BEIJING - In her white sneakers, Sola Aoi tiptoes through the Beijing studio as if she were wearing 20-centimetre-high heels. Every finger nail is covered with a different combination of rhinestones, glitter and plastic.
This 1.55-metre-tall actress can only do cute. Or maybe she has just played the role for so long.
The 30-year-old Japanese is a celebrity icon in China. She has her own branded collection of ladies' under-things.
She began her career 10 years ago as a porno star in her Japanese homeland, and later won film roles in South Korea and Indonesia as her fame spread through Asia.
As a media personality, her style is her brand. She has 15 million followers on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, quite an accomplishment, even in a country with a billion people.
"I don't know either why people find me so great," she told dpa, describing herself as a low-brow dolly bird. That however has been precisely the key to her success.
"She was something of a teacher for us," a 25-year-old man says, in a bid to explain her cult status among teens and young adults in China.
Japanese adult video star Sola Aoi, also spelled Sora Aoi, joins a stage show at Buriram United FC's I-Mobile Stadium in Buriram province two years ago. (Photos by Pattarachai Preechapanich)
Chinese authorities have a streak of puritanism that makes them shy of western-style sex education, and pornography is strictly forbidden. On the internet, sites with pictures of naked bodies get censored quickly.
"We use some ingenious tricks to get hold of Sola's pin-ups and videos," the man chuckles. He says boys supply one another with digital copies of them at schools and universities.
For some, her videos were the sole sources for a first impression of sex, earning her the sobriquet among many Chinese men of "the teacher."
Asked how she feels about that image, Sola Aoi brings an embarrassed hand to her mouth, Japanese-style.
"I know that many videos have been seen by many people here in China," she says.
"But I haven't given much further thought to it," she claims. In reality, her online presence shows she has a talent for dramatic images.
When China's censors wanted to tighten regulations on the presentation of bare skin in the internet, Sola Aoi demonstratively published a close-up of herself wearing a plunging neckline.
But she shrugs the stunt off, asserting, "I'm not a political person."
The petite star denies being China's greatest sex educator, claiming she is just an older sister providing tips about fashion and makeup to her Chinese female fans.
However she manages to do it, her success in China is very visible, and especially remarkable given China's difficult relations with Japan.
In a country where every day state television broadcasts films and television series on the war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers during World War II, Sola Aoi's candy-coated image is the sweet alternative.
None would even think of her as a hard-nosed Japanese businesswoman, though from time to time she does have to put up with nationalist hostility on her microblog account. Most of the time her fans come to her defence within minutes.
In 2012, when conflict between Beijing and Tokyo became especially intense, the former nude model adroitly joined the fray with positive words: "I hope that we normal people can have a good relationship," she wrote.
Along with the statement she included a picture of "Japanese-Chinese friendship" that she wrote in calligraphy.
Within a few hours, her microblog comment was shared 100,000 times and received more than 150 comments.
She sings in Mandarin Chinese - her online discography shows two releases this year - and in fact, Chinese society seems to accept her as one of their own, allowing her to participate in Chinese society in her own inimitable style.
When it came out a year ago that the head of a Chinese elementary school had been sexually assaulting his female pupils, she had herself photographed with a sign that said: "Mister Director, get a room with me and leave the little girls alone."