I was doing some thinking about the industry and I came to me that maybe there is a silver lining to this condom law. Allow me to explain.
I have some friends who are very much into Japanese Adult Video (JAV) and after contacting a friend of mine who is well versed in Japanese culture (he is Japanese) and Japanese pop culture he told me that I was wrong in my assumption that JAV was big in japan, he explained that it isn’t just big, it’s HUGE more money than porn was here in its heyday, and it’s showing no signs of letting up. They don’t have a condom law in Japan but it wouldnt matter if they did because in japan they have to pixilate the pubic areas, even when they are not hardcore, penises and pussies are pixelated even in solo scenes.
I thought man talk about an issue that Porn Valley couldn’t deal with…..condoms are nothing by comparison, and even though un censored hardcore porn is available on the internet in Japan JAV is going stronger than ever.
So I plunked down for a membership to a site that offers JAV downloads and I started studying JAV,
And I was very much amazed by how much more erotic and appealing it is than it’s American counterpart, despite the pixilation, and I started realizing why. When you watch JAV it is about the girl, the shooting style hugely de-emphasizes the penis and puts the emphasis on the girl. She is always impeccably made up, she doesn’t have tats all over her and she doesn’t overact the way western porn chicks do. Its much more real and a thousand times hotter.
You rarely see a guys face during a sex scene and just as important you don’t hear them. The camera angles the lighting are all about making the girl look beautiful and keeping her beauty throughout the scene. the makeup stays nice and you don’t get the idea that the male talent was at one time a ward of the penal system, they don’t choke the girls, they don’t slap them, they don’t spit on them and the emphasis is on her pleasure and the eroticism and not on the guys penis. But in reality this style of shooting was necessary to master because they COULDN’T show penises or insertion without pixilating them but strange as it sounds it doesn’t take long before you realize that it doesn’t even matter.
Now this isn’t to say that Japan does’t have specialty videos where humiliation, degradation and such are the emphasis but those videos are much like the bondage videos are here, it’s a niche market. The broader general market is much different than western porn in the way I described above.
When I watch it from a more technical perspective other things start to jump out, the colors and the videography is a lot richer, there is no annoying rap, tekno or other music, what music there is is very low key and doesn’t annoy you.
Now it comes to me that maybe this condom law could have some positive effects on the industry, forcing us to shoot in a much more erotic way, without the spastic camerawork, overacting, and annoying males. Maybe it will bring porn back to what it should be about, giving the average guy the fantasy that it could be him with this seemingly unapproachable girl. Maybe we can return adult to being about beauty and eroticism and not about violence, misogyny and going through the motions for a paycheck.
Maybe that explains why Wicked is doing so well, theirs are the closest we seem to come to capturing the eroticism of JAV, but even they have a way to go.
I bet if we could capture that kind of eroticism and excitement in our porn productions, condoms wouldn’t make a hill of beans worth of difference.
After all they can do it without even showing a penis or a clit, and they are hauling in the yen by boxcars…..
7 Responses
RT @MikeSouth1226: Could The Condom Law Bring Porn Out Of It’s Slump: I was doing some thinking about the industry and I came to me… …
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Mike you are just so new at this JAV stuff, and you still need time to really absorb it all and carefully. Subscribing to a web sitedoes not really tell you much of what DVD productions are out there.
=There is quite a bit of condom use in JAV scenes.
=there is way too much overuse of sex toys (of the silly variety, not those big dildos you may be familiar with in US/euro productions)
=it takes forever for a scene to really get going (interminable interview, the male fondling the girl’s tits and pussy through her clothing/panties, etc). Some 30-40 minutes go by before you begin to see some “action”. I mean you can go cook/eat a meal, come back and they pretty much are at the place they were when you left.
=yes the guys’ faces are not frequently shown and if they are not very clearly either. Let’s say the truth: they are generally unattractive and seeing their faces is a real turn-off.
=.Guys’ penis size. Ah, that is one major problem in JAV movies. By our western standards, not very impressive, and not always at full attention either. They are limp most of the time, and the usual style of JAV sex position and filmmaking/shooting style don’t help matters much either. And they these limp dicks are enwrapped in condom, it gets even worse.
=most JV movies are rather brief by our most recent standards of 2-3-4 hours.
