BOTH ECONOMICALLY and psychologically, the eroduction (a Japanese portmanteau-term coined from “erotic production”) is an interesting cinematic phenomenon. In the days of fallen box office receipts it at least made back its costs; in times of empty movie theaters, it played to half-full houses; even now the eroduction continues to command the attention of a loyal if small audience.
One of the reasons for this is that Japan, unlike other civilized countries, has no porno houses. The eroductions are the limpest of soft-core, and though there is much breast and buttock display, though there are simulations of intercourse, none of the working parts are ever shown. Indeed, one pubic hair breaks an unwritten but closely observed code. Though this last problem is solved by shaving the actresses, the larger remains: how to stimulate when the means are missing.
The rigidity of Japanese law in this regard is to be observed in film-showing as a whole. Japanese production must remain within certain limits and when it does not, as was the case with certain Nikkatsu pictures, the company is sued by the Metropolitan Police and a full-scale court case follows. Imported films also are no exception to the general rule. Many are rendered chaotic because so many scenes are missing; others are difficult to follow because the film goes out of focus (an alternative to snipping) during nude scenes; I Am Curious—Yellow had fortyone scenes blacked out with the title “Censored.” A further curiosity was the Japanese presentation of Woodstock. In several of the scenes nude couples wander in the distance. Though perhaps unnoticed in many countries, the sharp eyes of the Japanese censors instantly detected this irregularity. A number of employees were equipped with small scraping needles and painstakingly picked the emulsion from the offending parts. When the film was projected the distant strolling couples consequently seemed girdled with fireworks. Though this called instant attention to what the censors were presumably attempting to hide, the letter of the law had been observed and this result satisfies all censors everywhere.
In Japan, consequently, the eroduction is needed—small outlet for prurient interest or simple curiosity being found elsewhere. Though any number of illegally imported blue films and tapes are around, they are expensive, difficult to obtain and dangerous to show. For the average, interested moviegoer, the eroduction is all that there is.
Thus, unlike other countries where a free access to pornography has resulted in a satisfied curiosity, a stilled prurience, and emptier and emptier porno houses, Japan retains a compulsive and relatively obsessed audience. There are perhaps deeper psychological reasons for this, as may be apparent later in these notes, and in any event attendance is still good enough that the eroduction business remains a solvent one.
At the height of eroduction production twenty small companies made some two hundred such pictures each year. The shooting-time for each remains short—a week at the most; studios are seldom used, rather actual apartments, houses, etc. are seen; wages are low; and the cost of making such a film can be quite reasonable.
The released film is triple-billed and leased to a distributing chain which owns its own theaters. There were in Tokyo over twenty such chains (Kanto Films, Okura Productions, Tokyo Kyoe, Roppo, etc.) and the profits from the film are divided in such a way that from the per-picture average admission price more than one quarter goes to the original producing company, less than one quarter to the distribution company, and one half to the theater.
This division would seem unfair to a production company owning no theaters, but there are actually very few such. Usually, the production company, the distribution chain, and the theater management all belong to the same corporation. The profits are therefore both total and considerable. There were over one hundred eroduction theaters in Tokyo (and probably nearly one thousand in all of Japan) with an average capacity of hundreds per house; they are open daily from ten in the morning to ten at night, and they are always partially filled. Given the small original budget and the low cost of overhead, the profits are considerable.
The situation is somewhat analogous to that of the porno houses in America where the product costs little, upkeep is negligible, and admission prices are high. Differences would include the amounts of money authorities must sometimes be paid to allow public showings, and a capricious public which is not to be depended upon.
InJapan, the eroduction is the only type of picture that retains an assured patronage. The mass audience has fallen off in the last decade. Two of the majors (Shintoho and Daiei) are no longer in existence, Nikkatsu has gotten into trouble trying to turn out high-class porno, and the movie finances of Toho, Toei, and Shochiku (as differentiated from their other income sources) cannot be described as good. There exist, however, smaller, isolated audiences—and among these none is more faithful than the eroduction audience.
An assured audience means a standardized product. It is only in times of economic disaster that different formulas are tried and experimentation is indulged. If commercial cinema in Japan is now changing its content along with its form, it is only because the assured audience has largely disappeared. The eroduction, however, has its own loyal audience and this has resulted in its becoming a codified form of entertainment. Like the spectacle, the musical, the sword-fight chambara, the woman’s film—all cinematic forms which enjoyed a stable audience—the eroduction is formula-film
Thus, as a genre, the eroduction is predetermined. Since the audience knows what it is to get, it need not be informed. Consequently, the films’ titles are decorative rather than descriptive. Intercourse Bifore Marriage (Konzen Kosho); I Can’t Wait for Night (Yoru Made Matenai); Wriggling (Notauchi)—all these tell nothing about their respective contents; they merely make the ritual statement of intent to titillate, the presumed intention of all eroductions.
