By Keri O’Shea
Well, as my esteemed colleague Ben has already told you all, we plan on making August a huge celebration of the life of Asami Sugiura as she approaches her thirtieth birthday. But it also occurs to us that, out there, some of you may be completely uninitiated into the ways of one of our favourite horror and exploitation actresses. Firstly, we pity you if that’s the case, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Here’s a little introduction, from us, to you.
So just who is this Asami?
Tokyo-born Asami started out as an AV idol in her native Japan, getting her launch at the age of nineteen and staying in the industry until 2008, when she retired. Now, it’s worth saying that in Japan, the world of the AV – Adult Video – industry is rather different to how we’d probably recognise porn in the West. Japan generally has an oddball relationship with sex and its sex industry reflects that; it’s both overt and coy. You can access everything and anything that suits your tastes, but what you get is heavily pixellated; there’s a ferocious appetite for pornography, and you can buy it readily most anywhere, but no one really talks about it in polite society. In any case, your average AV/V Cinema (direct-to-video genre) starlet starts at a young age, and performs in any number of ‘niche’ cinema projects, usually also appearing in supporting photo spreads for magazines and the like for a couple of years at best. Thousands of girls get their big launch every year, and most of them disappear not too long after; it’s a crowded market, with heavy demand, and lots of girls eager to get their big break. Although the world of AV is different to the porn industry in the West, though, what’s common there as here is that it’s incredibly rare for an actress to make the switch from porn to mainstream roles. Can you name more than two or three Western porn stars who have made that transition? Nope, me neither. Asami is remarkable because even while she was still appearing in V Cinema, she was concurrently working on…well, I don’t know if we can call The Machine Girl ‘mainstream’ as such, because everything about it screams ‘I am not for everyone’, but the very fact that she was in it marks her out as different to so many of her peers. She took a risk – Noburu Iguchi took a risk – and it paid off. Speaking to Dazed magazine, Asami credits her former porno business colleague for giving her that opportunity: “He had directed adult movies and when he got the chance to do a low budget horror film he wanted to work with people he knew and trusted. I was very lucky because he realised I was interested in playing more legitimate roles.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
So how has she done so well?
Nia will be talking in more depth about Asami’s transition from AV to horror and her work with two directors in particular, but suffice to say that her career has now forged ahead into other territory, and it’s what we know and love her for. It’s not as simple as simply catching a lucky break, though. Luck plays its part, sure but there’s good reason that Asami has been able to achieve so much.
Japan may in many ways be a misogynistic culture, but it does have a tradition of heavy female representation on screen, and it acknowledges the fact that it must also cater to a large female audience; women have readily entered every cinematic genre there is in Japan, and Asami has now found her place in a long line of striking and talented B-movie actresses who know who their audiences don’t just comprise of men. To do well within the country, you have to get your head around this truism. As long ago as 1991 in his work Pink Samurai, critic Nicholas Bornoff was paying tribute to a “new breed of beauteous bloody mamas” gracing the screen in Japan; joining the ranks of Meiko Kaji and Eihi Shiina, Asami has proven that she has the charisma and work ethic needed to establish herself as an actress.
Of course, the reason that we can talk about her appeal at all is because her movies have made it across the hemisphere divide and got her known in the West, something which is tough to achieve, even in these days. A lot of her work still lacks legitimate release here sadly, but (to name but a few) titles like Mutant Girls Squad and RoboGeisha are always going to get you noticed. These films are gloriously loopy and a lot of fun, and you can expect a lot more chattering about how awesome they are over the coming month.
So, why her? Aside from the happy circumstance of her being given the chance to prove she could do the work in the first place, we can see in Asami an utter willingness to throw herself into her work (never has this girl phoned her performance in), a real hunger for her work to be accepted and valued, and of course a self-effacing streak when she talks about all of her successes to date. She’s in it for the long haul, she’s unconventional and as Ben noted, she’s one of a rare breed of actresses who really qualifies for the monicker ‘scream queen’. That’s reason enough, we feel, to pay a little thanks to Asami on her birthday. So if you didn’t know who she was before, you sure as hell will by the end of the month!