Spotlight on private and amateur porn as new adult video law loophole

Earlier this year, a new law was passed with major implications for how adult video productions are made and released in Japan. The legislation gives performers a lot more say over their contract, allowing them to withdraw even after signing a contract and to cancel a contract after a production is completed and released. Producers must also allow a cooling-off period after a contact is signed and after a video is shot, to give performers the chance to change their minds, and provide very detailed instructions on the nature of the shots and activities expected.

One type of AV not covered by the law is privately shot (or “amateur”) porn. With the rise of cheaply available equipment and online distribution channels, it is possible for anyone to become a porn producer and director if you have a willing cast of performers.

In Japan, you just have to be carefully that you pixellate the genitals — the default safeguard to avoid running foul of the country’s strange, ambiguous obscenity laws — but in theory, you can circumvent the AV industry’s production and distribution channels (controlled by a handful of big companies) with your own original content, regardless of your level of experience.

Now, according to a media report by Kyodo News, performers are complaining about threats and sexual violence in this part of the industry, which is largely unmonitored and unregulated.

Of course, quite a lot of this “amateur” or “private” content is performed, filmed, and uploaded by couples. But there are also very prolific (male) producers working on their own.

Kyodo News interviews one, given the name Satoshi in the article, who is in his thirties and lives in Tokyo. He started recruiting women on Twitter from a year ago. He has sex with these women, films the encounters, and sells the content online. He makes several such videos a month, earning a decent ¥1 million in this way.

He usually pays the women ¥100,000 per video, depending on if it’s their first time or if they are willing to show their face in the video. They usually don’t use contraception. The women take part to earn money for things like paying college fees.

To avoid legal trouble, he draws up a written agreement with how many times they will have sex and the filming time.

Satoshi does not follow the rules of the new porn law, which requires producers to wait a month after a contract and a further four months after a shoot is complete before releasing content. If he did so, he says, he wouldn’t have income after paying the female performer.

It remains to be seen whether the new porn law can result in prosecution for individuals like Satoshi, who are nominally making porn in a private capacity and then releasing it online for profit. It’s a potential gray area or loophole. At the very least, it will be much harder to enforce compliance with the new porn law among such private producers.

According to PAPS, a support group for victims of sexual violence, more than half the women contacting them in recent years about porn have come from people who performed in such private/amateur AV shoots.

The women say they feel unable to say no once they are in a closed room with the man. Sometimes they say the videos were unloaded without their permission or they were filmed and turned into “porn stars” by a man even though they had thought they were just doing compensated dating. As PAPS notes, anyone with a phone today can make a porn production. It doesn’t mean that all the parties involved are willing, though.

Kyodo News also interviews a a 28-year-old female hairdresser in the Kanto region who says her drink was spiked when having a meal with a male acquaintance four years ago, and then raped. The man filmed the assault and threatened to release the video.

Thinking she no longer had anything left to lose, she eventually started working as a nude model for individual men who wanted to take photos. But this carries risks. She had agreed with one man, who she met on social media, just to pose for photos, but he forced her to have sex with him.

She went to police, only to be told that she had no case because she had invited the man to her house.