Japanese Adult Video Proliferation
Posted on July 12, 2009
Filed Under Japanese History |
With the growing connectivity of the world wide web, JAV has received exponential growth in exposure to the West. With the growth of porn tube sites, many tube sites focus on the JAV niche, the most prominent in North America being sites like Youporn, and fast growing new JAV-only tube sites such as YouJav.com.
Magazines are, along with videos, popular media for pornographic materials. Unless a magazine contains pornographic manga or pictures, there is a no age requirement for its purchase. Many non-pornographic magazines have some glamour photography and as long as women are in something more than a swimsuit, it is considered a non-pornographic photograph. Several non-pornographic magazines have some nude photographs of women as a part of their articles but as long as they have an artistic quality and do not show men, it is not considered pornographic. Furthermore, a female and male doll may be partially clothed or even nude as long as it is a work of art and is not in an act of sex.
Confessional writings by both genders are a popular topic in men’s and pornographic magazines. Quite often, these writings are fictional stories written by professional authors. Other popular topics in men’s and pornographic magazines are erotic manga and novels, reviews of pornographic videos, and reports of sex services.
Women’s magazines also have most of the writings of men’s and pornographic magazines. Except for a few glamour photographs of men (who are usually clothed), they lack graphic pornographic contents. Few, if any, of magazines targeted for women are considered pornographic or have an age requirement as they lack any graphic content.
Manga with a pornographic content target both male and female audiences and both male and female mangaka (manga authors) write pornographic works.
The dividing line for manga on what is pornography and what is not, can be summed up by a simple rule: that which requires age verification to purchase is pornography, and that which does not require an age verification are not pornography. Pornographic manga are often sealed, so that one cannot take a peek and most of such manga are sold in an adult oriented store. The general attitude to pornography is closer to that of literature. If a sex scene has relevance in the progression of the storyline and not simply an attempt to offer sex for sex’s sake, it is not considered pornography. However, this would be unacceptable in most cultures and it breaks many of censorship codes and laws outside of Japan.
A manga that does not target mature audiences may also have a page or two of what looks similar to glamour photography. These nude or semi-nude scenes with objects or hands covering breast and genital area are called a “service scene”. These scenes are often a part of comical sequence.
Pornographic video (called “adult video” or “AV” in Japan or sometimes “Japanese adult video” or “JAV” outside of it) covers wide themes and its only limit is censorship laws.
Many videos have a title that may suggest that they use minors or the actual recording of a crime, but no titles that are circulated with the approval of Eirin, a self-censor organization of productions, break any laws. A common ploy is to have a part of a title replaced with a character, or to use a phonetically similar neologism. For example, a video about “19 years old girls Sex Party!” may be sold with a title like “1X years old Girls Sex Party!”. The word Joshikosei (女子高生?), lit. “High school girl,” cannot be used as it would suggest a girl of 17 years or younger, who cannot act in a pornographic video. The homonymic neologism Joshikosei (女子校生?), which can mean a “girl student,” is used in many titles to promote the product without breaking censorship laws. This fact may be seen in popular places of Japan such as Akihabara or Den Den Town at Tokyo and Osaka respectively.
Japanese AV also caters to many more fetishes than might be imagined (or thought legal) by non-Japanese. Schoolgirl or uniform themed AV dovetails with the aforementioned ‘non-consensual’ genre—rape (レイプ, reipu?)—are common. SM, rope bondage, bestiality, virgins, internal male climax or cream-pies (中出し, nakadashi?), lesbians (レズ, rezu?), along with more eccentric fetishes (soap, office ladies, game shows) are all covered.
Copyright infringement has created a problem in places where legal copies are purchased such as Asia, U.S. and Europe. To avoid spending money on hiring translators for conversations that often precedes an act of sex, it has become normal to cut and piece together a video filled with various scenes of sex and nothing else. Further, to avoid the need for explaining a scene, especially on infringing copies in countries where violence in pornography is heavily censored, videos with simulated rape scenes became a niche of Japanese pornography. What resulted was that outside of Japan, Japanese pornography came to be synonymous with violence in sex, with those watching believing that such fantasies are disproportionately represented in Japan.
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