Censor and pixellate porn in Japan for 1,500 yen an hour

Getting a side job where you can watch uncensored porn sounds like a male dream come true. But hang on. Uncensored porn? Oh, right, in Japan, due to bizarre adherence to a century-old regulation created to try to make Japan similar to “moral” Christian western nations, porn has genitals blurred out.

Technically, if you are selling porn in Japan that isn’t pixellated, you are breaking the law. (And then it gets complicated if it’s just a photo with genitals that is more “artistic” than pornographic, or if it’s a mainstream film with full-frontal nudity — all of which were also censored until recently.)

Hiroki Yokota (not real name) is a 41-year-old company employee and he’s been doing a side job for over ten years. His job is to pixellate the adult videos we all buy.

He earns a steady ¥100,000 (around $1,000) per month for his efforts and he recently revealed more about the mysterious side to Japanese porn in an interview with Nikkan Spa.

“You don’t need to get any special equipment or software yourself, you can just turn up at the porn maker’s offices, so it’s easy for a newbie to get started. There’s a pre-test before they take you on, but you can practice using the ‘mosaic’ while they train you so you don’t need to have particularly good computer knowledge. If it’s a main production company, you can get an hourly salary of ¥1,500 per hour. A regular businessman could do two or three hours per day on their way home from work and get between ¥50,000 and ¥60,000 per month.”

So, up to $15 an hour. Not bad, right?

The journalist tried out the “mosaic” (pixellation) duties and he felt it wasn’t an especially “easy” job. You get tired from having to always look at where you need to pixellate — and it also becomes strangely addictive, he felt.

“Yes, there are these kinds of problems. It’s not right for everyone,” admits Yokota. “After you’ve got some experience at a major company you can then start working for the subcontractors on a commission basis. The more you have to pixellate, the higher the salary. If it’s a gang bang or scat flick, then you have to deal with larger numbers and so the commission is higher.”

Yokota chuckles where he tells the reporter just how much work there is. “It’s not just for the DVDs sold by the major companies. There’s also pixellation for online streamed content plus the satellite porn, each with their criteria for ‘mosaic’. There is endless work for you, you’ll never be short of a job. You can also get free samples from the companies so I haven’t had to buy porn for the last ten years. Of course, I always watch them for homework!”