The founder of Japanese video hosting site FC2, Riyo Takahashi, once ran unsuccessfully for election in Japan's upper house.
His campaign platform was to "crush mosaic censorship," referring to the pixellation that covers genitalia in Japanese porn to protect producers and retailers from prosecution under Japan's obscenity law, which is usually interpreted as drawing the line at showing a penis or vagina. (This same logic is applied to nudity in mainstream movies too.)
Now Takahashi has been arrested by police in Japan when he returned to the country. The 51-year-old was arrested on ...
Famous (or possibly infamous) Japanese entrepreneur Takafumi Horie, aka Horiemon, has weighed in on the issue of adult video censorship.
Japanese adult video, despite being possibly the biggest porn industry in the world, is censored: no genitals are shown. This is a strange workaround to avoid prosecution under the obscenity law that was introduced to Japan in the Meiji era. The same policy is used in softcore porn and mainstream cinema, even if the nudity is not in a sex scene.
In a Japanese movie, the makers will simply shoot in a way to avoid genitals. If it's a foreign film, they will ...
Japan's obscenity laws about not showing genitalia apply to you, even if you are supposedly an amateur and not a professional porn production company churning out DVDs and streaming releases.
On June 30, Japanese media showed police giving 21-year-old Yukino Kimura the perp walk.
Her crime? She had sold unedited videos on Twitter to people who sent her a message on the platform. Her account was apparently reinya3_, which is still active at the time of writing but has not been updated since early June.
The cutie worked by day as a company employee in Kyoto but had a Twitter account ...
The ex-porn star Kaho Shibuya is suing a production company for ¥7.4 million (about $55,000) for mental distress, infringement of privacy, and harm to her reputation after it neglected to handle unedited data properly, resulting in a leak of footage.
In January 2022, Shibuya ascertained that two of her adult video releases made in September 2016 and released in 2017 had been uploaded to a video site in an unedited (uncensored) format not available commercially. In other words, the genitals on the content were not blurred out in the usual Japanese way (known as "mosaic," a custom in porn as ...
Though there is a tiny inkling of a chance that this might change if FC2 founder Riyo Takahashi wins a seat in the Japanese Upper House this month, it remains illegal in Japan to sell or distribute uncensored porn.
The "mosaic" look has become an iconic part of Japanese adult video: those grainy pixels where the penis and vagina should be.
Personally, we don't mind it. But some are put off by the constant blur and there is clearly a market for uncensored Japanese porn. Just don't try selling it if you are in Japan.
Masayuki Nakamoto was arrested last October for selling uncensored adult ...
Elections bring out the eccentrics, with plenty of novelty candidates reliably popping up to keep us amused. Past examples include the wannabe politician who wore government-supplied face masks as a bra or the regular appearances of Teruki Goto -- including once nude on his campaign poster.
With the recent passing of the controversial new law regulating the porn industry, how are candidates responding to the current situation?
We found two intriguing examples among candidates for the upcoming Upper House election.
Riyo Takahashi, the 48-year-old founder of the Japanese video hosting site ...
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 ...
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 ...
We don't like mosaic, right? There's nothing worse than having the mood ruined by some nasty pixels covering the very areas you want to see the most!
We won't get into the complicated, ambiguous reasons for why Japanese porn has mosaic (we've blogged about that before), but rather I wanted to give you all some practical tips. I'm gonna let you boys into a secret: There are ways to get rid of it!
With the Olympia DV-9900, your dreams have come true! All you need is this little gadget and your regular Japanese DVDs, and hey presto!
How does it work? Well, just hook it up between the DVD ...
If you love watching Japanese porn you will notice straightaway one very strange thing: pixelation. There's not a private part in sight -- they're all fuzzed and blurred out by the censors.
Why the need for mosaics? Is it some strange kinky thing that men like? Well, maybe it is NOW, since a whole generation of Japanese men have grown up obsessed with porn and sex featuring pixels rather than penises.
The real reason for it, though, is a 1907 obscenity law that remains unchanged to this day. (Taro and Tadashi, however, hate mosaic and always get under-the-counter porn that is ...
