As reported before on this blog, the implications of the change in the age of legal adulthood in Japan from 20 to 18 for the adult industry are attracted negative attention.
There are fears that teenagers will be forced into contracts and productions they don't want to make, especially as it comes in the relatively recent wake of coercion scandals in the industry.
The change comes into effect from April 1, the start of the new fiscal year in Japan. Women (and men) aged 18 and 19 will now be able to make contracts without parental consent, which includes contracts to appear in adult content ...
April marks the start of the 2022 fiscal and academic years in Japan. It also brings with a major change for young people: the age of adulthood will come down from 20 to 18.
Eighteen- and 19-year-olds can already vote, so this change has already been in the works for a while. One of the major consequences of this is regards contracts (somewhat strangely, the age for smoking, drinking, and gambling -- all the good things about being an adult -- will remain 20). In the past, they needed parental consent to sign a commercial contract until they reached the age of majority.
Given that a lot of ...
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 ...
We stumbled upon this great Twitter feed detailing a report by Shinbunka, the publishing industry trade journal in Japan, about the decline of the much-loved porn magazine vending machine. It also cites from an interview with the photographer Tetsuya Kurosawa, who has documented the vending machines (visiting some 500 locations along the way!).
It's true, we haven't seen one for many a moon. Here's why.
At the peak of the adult vending machine boom, there were some 50,000 machines nationwide in the 1970s. That lofty number has been reduced to a mere fraction now.
What are left are often ...
Adult retail giant DMM.com announced on September 7th that it would no longer sell content in which performers are under 18 years of age.
This will apply to "image video" DVDs and so on featuring idols and tarento.
DMM also said that since July 25th it had stopped selling adult content that had not been screened by industry bodies like the euphemistically named Intellectual Property Promotion Association (IPPA). Moreover, it said that it had never sold any pornography involving performers under the age of 18.
DMM also said that the non-adult DVDs featuring performers under the age of ...
The BBC occasionally likes to weigh in on adult Japan matters, not always with success.
It recently profiled Keiko Takemiya, "the godmother of manga sex in Japan". This time they go the extra mile and get some reasonable background and interviews, but some of their assertions are off -- not least the headline.
Takemiya was just 26 when she started Kaze to Kino Uta (The Poem of Wind and Trees).
It opens with two naked teenage boys in a 19th-century French boarding school lying on top of each other, post-coital. The series centres on one of those boys and another new boy. ...
Be warned. Be careful what you have in your drawer or on your phone, hard drive or cloud.
While the government was pressured by mangaka and animators to exclude comic book and drawn images from the new pornography laws passed in 2014, it seems the courts do not agree.
The Tokyo District Court has found an artist "guilty of violating the child pornography law by creating and selling realistic computer graphic images of a naked girl," reports the Asahi Shimbun.
The court on March 15 sentenced Akashi Takahashi, a 55-year-old computer graphic designer from Gifu city, to a one-year ...
Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, the UN’s special rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, has been in Japan for a week-long visit.
At the end of it she praised Japan for tightening up the law and banning possession of child pornography in June last year.
But she said Japan must do more and ban all "sexually abusive images" of children in manga.
“When it comes to particular, extreme child pornographic content, manga should be banned,” she said.
Japan's new laws have some loopholes, such as images and videos where underage models are wearing ...
The start of the shunga exhibition in Tokyo, the first major public event of historical erotic prints, has, not surprisingly, tested the boundaries of what is legally permitted and what is "morally" acceptable.
While the September issue of venerable art magazine Bijutsu Techo featured shunga, as well as a dialogue between two women who really know about sex and censorship ("vagina artist" Rokudenashiko/Megumi Igarashi and former porn star turned manga-ka Nayuka Mine), not to mention some mildly sexy Edo-era-inspired photos of Mitsu Dan by Mika Ninagawa, it stopped short of printing the ...
Amazon got busted!
Not even the biggest online retailer in the world is safe from the cops.
The Japanese police have raided the Amazon Japan office on suspicion of assisting the sale of child pornography.
On Friday, cops raided the Tokyo headquarters of Amazon Japan, plus the distribution center in Chiba Prefecture (ironically, you can spot it on the way to Disneyland).
The charges are that Amazon let products be sold on its website which broke laws against child pornography. The photo books featured nude girls under 18 and police suspect Amazon knew what the products were -- and ...
