May 23, 2017: Eight Million Yens filming income given up, Yura Kokona 心花ゆら is gone!
Yura Kokona's fan event scheduled for May 28th at Akihabara has been cancelled. Kokona is the second Yura doing an un-explain disappearing act, after Yura Sakura さくらゆら (also Kawaii contract girl)'s off-and-on-and-off retirement/disappearance [another ongoing story that I may translate later]. The netizens are a bit spooked. What's going on?
Yura dropped a bomb on May 17 [it doesn't seem to be twitter, I'm not sure in which social media this bomb was dropped]:
Yura has given up on collecting the 8 million yens fee that she's due and has run away with a newly met boyfriend.
The reason: Yura originally joined the AV industry after believing her manager that she will be [rich and] famous. But once she signed the contract she found that she practically become a "slave" to the manager. She was forced to live with and have sex (without paid) with a man ["a man" might be the the manager himself, the original text wasn't clear] and even the income that she earned by filming AV was swallowed by the manager.
According to this post, the manager wasn't named, but he's a producer with the studio Aroma Planning アロマ企画. He also allegedly controls her agency Sisters Tokyo シスターズ東京 so she's not getting any support or protection. Also the manager is accused to be a master of social media including Twitter and also charges exorbitant "consultant fee". The post claims this manager is very powerful in the AV industry and can do as he pleases. It's also very likely that he's already reading this post [meaning the original post written by or on behalf of Yura Kokona] [and implying that he can take revenge action against Yura or others]
The post also claims that, if she get sued for "failure to fulfill contract responsibility", she will file a formal complaint/report with the police or consult with lawyers [kind of amazing that she hasn't done so a long long time ago].
How real is that post?? Many of the details are not verifiable now, but some studio (producers of AV) personnel having some secret arrangement with agencies (supposed to be on the side of the performers) is an open secret. On one hand, it's possible that the post was planted by persons with ulterior motives to make false accusation against certain industry operator(s). On the other hand, the official Twitter account of the involved agency [meaning Sisters Tokyo] has become extremely quiet, retweeting only one inconsequential post in a whole week. That is pretty mysterious.
The post has, of course, raised some hay in the cyperspace. Some netizens are searching for the real world identity of this "Aroma Planning producer", some even say they would file a report with the police. But after all this is only the cyberspace, for every 100 screaming posts about action, there's probably no even one action being taken.
It's also very odd that almost a whole week has passed since the bomb was dropped, but nothing has (apparently) happened since.
Last October, Yura Kokona debuted as a Kawaii contract girl with a rather unusual persona: she is a kendoka (a kendo practitioner). After the 3-films contract, the loli idol [only 19 yr old] made quite a few vids in a short time with various studios. With over 30 vids under her belt, it's indeed plausible that her accumulated income was over 8 million yens. [If she had really not received any of that fee, she would be one of the most abused victims of the AV industry recently]
If this affair is real, it would likely cause a very serious impact to the industry. Earlier this year, a high ranking Japanese official had publicly declared a crack-down on illegal activities by the AV industry. While the last few weeks the authorities have not taken further enforcement actions, the appearance of this megabomb of a post is likely to cause some tremors. The problem is, even if not every accusation contained in the post were true, there's a tendency to suspect the worst. There are just too many skeletons in AV industry's closet for the general public to give them benefit of a doubt.
