Japanese Adult Video Research Articles

Book review: Pornography, ideology, and the internet: A Japanese adult video actress in Mainland China

Book review: Pornography, ideology, and the internet: A Japanese adult video actress in Mainland China

(Inside) An American in Tokyo: June Lovejoy as the adult video outsider

ABSTRACT Twenty-seven-year-old American-born June Lovejoy has become a popular performer in the Japanese adult video industry after leaving an unsatisfying and exploitative corporate job in favour of what they term the ‘less corrupt porn industry’. With more than 200 porn films under their belt and a growing social media presence, Lovejoy’s career continues to grow in an industry not known for featuring many non-Japanese performers. Walking a tightrope between representing ‘foreign culture’ and creating a persona that can be successfully integrated into the Japanese industry, Lovejoy is a fascinating figure through which to consider the performance of diversity in the Japanese porn industry as it struggles to survive in the internet age.

From texts to contexts: the self-regulating body in the Japanese adult video industry

ABSTRACT This paper examines how the Japanese self-regulatory systems that evolved in the aftermath of the Second World War to regulate the sexual content within Japanese films metamorphosed into a powerful state apparatus to create fear and uncertainty for those involved in making adult videos. We depict the history of Japan’s obscenity laws, from their origin as a response to Western imperialism to the self-regulatory bodies created in the post-war period of the American Occupation to maintain the obscenity laws while conceding to American demands for freedom of creative expression. Thus, these self-regulatory bodies originated to mediate between two antithetical Western imperial requirements in a state initially wanting to modernize and then democratize. We then examine how the notorious prosecution of the Nihon Ethics of Video Association (Bideo Rinri Kyōkai aka Biderin), the self-regulatory of the adult video industry, brought to a head the contradictions inherent in the state’s deployment of these bodies while revealing a more sinister dynamic of state control.

The determinants of a pornography actress’s career life

Statistics on Japanese adult video (A.V.) indicated that it is an industry that produces over 4500 videos every month and has recently provided 5.27 hundred million U.S. dollars a year. All related stories and sex toys promote the culture and trades of sex goods in Japan at home and abroad. They even affect the mass in sexual life, knowledge, chats as well as values in both good and bad ways. Nonetheless, almost no empirical analysis exists of this industry. This study investigates empirically the influences of debuting age, risky-sex movies and other related factors on the career life of Japanese A.V. actresses. By analysing data concerning the Japanese A.V. actresses whose careers commenced between 2002 and 2014, the authors found that the larger the cup size of an actress, the more likely she also serves as a model entertainer, and the longer she stays. On the contrary, an A.V. actress has to retire earlier or leave the industry because of a later starting age or the numbers of risky-sex movies she has produced.

The determinants of pornography actress production

ABSTRACTThis study investigates empirically the influences of physical appearances and risky sex in the production of adult video (AV) actresses. By analysing data concerning the Japanese AV actresses whose careers commenced between 2002 and 2013, we found that significant increases in the number of video shots of actresses are brought by cup sizes, working experiences, experiences as models or entertainers, and acting in videos of risky sex, but acting in risky sex videos has no significant influence on the production of those with greater cup sizes or serving as models or entertainers. We interpret that these actresses attract the market attention by their favoured appearances, and thus have no incentives to raise their production by acting in risky sex videos.

Rogue diva flows: Aoi Sola's reception in the Chinese media and mobile celebrity

Theorizations of celebrity often contend with questions of the constructed nature of star persona. This is more so the case when discussing divas in Japan, as they are subject to a wide range of gender regimes that mould the ways in which their persona is produced and consumed. Contemporary forms of transnationalism in East Asia, however, have created media flows and fan bases that provide new opportunities for Japanese female celebrities to re-construct their star personas, transcending their celebrity status in Japan. Focusing on the case of Aoi Sola, a Japanese adult video actress turned celebrity, this article demonstrates how transnational East Asian flows problematize our static theorization of celebrity. Sola's interactions with her Chinese social media fan base have afforded her a cosmopolitan persona that has been celebrated as a cultural bridge between China and Japan. At the same time, her star persona leaves her vulnerable to re-inscriptions into transnational politics as played out in everyday media flows. This dynamic is best demonstrated in Sola's attempts to quell anti-Japanese sentiment in China as well as in her efforts to reinscribe her star persona using nostalgic associations of cultural similarity and a shared past. Based on analyses of Sola's celebrity trajectory from adult video to online Chinese mediascape Diva, this article suggests that contemporary star persona status is better understood in terms of gender, movement and ‘meshworks’.

