The story
Athena Eizou was founded December 21, 1981, by pink film director Tadashi Yoyogi and Hikaru Kitoh (鬼闘光). The VCR and home video market in Japan was still very small at this time and Yoyogi, who has been described as the "Father of Japanese Adult Video", had produced his first adult video just a month before. Japanese adult entertainment audiences, however, were already moving away from the theatrical pink film and Athena Eizou and Yoyogi proved successful. The company's first star was Kyōko Aizome, called the "first hard-core porn actress in Japan", who appeared in several early releases in the 1980s. In the next decade, "big-bust" actress Mariko Morikawa made her AV debut with Athena with the July 1994 release Tits Way Too Huge.
In 2010, the company, which is located in Tokyo's Shibuya ward, had a capital of 10 million Yen (about $100,000) and the CEO was 杉山英寛. Athena Eizou has operated a website Athena Online since April 2003 with an audience derived 84% from Japan and 12% from China. The website has videos available by mail order and by direct download, including a number of works from the early years of the company. The company produces about seven or eight new releases per month on DVD.
From Wikipedia’s article on Athena Eizou, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3