Back in the cold days of winter, weather forecaster Yuko Nakagawa gave men across Japan a little summery fantasy when she made her bikini-modeling DVD debut. But while Nakagawa certainly has the figure and facial features for that line of work, what set her DVD apart from the scores of other swimwear video collections is that at 43, Nakagawa is old enough to be the mother of many of her competitors.
Japan has an expression, though, Bijin ni toshi nashi, literally “A beautiful woman has no age,” asserting that an attractive woman’s looks aren’t diminished by her numerical age. So if Nakagawa can pull off wearing a tiny bikini at 43, more power to her, fans said, and now she’s back again with a second DVD in which she wears a sailor suit school uniform for the first time in decades.
It didn’t take long for Nakagawa’s first DVD, Ashita Tenki ni Nare (or Hoping for Good Weather Tomorrow) to become a sales success. The meteorologist/model’s first DVD went on sale at the tail end of January, and before February was over, she’d already been approached about doing a follow-up.
The new DVD, titled Into the mystic, has just been released, and Nakagawa appeared at the Akihabara branch of electronics and media retailer Sofmap on June 27 to promote it.
To film Into the mystic, Nakagawa and her crew traveled to Pattaya, a Thai city of roughly 100,000 people on the Bay of Bangkok. Many of the new release’s scenes are framed as though the viewer is Nakagawa’s boyfriend on a romantic trip to Thailand, but the star herself says this sometimes presented a bit of a challenge for her.
“There’s a scene where I’m supposed to have gotten up before my boyfriend and wake him up,” she explains, “but I’m not really a morning person, so I don’t have much experience doing that. My first instinct is just to say, ‘Come on get up get up!’ like I’m trying to force myself to get out of bed.”
▼ The DVD’s front cover and spine (also pictured: Nakagawa’s navel)
Still, Nakagawa says she gave it her all, describing working without an actor to play off as being like playing “air boyfriend” instead of “air guitar.” And besides, even if her performance isn’t completely flawless, there’s still the sight of the incredibly youthful 43-year-old in a schoolgirl uniform to look forward to.
“I wondered…are there really that many people who’d want to see me like that? But after I put it on and we started filming, it didn’t seem that weird,” recalls Nakagawa. “At 43, I never imagined I’d get to dress up like a high school girl, and I think it’s one of the highlights of the DVD.”
During a promotional event for her first DVD, an unprepared reporter asked Nakagawa if she had a boyfriend, to which the model replied that she’s in fact married. While giving an interview to celebrate the release of Into the mystic, Nakagawa was asked what her husband said when he saw her in the girlish outfit, to which she replied:
“Nothing in particular. My husband isn’t really all that interested in these kinds of things. He didn’t even watch my first DVD until I made him sit down and watch it with me, and when I asked him what he thought, he casually said, ‘Yeah, that’s cool.’”
Mr. Nakagawa’s penchant for understatement notwithstanding, we imagine plenty of people will be onboard with the idea of her wearing a sailor suit, and if you’re one of them, Into the mystic can be ordered here from Amazon Japan.
Related: Yuko Nakagawa blog, Twitter
Source: Fieldcaster
Top image: YouTube/fieldcasterjapan
Insert images: Amazon Japan
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