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“Mariten is ugly without photoshop.”

–You wanted to work in the adult entertainment industry for a long time, so you ran a shop, but after two and a half years you became mentally ill. That must have been tough. How long were you hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital?

Mariten (hereinafter the same)Three months.

How did you spend your time during hospitalization?

I was well behaved in the psychiatric hospital, so I was given a smartphone halfway through. After that, I contacted my former clients from my sex worker days, and they came to Aichi to visit me. We updated each other on our current situations and asked each other questions like, “What should I do in the future?” The clients who came to see me were the ones I could trust the most, so those times were very healing for me.

–I see. You were hospitalized for three months. What happened after that?

During my stay in hospital, I transferred the shares of the adult entertainment store I was running to someone else and moved out of my house in Tokyo, so I really had nothing. My parents told me not to go to Tokyo again, and I was under house arrest in my parents’ house in Aichi, without even being allowed to have a wallet. However, I still had my residence card and passport, so I decided to take those two and work at a delivery health service in Aichi without my parents knowing.

──The first thing you did after being released from hospital was to work in the sex industry.

Yes. So, as I worked in the adult entertainment industry in Aichi and interacted with customers, I gradually felt more energetic and wanted to go to Tokyo again. My parents told me that they would let me go to Tokyo if I could show them a job offer for a job other than the adult entertainment industry, so I went to Tokyo to look for a job and got a job offer as a web planner for a major adult distribution company.

After moving to Tokyo and working at that company for about a year, I realized that I wanted to make a living doing what I loved, and I began to feel like I wanted to work in the adult entertainment industry again.

–So, did you start working in the sex industry again in Tokyo?

Yes. But I was still afraid of working exclusively in the sex industry, so I decided to continue working as a sex worker while also working as a YouTuber. When I was ready to do that, I decided to quit my job at the major adult distribution company.

──I see. Was YouTube a success?

I started in February 2020, and it was right at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, so within 3-4 months, my videos were consistently being played over 10,000 times, and I was on track. Before my videos were being played, I would post comments on online message boards like, “I saw you on YouTube, and Mariten is ugly without any editing,” and I would create a firestorm of controversy to increase the number of views (laughs).