In Japan’s lexicon of love, pornography has traditionally played a significant role. But it has lost something in recent decades; something that can probably be traced to American style consumer-market influence.
Traditional Japanese pornography—graphic portrayals of sexual activity in all of its possible human ramifications— was generally stylized and artistic, drawn and painted with considerable skill. While the quality did not gainsay the subject matter, it did give some of the work a value of its own.
More importantly, however, given their sexual attitudes and customs, the Japanese did not look upon sexually explicit printed or carved materials as sinful or sleazy or dehumanizing or demeaning. They were generally not spread out on the tea table for visitors to admire (or be shocked at), but they too had their place.
In the case of the popular “sex position charts,” they were often given to newly married couples on their wedding night. Notwithstanding the merriment and seeming embarrassment this invariably caused, the purpose was serious enough.
But the style, content, and purpose of Japan’s postwar pornography is totally different from the traditional genre. It is first of all strictly commercial, with no redeeming social value that I can discern.
Japan’s pornographers, just like Japanese producers in other product areas, have taken something someone else started and made it bigger and better (in a technical sense), by mass-producing it and developing a huge market where none existed before.
Most pornography in Japan today is produced in the form of black-and-white line drawings printed in comic magazine format, although there is also a substantial industry that produces photographic porn on high-gloss paper a la America’s “sophisticated” men’s magazines.
A key difference in porn in Japan and porn in the United States is that in Japan it is mass marketed to young boys as well as adult males and is absolutely everywhere. It can be bought in stores, shops, kiosks, and newsstands that are more common than hamburger shops, convenience markets, and drugstores in the United States
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of porn in Japan is that the people who buy it read it in public on buses, subways and trains, in coffee shops, snack bars, and elsewhere. Boys and men who read it in such public places make little or no effort to conceal it from the view of others.
Innumerable times I have been on crowded trains and subways next to someone reading fully illustrated comicbook porn that was equally visible to women young and old around them, obviously without feeling any sense of embarrassment or wrong-doing.
Surely the next most interesting facet of Japanese comicbook porn is that a great deal of it emphasizes the most extreme forms of sadism perpetrated on women. Scene after scene, page after page, story after story, depicts women being savagely assaulted and sexually violated.
There was, however, a softer, more romantic side to some of the porn that began to appear in the late 1980s. After millions of Japanese had traveled abroad to such places as Guam and Hawaii, a new kind of porn, aimed at young travelers, began to appear in a development that clearly revealed the commercial nature of the porn makers.
I first saw this new porn being read by a high school boy on a subway in Tokyo. The setting of the story was a yacht anchored off a tropical island. A group of boys and girls, who looked like they were in their mid-teens but were no doubt intended to portray high-teens, were on a scuba diving party.
The reason why the comic-book characters were made to look so young is that Japanese men are fascinated by girls with baby faces who look and act infantile, and use them in their sexual fantasies as well as their business advertising.
The story line was what one of the boys did to one of the girls while both were underwater. The compelling part, from my Western viewpoint, was the fact that the participants were made to look so young, and the excruciatingly funny expressions the artist drew on the face of the girl while she was being had and when she climaxed.
The thought that kept coming to my mind was that the comic would probably attract thousands more young boys and girls to go on scuba diving trips overseas.
Many Japanese publishers who are not mainline pornographers, and in fact are highly respected Establishment publishers, routinely add little porno featurettes to their magazines.
Since the Japanese do not react to pornography the way most Westerners do, the influence of this volume of mass-marketed pornography is probably different as well.
Looked at in the overall context of love and sex in Japan, the part that concerns me is the sadistic content of a great deal of it and what it might mean for Japanese women. At the same time, Japanese women themselves have not been overlooked as sexual consumers.