= Fetishes? They got more fetishes that you would even dare imagine. They surpass the Germans and Brazilians for sheer and utter crazyness (lactation, pregnant, BDSM, bestality, pissing, incest, etc)
=Yes generally the female performers are quite attractive, nicely dressed and made up. =The scene set-ups are long (and often too long) and erotic. The women generally do not seem to really actively participate in the sex, but are most like pushed/coerced and seem to be doing it against their better judgment and will. They generally seem to be uncomfortable with the whole thing and to us westerners they seem to be more in pain than really enjoying it (just take a look at facials in a JAV and compare them to a western hc scene) .
=You will see less sex positions in a JAV scene that a western scene. Very little anal or DP, not that much shaved pussies.
=while in a typical American or euro movie you will see male and female performers of different nationalities, in a JAV movie you will only see JAV performers. There is absolutely no variety. Japan is a very closed society when it comes to sex production. Some foreign performers do go on rare occasions to Japan to shoot, but it is rare and usually their names are not prominently displayed on the box cover.
=I am also given to understand that JAV female performers get higher pay than western porn performers. Not really clear as to why (question of supply and demand?).
Mike, you will say well there is no point in having the women shave themselves, or there is no need to have the males attractive or rock hard, if little or none of that will be shown/seen due to enforced pixilation. But then why go to the trouble of having them take off their clothes at all!? They could just go on shooting simulated soft-core sex.
Mike this statement: “Maybe that explains why Wicked is doing so well, theirs are the closest we seem to come to capturing the eroticism of JAV, but even they have a way to go”
Define “well”. Are we talking DVD sales, are we talking cable/satellite sales? Do you have actual figures you can share?
If I go back a few years when I used to frequent the ever-vanishing video-clubs, you could not find Wicked titles on the shelves. Why? The store owners knew the truth and did not hide it if you pressed on the reasons: low rentals due to use of condom and plot-driven content.
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I’m a big fan of Japanese porn and can say that without a doubt, it is more erotic than western porn and the girls are usually a lot better looking too. The squealing could go, but the scenes themselves are usually pretty hot and they are great at setting up the fantasy and playing it out. I find most American and Euro porn to mostly be unwatchable unless it’s amateur.
Really Mike, you are just NOW discovering JAV.
This article is weak and comparing JAV to Western Porn is like comparing apples to oranges. Plus, do you have any actual data that shows how JAV is really doing financially?
My now-defunct post-producton company edited tons of Japanese porn for five years. We kicked out hundreds of titles for a company called Typhoon Pictures. We generally received dupes of the camera masters from Japan. Cut them. Came up with titles for them. I even did on-camera stuff with a Japanese guy introducing the scenes. (He worked for the producer in Japan and spoke English) Sometimes, we did it like Mystery Science Theater 3000, with us silhouetted in the foreground, doing a running narrative of the scene. Generally, my job was to be rude, crude, and insulting to the Japanese in general. You know, playing the “Ugly American.” (Typecasting?) Upon returning from one of his trips to Japan, my co-host, who went by Aso Hashimoto (I always called him Asshole Hashimoto on screen) told me I better not ever go to Japan. Apparently, our pics were in lots of adult magazines in Japan and they really hated me there because of my insults. (Oh fucking well.) Anyway, I haven’t watched hardly any JAV since then but, since I got to see the camera masters, I had pretty good insight into production and production mindsets in Japan. Yes, they take FOREVER to get to the action. Yes, they pay the girls more than they do in the US, leastwise they did then. Quite a bit more, in fact. Many of the girls in the films aren’t professional porn stars. They’re simply girls wanting to make some money for clothes shopping or whatever and many of them only do porn once. Yes, the Japanese are preoccupied with more fetishes than I thought ever existed, and I probably already heard about more fetishes than the average guy knew existed. And many of those fetishes have private clubs dedicated to them in Japan. (For Japanese only.) The girls, usually acting like they’re getting raped or something in the scenes, is a cultural thing. They mostly all do it. The incessant “mewling” or whatever you want to call the sound coming out of their mouths became unbelievable annoying to hear. Mostly, the guys who produce porn in Japan are owners of chains of porn stores or they’re “agencies.” When the big honcho came over from Japan, he was usually with colleagues who were missing pinkies. They wore business suits and rarely said a word. The honcho spoke English but usually chose to speak through an interpreter. We’d be in meeting and I’d try to screw with the interpreter by using words he probably never heard before or I made words up like they were real English words… you know, just to fuck with him. But he never let on and never seemed to break stride when interpreting. ANyway, the Japanese have a whole different idea of what porn should be than we do in the US.