Japanese porn, the one search that probably scarred 13-year-old you for life, is home to some pretty unique fetishes. From mixing up the genres of extreme BDSM and role play, to introducing the world to an otherwise unheard of category (ie tentacles) Japanese porn has ventured where very few have dared to go. But if you’ve ever watched a video produced by the country’s AV industry – and of course you have – you’d know that once the actors start getting down and dirty… well, let’s just say that the juiciest bits are pixelated.

Genitalia in Japanese porn is seen only in 8-bit. While it may seem to some that blurring out an actor’s baby making bits defeats the purpose of pornography, it would be advisable to consider the existence of cultural differences which have further manifested at laws.

Japanese porn and the legal system

According to Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code, it is illegal to share “indecent materials.” Though this may sound familiar to the rules closer to home, Japanese artistes of the adult variety have found a way to circumvent this: They simply blur out the genitalia. As amusing as it may sound to someone on the outside, appropriately placed digital mosaics are a big deal in Japan. Or at least, they have become so over the last few years.

In 2004, for the first time in 20 years, Article 175 was used against Suwa Yuuji, creator of the manga Missitsu or Honey Room. Yuuji was convicted for distributing “indecent and explicit” material through his artwork. He was originally fined ?500,000 or INR2,87,829 and avoided imprisonment after pleading guilty to the charges levied against him. But the artist wasn’t quite done with the legal system. He took his case to the highest court in Japan, arguing that Missitsu was not nearly as graphic in its depiction as a lot of other material that was freely accessible on the internet. However, the Supreme Court of Japan was not buying his argument and held that Yuuji was in the wrong and tripled his fine to ? 1.5 million or INR 8,63,420.

Though no major arrests have been made post Yuuji’s case, artists, publishers and others who produce and distribute pornographic material have adopted a sort of self-censorship in order to avoid trouble with the law.

 Japanese culture and porn

While it is largely true that a nation’s laws reflect its morality, one must understand that morality itself is subject to change. In spite of Japan’s present policy of pixelated porn, the country was far more progressive in its attitude towards sex before it was touched by Western influence in the 19th century.

With the arrival of Westerners on the island nation, which had remained closed off from the rest of the world until then, everything changed. As Western morality took root in the upper echelons of Japanese society, the government began to outlaw traditional Japanese practices that were perfectly normal to the people but appeared uncultured or strange to foreigners; all this, in order to prove to an increasingly curious Western gaze that Japan was just as civilised a society as them.

One of the practices that faced the wrath of the law was shunga, or traditional Japanese erotica. Though once considered to be as just another genre of art, shunga was first officially banned by the Shogunate, or the military dictatorship of Japan, in 1722. But crackdowns on the art form and those who produced and procured it did not begin until the country first begrudgingly allowed the visit of Western powers.

Sold either as single scrolls or more popularly in the form of enpon, or a book, shunga was produced by artists in the block print format of traditional Chinese medicine scrolls. It depicted largely heterosexual, ethnic Japanese couples with enlarged genitals engaging in intercourse. However, a few paintings have been found depicting Dutch or Portuguese characters and sometimes (as seen in Hokusai’s now iconic The Dream of the Fisheman’s Wife) non-human creatures as well.

Though shunga has been outlawed for almost 300 years now, it has left an unparalleled legacy. A single look at any of the raciest manga comics today will reveal the influence shunga has had on the art of the island nation. In fact, Japan’s most popular export, tentacle porn, is thought to have originated in Hokusai’s classic depiction of a woman’s octopus fetish.

But why aren’t breasts pixelated in Japanese porn?

If laws and cultural practices to curb obscenity are so strong then somebody would object to nipples in porn too, right? Well… Not exactly. While we’re sure #FreeTheNipple hasn’t exactly taken over Japanese porn as a movement yet, the country itself has had an interesting relationship with breasts. The answer to why they aren’t treated as forbidden a fruit as a woman’s love box might be found in observing the roots of Japanese porn.

As observed in shunga, not much difference is visible between the chests of both men and women who appear in the paintings, with the only marker between them being either their dress or their genitalia. Unlike present beauty standards which value big breasts, preserved shunga prints show that the Japanese never really eroticised boobs and, although this was dependent on class, it was not uncommon for Japanese women to be topless.

Shunga almost always depicts people as being clothed, with only their naughty bits visible through robes partially pulled aside. The clothes served as markers of gender and social status, and perhaps act as a testament to the lack of surprise over nudity in 17th or 18th century Japan, where it was not uncommon to see the opposite sex in the nude at communal baths.

Japanese porn and the future of Japan

In a country where the population threatens to fall by a third of what it is, adversely impacting its economic and social institutions as it falls, pornography has a bigger role than ever before. As confirmed by Politifact, 46 per cent of Japanese women and 25 per cent of Japanese men between 16-24 abhor the idea of sex. 40 per cent of Japan’s millennials and almost a third of those entering their 30s are virgins.

Megumi Igarashi, a Japanese artist who has been embroiled in a battle with her country’s judiciary over the meaning of ‘obscene,’ was quoted by the BBC as saying “building a relationship is not easy,” when asked why 64 per cent of young Japanese people were not in a relationship.

Igarashi instantly shot to fame in 2014 when she was arrested for creating a fully functional kayak from the mould of her vagina or, as she calls it, her manko. According to her, men just won’t make the first move, “They can watch porn on the internet and get sexual satisfaction that way.”

But 26-year-old comedian Ano Matsui shed light on the other side of the coin while speaking to BBC. It wasn’t that men couldn’t be bothered. It was that they were terrified. Matsui shared that he had been traumatised when he had asked a girl out and had been turned down; and apparently, he isn’t the only one,

“There are a lot of men like me who find women scary. We are afraid of being rejected. So we spend time doing hobbies like animation. I hate myself, but there is nothing I can do about it.”

For someone who has just spent a generous half an hour browsing through shugna (for purely research-related purposes, I assure you), it is hard to believe that a nation with such rich erotic art depicting a rather healthy appetite for the more pleasurable aspects of life should ever find itself in a position where things as natural as both human reproduction and the organs that ensure it are seen as “indecent”.