.
This week brought the news that Suzumi Suzuki has found love and happiness at the age of 40. She announced her marriage to Shun, a Kabukicho host and the head chef at a sushi restaurant.
The announcement was made on social media and was then picked up by the mainstream media, which failed to report her porn career — simply saying she was an “actress” during college. (The Japanese mainstream media, despite the huge size of the JAV industry, often gets euphemistic about porn, using terms like “sexy actress.”)
We are very curious to know how she met her husband, since typical customers at host clubs are actually female hostesses, sex workers, and other such women who spend their lives serving men. We assume a lot of JAV stars also spend their hard-earned cash in host clubs, because it gives them a place to feel pampered and listened to. Suzuki/Satoh is herself a former hostess.
It is also another example of the trend for idols and stars to have relationships with male hosts or former male hosts. Another instance includes ex-AKB48 Mariya Nagao, who is in a long-term relationship with a former host. Despite all the recent negative news coverage of male hosts and their exploitative activities terms of extracting money from clients, they remain also very attractive figures to successful and good-looking women.
