TOKYO (TR) – For Kaho Shibuya, her debut as a porn actress was not smooth sailing. To wit, her parents strongly opposed her appearance, leading them to impose psychological counseling upon her.
In February, publisher Saitosha released Hiroki Terai’s new book “Highly Educated AV Actresses,” a collection of interviews with past and present figures in the adult video industry whose pedigrees include elite academic backgrounds.
In the second of a three-part excerpt provided The Tokyo Reporter (the first is here), Shibuya — now a cosplayer, YouTuber and author — discusses how her parents found out about her former profession and how it motivated her to continue.
At the time of her debut, Shibuya had completed a stint as a reporter for evening tabloid Tokyo Sports. Shortly thereafter, a senior reporter who covers wrestling talked to former wrestler Akira Maeda about it, which led to her parents discovering the truth.
“I didn’t ask [Maeda] directly, but I think he probably did [leak it],” Shibuya tells Terai. “Maeda and my father were acquaintances, so he was worried. He said stuff like, ‘Is your daughter okay with appearing in [AV]? Isn’t she being threatened by the yakuza?’ It was four months after my debut. Well, I think he would have found out eventually, somehow.”
“Do you know Kaho Shibuya?”
The first real discussion within her family about her work in AV was with her mother.
“My mother sent me an email while I was at work saying. She wrote, ‘I have something important to talk to you about today.” When I got home, I could smell incense coming from the Buddhist altar. I hoped, ‘Maybe someone has died and they’re calling me.” But it didn’t work out that way.”
Instead, her mother asked, “Do you know Kaho Shibuya?”
“Come to think of it,” Shibuya remembers, “she asked me the same thing a while before, as if it was a light jab. But at that time, only the [DVD] packaging had been released. As well, it was a photo that had been retouched to the point it would not have been strange to call it out as just a a package photo manipulation. So my mother probably just thought it was similar. So, I was able to avoid it. But when the sample video came out, it was impossible. When they saw me talking and moving around, they found out after all.”
After Shibuya’s AV debut, the tabloid media gave her a lot of attention.
“I was featured in various weekly magazines as something like ‘Former newspaper reporter making her debut.’ I was completely surprised when [weekly tabloid] Friday even included a sealed envelope, color pull-out section,” she laughs.
Her mother, however, was not enthused.
“Rather than being angry, she was shocked,” Shibuya remembers. “She thought I was going crazy. So, she took me to a psychologist. The doctor was a friend of my father, and my mother asked that the psychologist to tell me to stop [working in AV] because [she thought] I was going crazy. But the psychologist calmly accepted the request and said, ‘Let’s talk about it just the two of us.’
The psychologist, a woman, later prescribed some medicine, both for her and her mother.
“Appear with a false history”
In the end, the counseling actually had the opposite impact — at least from the point of view of her parents. The psychologist came away with the impression that she grew up with parents who were overly involved and applied a significant amount of pressure upon her.
“[The counseling session] was only that one time, but when I told the counselor about my upbringing, my life, what I’m doing now and what led me to come here, she enjoyed it, saying, ‘That’s really interesting.’
That proved to be a “trigger” or turning point for her.
“I thought, ‘Maybe it would be better for my future work if I open up about my life,'” she says. “Until then, I had believed that ‘I wouldn’t be able to sell [DVDs] if I just keep my background the way it is.’ I thought that the basic rule for AV actresses was to appear with a false history. But from that point, I would try to do my best by showing my true self. When my parents took me to the psychologist to get me to quit AV, I ended up feeling motivated instead.”
With everything exposed, she decided to leave home.
