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Thanks to Japan's Confucian past, nastier types tend to view women marrying only after falling pregnant as little short of sluts.

So their shock was enormous last week when actress Ryoko Hirosue, who has virtually grown up in front of the cameras and made a lucrative career out of her virginal image, announced she was marrying to do the right thing by the child she is bearing.

 

And, as Shukan Jitsuwa (1/1) shows, the knives have already been sharpened for Hirosue.

 

"She's totally lacking the ability to plan in advance. How can her agency ever trust her?" a Tokyo talent agency insider asks rhetorically in Shukan Jitsuwa. "She can't read what's about to happen. That's why she runs wild, goes through any number of guys and now finds herself pregnant."

 

Noting that some are already calling for Hirosue to retire from the entertainment world, a sports newspaper hack covering the celebrity beat says that marriage and pregnancy threaten Hirosue's career.

 

"She promised (when dropping out of posh Waseda University in October) that she was going to concentrate on her acting career, so she should never have let herself get pregnant. She's really betrayed her fans," the hack tells Shukan Jitsuwa. "Marriage and motherhood are part and parcel of the careers of entertainers, so agencies usually help out with the planning. But this unexpected pregnancy has got her agency worried, too. Hirosue's reputation for acting is fairly good and people were just starting to say that her time was about to come."

 

Compounding matters for the 23-year-old actress who's been a fixture on Japan's TVs since the mid-'90s, her model boyfriend Takahiro Okazawa has a reputation that couldn't be further from Hirosue's squeaky clean image.

 

Okazawa is an amateur boxer once apparently ranked among the toughest streetfighters in Shibuya, Tokyo's teen Mecca.

 

He has been seeing Hirosue on and off for about the past two years. Though now burdened with the double responsibilities of fatherhood and marriage, his status as "Hirosue's husband" could give his fledgling modeling career the shot in the arm it needed.

 

"He's suddenly become famous. Sure, he's tall, but I'd guess his current annual salary would only be in the 4 million yen to 5 million yen range. He's not even in the same class as Hirosue, who wouldn't even consider appearing in a TV ad for less than 10 million yen," an entertainment beat reporter tells Shukan Bunshun (12/25).

 

Hirosue appears doomed to join the ranks of so many female Japanese celebrities for whom motherhood has meant an end to their most profitable years.

 

"Hirosue always said she wanted to marry before turning 25. Well, her wish has come true. But, even if she does come back after giving birth, she'll never reach the heights she could have," the reporter tells Shukan Bunshun. "Who'll ever forget she almost caused a riot when she first turned up for class at Waseda University? And, even though she struggled to keep up with her classes, she stuck it out until at least October this year. But now she's dropped out of college and her career is at the crossroads, she'll always be known for only doing things in half-measures."

 

Shukan Jitsuwa is even more scathing, pointing out how Hirosue will forever be tainted for getting pregnant out of wedlock, making it unlikely she will pick up the tattered threads of her career after having the baby due in May next year.

 

"If she retires now," a tabloid TV insider tells Shukan Jitsuwa, "the bad image she's made for herself with the shotgun marriage will stay with her forever."

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Tis quite funny how the reporters(most likely males) have conveniently forgotten the role a man plays in "a lack of planning"(as they put it) pregnancy.

 

As someone whom has been engaged for over six months now and planning for the scrog on the way for about the same amount of time, I am taking a lot of flak now that we have been sucessful. Not as much as my partner whose mother belevies that the upholding of Japanese society "traditions" rest upon her shoulders.

 

This country really needs to wake up and smell the roses from the greener grass on the other side of the hill. The times they be a changing peoples!

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> the upholding of Japanese society "traditions"

 

All the more ironic that until this century in Japan, one would certainly not make the mistake of marrying a girl who wasn't capable of bearing children. And there has always been only one way to find that out.

 

Indeed, Emperor Hirohito's insistence on monogomany was considered a most reckless form of eccentricity, precisely because he was hedging his bets.

 

The 'dekichatta kekkon' almost seems to be the norm in Japan as with most other places now, and whereas it was frowned upon in the West in the past, it was considered only common sense up to Japan's recent past.

 

Free pregnancy test girls? I do them.

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 Quote:
Originally posted by fukdane:
 Quote:
Sure, he's tall, but I'd guess his current annual salary would only be ......
WTF is that? Sure he's tall, but his salary...?! wakaranai.gif wakaranai.gif
well.... she had a point. It is pretty measly.
:p

(JUST JOKING AROUND)
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