The alluring gravure idol and actress Haruna Yabuki (formerly known as Mari Abe) has gone fully nude in a “hair nude” shoot for Golden Week in a weekly tabloid magazine, shot by the famed photographer Kishin Shinoyama.
Though she has done semi-nude shoots before, this is a new step for the 1984-born Yabuki, who has officially now become a jukujo like Manami Hashimoto or Mitsu Dan.
The truth is, Yabuki’s career is at a bit of an ebb. She broke up with her idiot celebrity boyfriend after she caught him in bed with a hostess. It’s been years since she was releasing photobooks and gracing the weeklies. This may be her last major commercial gig.
These weekly tabloid spreads are often promos for a photo book, and this is no exception. The new Yabuki-Shinoyama book is scheduled for the end of May. We look forward to seeing Haruna’s hair.
A “hair nude” is a full-frontal shoot. Since the actual depiction of genitalia is legally “obscene”, showing a hairy bush was a way to be bold and bust taboos. The vogue over twenty years ago for hair nudes caused problems for bookstores and publishers, who were potentially breaking the law, but by positioning the photo books as art they could steer around the issue.
When weekly tabloids feature hair nude shoots they often seal the offending pages or even censor the actual genitals, which is kind of against the point but anyway…
Kishin Shinoyama, now in his horny seventies, was the pioneer of the genre.
However, the hair nude is now out of fashion and has become a choice for porn stars or actresses who appear in soft-core films, such as Yuki Mamiya, Yoko Kamon, Risa Goto, Kokone Sasaki, Mayu Mitsui or Mitsu Dan. The only regular models and idols who do it are people who are getting older and their careers are waning.
In the past, though, it was the opposite: mainstream, young (possibly even underage, like Rie Miyazawa) stars did it to launch their careers up a further notch, such as Miyazawa or Miho Kanno did triumphantly.
There have been very few such high-profile hair nudes in recent years, though the Gekkan series of monthly photo books attempted to revive the genre. A great example was Eimi Kuroda.
