It would surely be the most-wanted job for any man in Japan.
But incredible as it sounds, there is a shortage of male actors in Japanese porn (known as “JAV”).
“There are only 70 or so male adult video actors,” Japan’s biggest male porn star Shimiken tweeted the other day. “That’s less than the number of Bengal tigers.” He said that the ones doing most of the work are even less — just 30.
We’ve always known that there was a relatively small number of men working professionally and full-time in the industry. But we didn’t know the men themselves were worried.
Here is Shimiken and some pals.
Shimiken should know — he’s appeared in around 7,000 titles in 16 years, by Kotaku’s calculations.
On the other side, there are (in Shimiken’s estimate) 10,000 actresses.
Of course, the disproportionate numbers can partly be attributed to the concept of kikaku joyu, the nameless (and poorly-paid) actresses who appear in the more unusual JAV porn titles that call for dozens of anonymous women to be screwed by a series of men. Plus many actresses change their “name” multiple times in a career, leading to multiple “debuts”.
That’s why you sometimes here figures like “6,000″ women making their porn debut each year. Well, the industry releases hundreds of titles a month (sometimes you read about “thousands” but this just cannot be true, even for the largest per-capita porn industry in the world).
Something like 14 porn films are being made each day. That keeps the low numbers of men like Shimiken very busy. Being harried and stressed is not good in any job but certainly not when you really need to “perform” with your body, and make it look sensitive and interest, and not just your 152nd new girl you are fucking this month.
So, do we have any takers? Anyone want to help share Shimiken’s workload for him?
For the record, Shimiken was right in his analogy. There are something like 1,700 Bengal tigers in India today.
