Company Matsuo

Company Matsuo (カンパニー松尾, Kanpanii Matsuo) is a Japanese adult video (AV) director, producer and entrepreneur. He is credited with popularizing the Japanese porn genre of "hamedori", where the director/actor performs sexually with the actress and also films the actual action. He has been called "a master of shooting pornography with amateurs".

Matsuo was born June 29, 1966 in Aichi Prefecture. His nickname "Company" goes back to his junior high school days when he sold box lunches to his fellow students and became known as "Company". He was interested in a TV career from his high school days and after finishing technical college he joined a music TV company. When the company went bankrupt a friend talked to him about the AV industry.

Matsuo's first job in AV was with V&R Planning which had just started up in 1986. The company was small and when Matsuo joined the firm in 1988, he was only the fourth employee. He started as an Assistant but began making his own films by 1989.

V&R Planning didn't only make AV - founder Kaoru Adachi was interested in death videos and V&R distributed the Japanese versions of the US Faces of Death as Janku or Junk. About 1989, the company sent Matsuo and a cameraman to Brazil to film death scenes for V&R's continuation of the Junk series. He spent two weeks in Rio de Janeiro listening to police radio with local newsmen and filming accidents and murder scenes.

Matsuo's first films for V&R were dramas but he started working in the documentary hamedori style in 1991. Matsuo says that it was Yumika Hayashi, an AV actress at V&R at the time, who was the indirect cause of his switch to hamedori. He was having a love affair with Hayashi but the films he directed with her used professional AV actors. He felt that the more intimate hamedori technique could allow both him and the actress to show true emotion. His technique was to use amateurs, travel to their hometowns, and talk to them extensively on camera to get them to open up before any sex scenes started. His collaboration in hamedori videos with Reiko Miyazaki (宮崎レイコ), who started out as an amateur at V&R, made the director and actress well-known.