We asked you to stay tuned, and quicker than you can say ring-a-ding-ding above is Setsuko Ogawa as promised. Her guitar isn’t just for decoration. In addition to her many film credits she released a 1973 single and later sang the theme song of the Nikkatsu Studios roman porno flick Enka Jôshikô: Kizudarake no Kaben—translation: “petals full of scars”—in which she headlined.
We’ve seen Ogawa described as the first roman porno star, and that could be true. Her debut film was 1971’s Irogoyomi ōoku hiwa, aka Castle Orgies, and it was Nikkatsu’s first official offering from its radical new genre, or possibly the second, depending on which source you believe. She starred in another Nikkatsu movie that year, so she was certainly among the genre’s first recognizable faces.
The above image was pasted together from two larger shots and put online several years ago. We found full-frame versions of those separate shots, but not at a useful resolution, so two cropped shots stuck together like Siamese twins is what you get. However the resolution on that image is good, so we put it under the digital knife and split it during a dicey operation that took all of five seconds, with the results below. We’ll have more from Ogawa at some point.