Likewise, the length of each film is predetermined. Since each is intended to be shown with two others, the ideal length decided upon is 6,500 feet, or 70 minutes. Further codifications are then introduced into the structure of the film itself. In theory, directors are instructed to aim at some kind of sex scene every five minutes; in practice, however, it has proved almost impossible to construct a story-line which allows this, with the results that sex scenes are sometimes fewer but somewhat longer.
Also predetermined, though perhaps not so consciously, is the interior shape of the film. One comes to recognize the component parts, just as in the jidai-geki one comes to expect the final sword fight, in the Western, the last shoot out. In the eroduction these necessary parts would be: establishing sequence, plot sequence, defiling sequence, consequence sequence, and concluding sequence. The connecting tissue may vary with the story, but all or some of the predetermined sequences are invariable.
Since the ostensible intent of the eroduction is to arouse, the establishing sequence usually shows the beginning if not the conclusion of a sexual act. Common among these are: tipsy bar hostess being escorted home by inflamed customer; hiking girls being offered and accepting rides from plainly untrustworthy gentlemen in automobiles; unmotivated sexual acts during which conversation establishes that this is her first time. From these beginnings grow scenes which establish that sexual union is taking place.
The plot sequence follows at once. This establishes that: the drunken hostess has really fallen into the hands of a white (or yellow) slaver; the girls are not to be shown the good time they had perhaps expected but, rather, are to be painfully raped by numbers of men; the despoiler of the repentant ex-virgin was not really interested in those now wasted charms—rather, he was really captured by those of a virginal younger sister, etc.
With such tragic complications occurring so soon, one rightly suspects that Japanese eroductions are about something other than the joys of sexual union. The next sequence confirms this—it is about the denigration of women. Bar hostess, goodtime girls, ex-virgin—all are given a very bad time. Common are scenes where, in order to escape, women must run naked through the fields or the streets; scenes where nude or near-nude women are overtaken in muddy rice-paddies, knocked down, mauled, and dirtied by their attackers; scenes where women are blackmailed or are in other ways compelled into giving themselves to various perversions, the most overwhelmingly common being: tied up, hung by wrists, savagely beaten, otherwise mistreated with sticks, lighted candles, and—odd, but an eroduction favorite—long-handled shoe-horns.
The consequences of such excess are depicted in the following sequences. These are various and include women—never men—coming to see the error of their ways through the humiliations of venereal disease and unwanted pregnancy. Among the more spectacular, however—and occurring often enough to deserve some comment—is that though the attackers are shown simulating every symptom of unbridled lust except the ultimate, it is eventually they who most suffer. Having finally achieved his way, the hero is suddenly unable to perform. This is not, as one might expect, seen as a consequence of his own rashness; rather, it is always, somehow, the woman’s fault. (Naturally, this failure is never once seen as human and amusing; indeed, as entertainment, the eroduction is unique in being both risible and humorless.) The failure is a tragedy for which woman is to blame.
This leads directly to the concluding sequence where repentance and remorse are the emotions most often simulated. If the girl has been bad, she will now be good; if merely unfortunate, she will now be prudent; if hurt, she must simply live with the knowledge of an abortion or a ruined younger sister; if dead (as she is in a surprising number of instances) short shrift is made of her personal existence—rather, she becomes a symbol for the general dangerousness of sex.
If she is dead she has often become so as a result of the impotent sequence. Unable to express baffled emotions, the man resorts to strangling, shooting, knifing, etc. (A typical scene occurred in Black Snow (Kuroi Yuki), a film for which Nikkatsu was early taken to court: the impatient young man unable to express himself in any other way blew out the brains of his girl friend just as she was climaxing in response to his dextral stimulation.} Since, somehow, it was all the woman’s fault anyway, the eroduction audience (entirely male, watching a film made entirely by males) finds that this murder is to be regarded sympathetically. It was perhaps unkind, but, after all the hero was experiencing the worst humiliation a man can know, so what else was he to do?
More often, however, man and woman agree to part. After such extended sexual encounters, such pain, such pleasure, the feeling is that it was somehow not worth it. They go their separate ways, sadder, wiser, and the screen darkens. This conclusion is, when you consider it, surprising in a film the announced aim of which was titillation.
