Three years on from the passing of the controversial porn law, the situation for the Japanese adult video industry remains complex.
Prompted by a desire to curb the issue of coercion in porn that had led to numerous scandals and arrests, as well as fears that the lowering of the age of adulthood to 18 needed safeguards to protect teenagers from exploitation, the porn law gave performers much stronger rights, including cooling-off periods after a contract is signed and a production is filmed.
It seemed to usher in a real shift in the discourse, to such an extent that some pushed to end ...
There has been much in the news recently about concept cafes in Japan. Concept cafes, also known as concafes, provide an experience based on a specific theme.
In the same way that a girls' bar is a "lite" version of a hostess bar, a women's concafe is like a host club without the eye-watering prices or nighttime reputation. Though there are plenty of female-staffed concafes that operate like a maid cafe with another character instead of maids, the establishers that have attracted media and police attention so far have been concafes run by men and aimed at women.
Common cosplay themes ...
Here's a case that ticks all the boxes about the current moral panic.
A concafe ("concept cafe") staffed by men in Kabukicho, Tokyo, is accused of exploiting vulnerable female customers.
Concafes can be innocuous themed cafes but are often staffed only by men, making them essentially a kind of host club (similar to how girls' bars are like a cheap hostess club). The customers come for the fantasy created by theme (butlers, doctors, private boys' boarding school students, etc.) and the men who work there.
At this one, 32-year-old Takuma Ono is alleged to have tried to force a 20-year-old ...
Police have arrested a 24-year-old man on suspicion of violating the new adult video law after he was caught filming a sex act with a 16-year-old girl in a karaoke room.
One of the most common places to go to karaoke in Japan is a building with lots of small soundproof rooms, little more than booths really. This gives you privacy to drink and sing, and thus also ideal date spots. A bit of cuddling and smooching in the karaoke booth is the perfect prelude to moving on to your home or a love hotel.
Inevitably, sex does happen in karaoke rooms, but actually making a porn film without ...
The controversial adult video law, which requires productions to allow for one-month contract cooling-off periods and gives greater powers to performers to prevent releases even up to four months after completion of a shoot, was introduced in June 2022. These well-meaning measures are meant to curb coercion, which has been a rampant issue in porn, but many insiders say that the new law's restrictive conditions are too harsh and risk killing off the JAV industry.
Some of the most vocal opponents of the law have been porn performers themselves. Several prominent AV stars launched a petition in ...
The Economist recently reported on the Japan's porn industry as it continues to respond to the coercion scandals that (belatedly) came out in the 2010s, and the legislation that politicians have introduced, in part, to tackle the issue.
Claiming that Japan's porn industry is "coming out of the shadows," the article claims that the 2022 law targeting coercion and allowing performers to withdraw from contracts brought the industry out of a gray zone. We are not sure that's fully true. The industry still operates in murky waters, both in a good and bad sense, and the new law was ultimately ...
We have written before about the massive impact the new porn law is having on the Japanese adult video industry.
But here's a positive impact -- well, kind of. It's a good example of how the adult video industry is always quick to respond to recent events and exploit it as material for its output. And as is often the case, it does this in a parodic way.
In a new release (scheduled to come out January 20), the controversial AV law serves as the whole basis for the plot!
In the AV from Faleno Tube (1MFO00003), the premise is that the female performer has canceled at the last moment "due to ...
The controversial new porn law has been used for the first time in Japan to arrest someone.
A 50-year-old executive at a video production firm, Takashi Sumiya, was arrested on suspicion of not giving contract documents to three performers (aged twenties to fifties) between August and October, according to multiple media reports on December 6.
The Shinagawa resident had been initially arrested and charged with filming "indecent acts" and uploading them uncensored to a video sharing website, the US-based FC2 Content Market. Sumiya has apparently earned around ¥82 million doing this in six ...
As frequently reported on this blog, the new porn law in Japan has proven very controversial.
Though touted as a way of protecting performers, especially younger and debuting performers, by giving them far greater freedom to get out of contracts and by making production and distribution companies delay release, the legislation introduced in June was opposed by many in the industry.
While many major production companies have maintained a careful silence, perhaps concerned about stoking calls for a total ban on unsimulated sex in porn and encouraging further regulations to target the coercion ...
An underground Japanese music idol group has claimed that one of its members will become an adult video star for being the least popular.
Announced on September 16 and apparently running until September 19, the last day of a music festival, the Planck Stars said that the member who got the least number of snapshots taken with fans would be forced to debut in porn. Incidentally, the winner gets a free bicycle.
The group claimed its members devised the campaign themselves.
The original announcement got some attention back in September, but has received renewed outrage on Twitter in the ...
