JAV Studio President says ‘The Industry is Dying’

Hearing insight about the JAV industry is always interesting, especially when it’s from people within the industry. This was the case when the president of the studio Celeb no Tomo, known online as Hakusuiriki, spoke out about his dinner conversations with other fellow heads of studios. And he walked away from that conversation with grim tidings.

This poor prognosis is mirrored by many within the industry. There’s been a wave of exits from well-known actresses, while those lower on the totem pole lament the lack of work. Support staff are scrambling for jobs while producers complain they can’t push out as many films. Hakusuiriki lays the blame at a few culprits, so let’s walk through them and, more importantly, try to dissect what’s wrong with the AV industry and the paths to success it can take in the future.

This is an issue that plagues not just JAV or porn but also the Film, TV, Music, and Video Game industries. It’s an issue they have all long tried to fight against, to middling results. Earlier this year, the JAV industry celebrated a big win after taking down a very well-known JAV piracy tube site. However, it was promptly brought back up and replaced with another site. All it really caused was a headache for Mio Ishikawa, a mascot for JAV’s anti-piracy push and the cover image for their takedown page. To add insult to injury, the newly reloaded pirate site made it so that all of Mio’s videos were Ad-free.

Piracy is a losing battle. If film, music, and video games can’t beat it, how can porn, which has less financial and political backing, do any better? Steam co-founder Gabe Newell is infamously quoted for saying that “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”. I don’t know if I entirely agree with that statement, nor if it can apply to porn. What I do know is that some studies and reports saw a decline in piracy for TV, Film, and Music in the 2010s. This was also the time of the rise of subscription-based services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Pandora, Video-on-Demand, and the like. When people have access to low-cost, easy-to-use services with high-quality sources, they will prefer that over piracy.

The biggest barriers to entry to JAV are, in my opinion, language, mosaics, and access, in that order. People would love to understand what the performers are saying, especially for the more plot-heavy JAV, which is what ZENRA is built on. While mosaics are a clear turnoff when uncensored alternatives exist, the talent and videos are unique to JAV and will draw in people. However, of the three, I think the biggest barrier is the lack of access outside of Japan. Hakusuiriki mentions another reason for sounding the alarm bells on JAV's future: the future population of Japan. If the population of Japan stagnates, so does the total viewership of JAV. So, how can the market be expected to grow if it’s mostly contained to Japan?

"Japan's population is rapidly declining. In other words... the number of people watching AV is steadily decreasing."

As an international fan, I can’t tell you all the hurdles I have to go through if I want to buy a legal piece of JAV from official storefronts. Payment processor issues, IP Region bans, VPN blocks, language barriers, or DRM restrictions. That’s not even getting into physical media and merchandise, which is a whole other pricey ballgame. There will always be people who want to pirate and steal stuff, but if you give users an attractive option over piracy. Something affordable, easy to use, convenient, and the users will come. Literally.

To the modern era's credit, I have noticed an uptick in special titles from massive orgies, like with the return of Bako Bus or special team-ups with actresses from across different studios. It’s also an era with the best overall talent pool, in my opinion, and the video quality and productions are top-notch when they want to be. If we brought back the looser, chaotic, and free energy of the past, then we could be looking at a new golden age.

Not to say that I want the movie format to go away, it’s part of what I really like about JAV. However, maybe not every title needs to be a full movie? Maybe more studios could switch over to a scene-based model and save the full-length feature titles to the others. Madonna or S1 making full-length films makes sense, Hunter or Switch not as much.

ANG-010 Minami Kozue x Usui Saryu, Private Photoshoot, Godly Lesbian Swimsuit

Another hot take I have is that maybe there’s too much porn? Perhaps the industry is oversaturating the market and flooding it with too much shovelware of porn. It dilutes the quality of videos, buries others in a sea of smut that piles up, and lowers the value of a video. Japan is one of the biggest makers of porn in the world. When you compare its output to that of America relative to its size, it’s staggering.