“I Don’t Like Watching Japanese Adult Videos Because You Like It”

This article focuses on women’s use of pornography in modern Taiwan, with an eye to making sense their “claimed” preference for American pornography. Our research shows that men and women display vast differences in pornography use and pornography preference with men tending to identify with Japanese adult videos and women with American pornography. Such gendered use of pornography has been substantially documented and examined through multiple disciplinary lenses. While illuminating, these studies tend not to examine further how such gender differences come about. It fosters an impression that gender can be used to explain away the reasons that men and women will differ in pornography use and sex. Gender is thus seen as universally applicable and able to explain everything without providing any concrete explanations. From this vantage, the specific, concrete gender norms that gave rise to the differences in pornography use in different cultures are dismissed as just manifestations of their genders. This article therefore aims to recover the specific gender norms and politics in Taiwan, which are often lumped together and explained away as gender inclinations and see how these specific contents gave rise to gender differences in pornography use. To understand how these gender differences ultimately come about, one needs to first explore how and why men and women consume pornography, respectively. Elsewhere, we have explored Taiwanese men’s use of, and preference for, pornography. This article therefore aims to examine Taiwanese women’s use of pornography with reference to gender norms in Taiwan.

The ‘real core’: The taste of Taiwanese men for Japanese adult videos

Inspired by Simon Hardy who sees ‘pornographic realism’ as the defining characteristic of pornography, this article argues that Taiwanese men identify more with Japanese adult videos (AVs) especially bishōjo (beautiful young woman) AVs, the prototypical genre in Japanese AV industry, than other varieties, because they appear to these men as more ‘real’. However, this article goes further to move beyond the reality–representation divide by arguing that the so-called ‘reality’ is also discursively constituted. We first demonstrate how the ‘proper’ sex act of men in Taiwan is discursively constituted through Simon and Gagnon’s notion of ‘sexual script’. We then show how this discursively mediated male sex in Taiwan parallels neatly with the structure of the narrative of nine Japanese bishōjo AVs featuring Yuki Maiko, a prominent Japanese AV actress. We conclude that Japanese AVs in general and bishōjo AVs in particular will garner huge popularity among Taiwanese men because they appear to these men very ‘real’. That is to say, the distinction between pornographic representations of sex and the ‘real’ sex vanishes not because pornographic representations are getting more ‘real’ as Hardy has argued, but because the so-called ‘real’ sex is also culturally constituted.

Transnational Japanese Adult Videos and the Emergence of Cable Television in Post-war Taiwan

This article examines how transnational Japanese adult videos migrated to Taiwan and how such a migration “contributed” to the advent of cable television in post-war Taiwan. It argues that the relationship between the migration of Japanese AVs and the advent of cable TV is not automatic but needs to be qualified. There is a huge gap between the migration of Japanese AVs to Taiwan and the advent of cable TV there. The advent of cable TV in post-war Taiwan cannot be directly reduced to the transnational Japanese AVs. Nor are transnational Japanese AVs the sole reason for the advent of cable TV in post-war Taiwan. Instead, cable TV in post-war Taiwan is the consequence of a very complex process in which transnational Japanese AVs reciprocally mediated with socio-political factors in Taiwanese society. We argue that it is only when Japanese AVs were mediated by a number of local socio-political factors that they together contributed to the introduction and legalization of cable TV in Taiwan.

Translating Japanese Adult Movies in Taiwan: Transcending the Production-Consumption Opposition

This paper is an attempt to reconsider the opposition between consumption and production in social sciences through a detailed analysis of the production of Chinese subtitles for a pirated Japanese adult video (AV) clip in Taiwan. We demonstrate that the way local pirate merchants provide Chinese subtitles is very much guided by the sexual roles of men and women, or what Sahlins calls a cultural code, in Taiwan because this makes Japanese AVs look “natural”, and thus sexually appealing, to Taiwanese viewers. More importantly, the same cultural code also serves as a model for Taiwanese viewers to consume Japanese AVs; otherwise, the reproduction of Japanese AVs will not be sexually appealing to them. Seen in this way, the relation of production and consumption is not as opposed as is commonly thought. It follows that arguments that either production or consumption offers a better mode of investigation of a cultural good are misleading, because they presume that production and consumption entail different lines of logic when in fact both follow the same cultural code.