Is Japanese pornography really inferior? A short treatise on the comsumption of Japanese live-action pornography
Posted on | September 26, 2007 | 12 Comments |
| Can you overcome the lure of 2D…
What place exactly does Japanese live action pornography hold in today’s society?
By live-action pornography, I am referring to the reams and reams of DVDs that line the shelves of the adult sections of media stores throughout Japan – the Japanese counterpart to good old common garden porn. You know, the stuff with real people in. Having sex. Naked. And uniquely, of course, with huge mosaics over the good stuff.
The Japanese censorship laws seem to go back as far as the Meiji era in which a lot of things were outlawed as “deleterious to public morals”, and though most of these things seem to have been freed by the Americans post-WW2 in an effort to guarantee free speech, the Japanese government saw it fit to exclude the laws on pornography which persists to this day.
So in a society such as todays, where you can go online, google, find and download (or at least stream) mainstream Western UNCENSORED porn, where is the market in (even) lower budget Japanese fare with huge censorship? Nevertheless, there still seems to be a demand for the goods, otherwise they wouldn’t still be making them. So there seems to be several issues at work here:
- Accessibility
- Fetish catering
- Preferences
Let’s deal with accessibility first. Let’s take our basic common teenage Japanese boy. He wants pornography (unless he is gay, in which case he would want GAY pornography…). Where does he go to get it? Being underage, he would find it difficult to buy from aforementioned media stores, so this leaves the internet and well worn hand-me-downs from upperclassmen unknown.
| …when these things exist in 3D? You decide!
The reason I think that most choose the latter Path o’ Least Resistance is purely on the basis of language apathy. To surf English internet sites and download Western pornography requires a working knowledge of English, and since the average Japanese schoolkid has about as much interest in learning English as the average English schoolkid has for learning French, he’s pretty stuck. And to a teenage boy, any pornography, censored or no, is solid gold.
Fetish catering, I admit, is a minor point. Japanese live-action pornography producers, it seems, go out of their way to produce niche material catering to fetishes that are already catered to in anime – for example, futanari (with fake latex appendages – and with censorship, who can tell anyway), giantesses (with CG) and tentacles (you really don’t want to know…) In this way, they hope that they can capture the audiences of people already captivated by these fetishes and sell DVDs. Admittedly, this is still niche and doesn’t explain the uptake of the general material
Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, I would say that there probably is a preference for the general Japanese public to prefer erotica involving Japanese women over foreigners. In some ways, this could be seen as xenophobia, and though the Japanese are often accused of this, I would argue is probably is not the case. I believe (purely circumstantially, of course) that the females that a man is exposed to while growing up shape his later preferences and ideals rather exclusively. For example, though I am of Chinese origins, having been brought up in the UK, I have a strong preference for Caucasians (and have received similar stories from some of my more integrated British born colleagues. Since Japan is one of the least cosmopolitan of the developed nations, it makes sense that the most popular uptake of their erotica market would be involving Japanese women.
Though it would seem intuitive that the existance of censorship would decrease the popularity of the material, there do seem to be some plus points. Fans of the Japanese style would say that taking the focus away from the penetration shot allows a greater imagination to be brought to the fore in the general old sex scene, moving away from the formulaic stereotype borne by their Western colleagues to what could (conceivably) be called an artform. Well, that is if you consider fifty guys spunking on one girl’s face an artform (*cough* Tracey Emin *cough*).
So while, to me, it seems very strange that while literally surrounded by very accessible and voluminous Western foreign pornography, Japanese men prefer to indulge in their own niche, low-budget local produce; there may very well be reasons why. But then again, we’ll never really know unless I go and set up a DVD import company in Japan and see what the sales are like.
Hang on a minute.
I think I’ve found my vocation…
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September 26th, 2007 @ 9:18 pm
“For example, though I am of Chinese origins, having been brought up in the UK, I have a strong preference for Caucasians”
Caucasians ? Wait a minute, you’re saying you like dark-skinned women with MOUSTACHE ? Like, from Georgia, or Armenia, or even Chechnya ? Or you wanted to say white women ?
September 27th, 2007 @ 12:04 am
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
September 27th, 2007 @ 2:41 am
guns are cool. this is really helpful to me xDDD
September 27th, 2007 @ 2:42 am
xD
September 27th, 2007 @ 4:26 am
“So while, to me, it seems very strange that while literally surrounded by very accessible and voluminous Western foreign pornography…”
You seem to assume Western porns are superior…
Porns works differently for everyone.
I absolutely hates Western pornography because I think they are boring. I wouldn’t masterbate to those even if I my life depended on it; it simply wouldn’t work.
Japanese porns are much more diverse in themes and I think are on average of higher production value than most western porns.
Hong Kong used to make a lot of crappy category 3 movies. While they are absolutely crap, they are far superior porn production than either Japanese or Western porns.
September 27th, 2007 @ 9:20 am
Ah, yes, the stupidity of English language, how could i forget.
September 27th, 2007 @ 2:15 pm
*cough* http://javtalk.com/forums/ *cough*
September 27th, 2007 @ 4:05 pm
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today on Is Japanese pornography really inferior? A short treatise on the …Here’s a quick excerpt [...]
September 28th, 2007 @ 4:30 am
I think it’s not just exposure and accessibility, but somewhat of a “Our women are our women,” feeling. I know that although I like all porn, most of it tends to be pictures of Western women, even though I have been accessing porn since 1994 online.
September 29th, 2007 @ 2:54 am
Does one really need to know much English in order to find porn in the web, though? :)
“Fans of the Japanese style would say that taking the focus away from the penetration shot allows a greater imagination to be brought to the fore in the general old sex scene, moving away from the formulaic stereotype borne by their Western colleagues to what could (conceivably) be called an artform”
Isn’t there lots of Western soft porn, i.e. porn that is showing even less than Japanese censored porn? I guess it’s even more of an art then. :)
Anyway, I think you nailed it with the guess about the Japanese men’s preference for Japanese women.
P.S. The second picture is utterly hilarious – a typical sexy fantasy outfit…plus a machine gun.
October 13th, 2007 @ 10:22 am
Oh, I see it now. Hm?
October 13th, 2007 @ 10:22 am
That kinda got me horny. lmao! SORRY!