Jukujo

The Japanese have a specific word for older women in their adult industry: jukujo. There’s an entire category built around them, and it’s not failing. The industry gets fresh twenty-year-olds every year in bad schoolgirl costumes, and the jukujo women just keep working. They’re not marginalized, not treated as a novelty. They’re just there.

Vice did a piece with Chisato Shoda, one of the performers in that space. She talked about the work—what the fantasies look like, what happens when desire is aimed at bodies that show their age. The Japanese industry has never pretended that male desire is monolithic. It’s messier and more specific than that.

What interests me is how unsentimental it is. The category exists because men want it. The women know what their audience desires and deliver it, no apology, no story about empowerment. Just work. The fantasy isn’t she’s secretly young—it’s she knows what she’s doing.

In America, we pretend desire should be simple: youth and perfection. Anything else is a fetish, a compromise, something to hide. The Japanese just make what people actually want instead of what they think people should want. I respect that approach way more than I probably should.