In a stark contrast to the '90s when payouts were bigger the closer women got to being starkers, Noughties Japan now pays more to gals who wear clothes, albeit not too many, where once they would have bared their souls and more, according to Shukan Post (11/18).
Haruka Nanami is one of the hottest women in the market in a practice called chakuero, a contraction of the Japanese words for "wear" and "erotic." Chakuero proponents like Nanami strike sexy poses for the camera, but do so without shedding their clothes.
Nanami's first job about three years ago -- a shoot for a DVD -- paid her 100,000 yen. When it sold well, her publisher asked her to make the poses a little more risque and offered to pay more for them.
"My poses were pretty raunchy, so I ended up being paid about 100,000 yen for the first print of the photo book," she tells Shukan Post. "The book sold like wildfire and there was one new edition after another, with my payment being 300,000 yen to 400,000 yen for each new edition. I eventually made about 2.5 million yen out of it."
Producer Motoji Takasu explains how chakuero models have come to dominate Japan's erotic pose market.
"The early '90s were really an incubation period. Standard payments used to be about 10 percent, which the model and her photographer divided evenly. By the mid-'90s, photo collections couldn't sell unless they were shots taken by a famous photographer. In those cases, the model received 3 percent and the photographer 7 percent. Standard figures in the incubation period were based on a calculation of a 4,000-yen book selling 30,000 copies, which meant the model could expect to be paid around 6 million yen. Later, the figures were for sales of about 10,000 copies of a 3,000-yen book. Women were only being paid about 900,000 yen for posing nude," Takasu tells Shukan Post. "The outcome of all this was that famous actresses stopped taking their clothes off for the cameras. Now, with everybody owning digital cameras, the bottom has fallen out of the market and the demand for nude photo spreads has disappeared."
That's not to say that baring all for the shutterbugs is no longer a profitable profession. Women can make several dozen thousands of yen a day agreeing to strip down as a model for photo clubs or individual shutterbugs.
Or there's another type of nude modeling job that women are dying to get in to - almost literally! They can work as TV or movie extras posing as murder victims, morgue corpses or a bather at a hot spring resort.
"There's a production company that deals exclusively in supplying women to pose as naked corpses for dramas. The basic rate of pay is 8,000 yen for three hours work on a TV show. It pays a bit better if the show is on in the peak ratings period, but never more than 50,000 yen a day," a TV production company insider tells Shukan Post. "To make sure there's the maximum possible extent of realism, it's usually the sickly types who get the corpse work. There have even been some corpse models who've gone on to extremely successful modeling careers."
Maybe not quite as dead easy a way to make money by buffing up on being in the buff are those women who form erogs -- erotic Web logs. These women pose nude without ever showing their faces, but showing everything else, or at least as far as is legal to do in Japan. But they do so more for a yen than for the yen.
"Let me make it clear to you that I don't do this for the money. I get several requests from companies each month offering me anywhere from 100 yen to 1,000 yen for each click of a banner they place on my site," Yuki, a regular OL and self-confessed erogger, tells Shukan Post. "If you become popular and get lots of people visiting your site, you can make somewhere from 100,000 yen to 200,000 yen a month." (By Ryann Connell)
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