But then, like most formula-film, the eroduction is of two minds about its subject. Unable to dwell upon a detailed examination of the sex act as is, say, American pornography, the eroduction must sublimate and take that path which occasionally reaches the summits of art in other kinds of film. All the way along, however, it hankers after what it cannot legally have and its compromises do damage to its already myopic view of reality. American pornography is kept forever on its elemental level because, showing all, it need do nothing else; Japanese eroductions have to do something else since they cannot show all. The stultified impulse has created some extraordinary works of art, a few films among them. None of these, however, are found among eroductions. What this Japanese genre has done is to reflect or create a kind of mythology.
The producers of the eroduction believe that they have discovered a money-making recipe; the patrons of the eroduction think they have found a harmless and inexpensive way of killing a few hours. Both, however, would seem to share further assumptions, and these one must deduce. In main they share a belief, a myth—and the denominator of this common agreement is invariable: to be completely enjoyed, a woman must be completely denigrated.
How different are the various myths suggested by the pornography of other countries. There, even if an amount of sadism is involved, it is always plainly labeled, never suggested as the norm—something which invariably occurs in Japanese eroductions. Though the woman in Western pornography may be a bit more forward than is common in Western life, her only motivation is to have and to give a good time. She is bold, even brazen, but this suits her audience. Indeed, if a man did not require that kind of woman he probably would not be sitting in a porno house.
The Japanese eroduction is very different. Woman must be denigrated and she must deserve to be. The ways in which this is shown are various, but the conclusions are identical. Often, for example, the woman has had some prior experience. Since she is no longer a virgin, she is ritually unclean and, therefore it would seem, deserves all that she gets. Again, however, if the woman is still a virgin, her culpability is evidenced in other ways. A simple crush or mere attraction for some young, clean-cut type suffices. He shortly vanishes from the film, his sole function having been to uncover her low, animal nature. Or a man may not even be involved. Instead, she is observed in amorous dalliance with another girl—a spectacle some men find excitingwhich establishes her worthlessness at once.
One recognizes here an inverted idealism, particularly in regards the state of virginity. Pornography is typically puritanical about the virgin state. Women are presumed (for very suspicious reasons) to be better than human, and the hymen is proof of this—they emerge from the creator’s hands clean, pure, factorysealed as it were. Being human, women naturally do not long remain in this state, to the chagrin of romantically-minded males. Since they are no longer pure they must then be made completely impure. Thus it is that women who naturally, humanly, warmly acknowledge their emotional needs are regarded as vicious.
Men who so acknowledge their needs are, of course, not. It is here, in this rigid belief in the double-standard which it either observes or creates, that the hypocrisy of the eroduction is greatest. It would follow, then, that man in the throes of passion is always somehow noble; that the women, in the same situation, is always ignoble.
This curiously inverted, perhaps even oddly chivalric but certainly unrealistic attitude, is visible even in the ways in which love scenes are photographed. The woman is often completely nude and is observed as a hysterical animal. The man, on the other hand, is always at least partially clothed and, thus appearing in the raiments of civilization, he does not suffer common nudity. While she screams, kicks, and in general abandons herself, he remains thoughtful, calm, a dedicated craftsman.
Her focus of interest is upon the loins, both his and her own. His, however, is upon the breasts and much footage is expanded on scenes of their being caressed and aroused. This reinforces the idea of the man as being above it all (in both senses of the word) and, since he is therefore not directly involved in the essentials of the act, he appears disinterested, civilized, somehow a nobler person than she. He is immune to the vagaries of undisciplined emotion (all women are latent lesbians, homosexuality among men is unknown), to the tyranny of the jaded palate (scenes of simulated fellatio are very common, scenes of equally simulated cunnilingus extremely rare), and in all ways displays that he is, obviously, a much better person.
He also displays—and this is something which the eroduction-makers do not intend—an extremely immature relationship with women. Precisely, he reenacts the mother-child relationship. Mother is cast as bad-woman; bad-woman is cast as mother. Even in those scenes where the suspended and unfortunate girl is about to be tortured, there are ritual breast fondlings which would seem to indicate a male attitude extremely ambivalent.
One might simplify and say that if the man with the whip shows the average eroduction customer himself as he would like to be, the same man kneeling in near-adoration before the breasts show him as he truly is. To insist upon this, however, would not explain why Japanese eroductions are really, if unconsciously, concerned with depicting a love-hate relationship of major proportions.
