Man arrested for decensoring pixellated Japanese porn

We have by now learned to accept the innate contradiction that exists at the heart of Japanese porn: that the country has one of the largest, most varied industries in the world, and yet it also adheres to an interpretation of a century-plus-old obscenity law that says you cannot show genitalia. Hence JAV always has “mosaic” — pixellation of the penis and vagina.

We have gotten used to this and no longer find it distracting, nor do we think it actually obscures the really important stuff (i.e., the beautiful face and body of the porn star).

Others, though, disagree and there exist ways/tools to remove the mosaic filter with varying degrees of success. Search online in Japanese and you quickly find a host of services supposedly offering to remove the pixellation for a fee.

But you do have to be careful, though, since you might get arrested — especially if you then distribute the content.

Last week, Kyoto police arrested a 43-year-old man for engaging in a nine-month spree of decensoring porn videos. According to reports, the man set up a website and took requests to remove the pixellation filter.

He did it in quite a sophisticated way: rather than removing the mosaic, he used an AI program to create what the image should look like underneath — the same kind of tech used to restore damaged images. In effect, he was editing the videos, not un-editing them.

He is facing charges of copyright violation and displaying obscene media, since he sold 12,000 uncensored videos via his website and earned ¥11 million in the process. This was his undoing.

So if you are going to indulge in technical trickery to reveal those cocks and vaginas in all their glory, make sure you do it purely for private consumption.

And spare a thought for the poor people slaving away at computers to pixellate the porn in the first place.