Maria Ozawa gently insists that she is not that young anymore—but as she sits with me, made up in sculpted hair and evening clothes, wearing sculpted gel nails, her legs crossed in a giant couch, deep in the cavernous third basement that is her very own nightclub, she manages to come across as curious and precocious. There is confidence in her tone but innocence in her manner, as if she were still finding her way around things and pleasantly surprised by small matters brought up in conversation.
But that is something she has been brought up to do. Maria entered the rough, tough, and secretive Tokyo JTV lounge scene at 18—two years before the legal drinking age in Japan. At that early age, she was taught how to mix other people’s cocktails before she could drink them. She was trained to make pleasant and engaging conversation.
She was encouraged to flirt just enough to keep the customers staying and paying, which was part of the culture of the classic hostess club that made it irresistible to Japanese salarymen and the foreigners lucky enough to gain admission. She learned to be distinctly polished and formal in her approach, and to always be disarmingly charming.
She also quickly learned how easily she stood out among the rest of the women working the scene. The daughter of a Canadian father and a Japanese mother, Maria bears a distinctive and immediately arresting mix of Western and Asian features, along with her startling fluency in English, by way of middle school and high school spent in Canada. This made her an easy pick for big-time producers in the Japanese AV (adult video) industry.
“Back in the day, there were very few foreigners or mixed-race girls in the AV industry,” Maria explains.
"They started to sell my school ID, my school photo book. They sold everything that was defined by my old name. So I was very traumatized by that."
The JAV industry is productive and prolific; it generates billions of US dollars in annual revenue, coming from an annual output of about 50,000 titles. Through a continuous revolving door of scouting, discovery, fast-burn stardom and youthful retirement, there are literally thousands of female performers working at any given time, covering a staggering range of genres and subgenres. The adult entertainment industry is part of the firmament of Japan’s economic landscape. And yet, it is still largely considered a hidden world, tinged by stigma and tucked away in the small streets and nondescript low-rise buildings in Tokyo and other major cities, in small media production offices, backstreet studios, and adult DVD stores.