The hatred takes the form of undisguised sadism. The hero has turned his neurosis into a perversion and while this may be more healthy for him, it offers no help to the audience. At the same time, anyone engaging in active sadism is, among other things, proclaiming a profoundly felt inadequacy. The impotence-syndrome observed in some of these pictures supports and explains, on a plot-level at any rate, this inadequacy. At the same time there is ample reason everywhere to see this sadism as merely inverted masochism. Just as idealism is plainly inverted in these pictures to create the universal bad-woman, so natural masochism is also inverted to create these endless torture scenes which presumably so engage the audience.
It is presumed that the audiences are engaged or else they would not be in theater. Yet, one might also ask if they are not merely enduring rather than enjoying such savage spectacles in an effort to extract a mite of titillation. In other words, are we not seeing the fantasy of the jaded eroduction executive, rather than viewing an anthropologically interesting attitude on the part of the average eroduction-goer?
That the eroduction fills a social need, no matter how poorly, is beyond doubt. During these few decades when they have been made in any number, the audience has remained faithful. And, though the films may sometimes resemble the soft-core quickies shown on Times Square or the naughty-nudies shown in Soho, the differences are at once apparent. Those foreign pictures are often little comedies, little melodramas. Innocent of overtone, happy to display the allowed quotient of female flesh, they babble their way to the final reel, mindless and ephemeral. The Japanese eroduction, on the other hand, can be seen as tortured, dark, involved—plainly of psychological import.
The eroduction-makers could claim that I delve too deeply, that their hour-long fantasies were never intended to bear the weight of investigation. And, as for the excessive scenes of torture, well, you have to have some kind of story, and you cannot have plot without good, strong conflict. We make an honest living, they would tell me, because we give our public what it wants. That the public always wants a cheap, safe thrill is their contention, and this, they claim, is all that the eroduction provides.
I would maintain that it provides considerably more. That it, in fact, provides an outlet for the often stultified animosity which all men everywhere must feel toward women from time to time. It expresses this in second-hand terms which, precisely because they do not arouse the intelligence, are potent indeed in arousing and exhausting the emotions. This is because they are dealing with archetypal situations—the essence of the eroduction myth. Like most formula film, the eroduction is also mythic cinema. In these theaters one may go and see a common fantasy endlessly repeated.
This repetition must reassure at least some members of the audience because the fantasy is an infantile one. That woman is an enemy is a sensation that all men have experienced, but it is not one that we usually or necessarily believe. We may cast woman in this role but we do not long keep her there. Yet this is precisely what the eroduction does. With a truly compulsive insistence, it monomaniacally maintains that the nursery vision is the only one, that women are evil, that sex is their instrument, and that men are their prey.
A too cursory glance at the films might seem otherwise—it is the women after all who are being beaten and shoe-horned. Actually, however, prolonged viewing indicates that the tortures almost invariably result from fear felt by the men. They are doing in the women before the women have a chance to do them in. That this is an extremely primitive view of the male-female relationship is obvious, but it is as basic as it is barbaric. It lurks in the mind of every man and only his knowledge and love and goodwill can bridge this gap to make happy relations between the sexes possible at all. This is matched by a fear within the woman herself and it is her trust and self-knowledge which completes the bridge connecting her and a man. The eroduction, however, is not concerned with happy relations. Indeed, it does not believe in them. It encourages in the spectator a rigid dichotomy of thought and offers ample provocation to every latent love-hate neurosis in the theater.
Which is perhaps why the eroduction cannot afford to be human, altruistic, fair-minded. Every speech, every action must be instantly and compulsively related back to woman’s voracious sexual appetite. In an eroduction even a remark about the weather carries innuendo. One is caught in a changeless, catatonic state where each action springs but from one cause, where everyone is caught, fixed forever, by one’s ambivalent sexuality. It is a world where generosity, freedom, love is unknown. This is the world of the solitary, the domain of the voyeur.
Naturally, the eroduction is, like all pornographic productions, masturbatory cinema. The audience is not thinking about women, it is thinking about itself. Watching the most elemental of fantasies being acted out, it is caught, trapped in its own elemental and hence infantile nature.
In Japan the eroduction seems to be a habit, like smoking, drinking, biting the nails. Its gratifications are instant, meaningless, and necessary. Quite accidentally and even now unknowingly, the makers of eroductions have tapped an audience of great financial potential. For this reason the films can afford to be shoddy, badly done, unerotic to an extreme, and often ludicrously inept. The economic phenomenon is firmly based upon the psychological phenomenon. The eroduction theater in this sense shares much with the bar and the race-track.
And, like these male retreats, it is essentially harmless. Working out a fantasy never caused anyone any trouble. But, at the same time, the patrons of the eroductions must receive some rather strange ideas of the world they live in—because the point about fantasy is that the real world is, after all, different.
—1972