HorrorSpeak---Terror Awaits You in Every Forum!!!!: The Big ASIAN FILM Q&A thread.

For a general description of Japanese censorship, here is a Q&A from the Seldom asked questions about Japan Q&A:

"Q. I've been to Japan a number of times, and have grown curious; why is there censorship of genitals in adult entertainment? - Question submitted by Douglas Hardy

A. Japanese censorship has a long, strange history and even when you understand it, it still doesn't quite make sense. The infamous Japanese mosaic on Japanese porno movies and girlie magazines is a way to get around Japan's obscenity law, Article 175 or the Criminal Code. It dates back to 1907 and stipulates that "anyone found guilty of distributing, selling or displaying in public obscene literature, pictures, or other items" will be subject to a prison term of up to two years or a very stiff fine. Although it is very clear about the punishment, it is not so specific about the crime. As is the case with many obscenity statutes, there is no definition of what exactly constitutes 'obscene' and since the law was passed, Japanese pornography has gone through various stages. At times has been censored quite strictly, and sometimes not at all, depending on public attitudes and who was in power politically. During the 1950s, censorship was quite strict, but art books with shunga (literally 'pictures of spring; erotic prints painted by famous Japanese artists like Hokusai or Utagawa), were allowed if the genitalia were covered over. Allowing shunga to be published set a precedent of sorts, and pornography from the West began to be imported in the 1970s. The customs office in Yokohama set up a special department which was full of people busily blacking out genitalia. Since it was okay to sell Western porn, Japanese entrepreneurs realized that they could probably produce domestic pornography as well, as long as they censored it the same way that Western movies and magazines were.
The most recent developments in the censorship battle are "hair nude" photos and "thin mosaics". Hair nude photos are pictures which depict pubic hair without any mosaic or other covering. A magazine called Shukan Bunshun published a series of artistic nude photographs, and when it was ruled that pubic hair was okay as long as it had "highly artistic content", this opened the door pretty much anyone to print whatever they wanted and claim that it was art. Computer technology has led to smaller and small mosaics, because sophisticated software makes it less time-consuming to cover up the genitalia. Non-mosaic versions of Japanese pornographic films and photos that were smuggled out before being censored are now widely available on the internet, making Japan's censorship practices even more meaningless."

http://www.quirkyjapan.or.tv/saq.html

At the same time that does not cover the question of the asshole(friendly pun

). But at the same time I do have a theory. It seems that the interpretation by the Japanese supreme court of ideas of indecency in film and other media is far more concerned with genitals then the anus and have ruled as such. Most Japanese films that feature genitals usually wear a piece of cloth or a kind of putty over them, for a western example of this see The Toxic Avenger Part 2 in which a Japanese actress wears one of these coverings during location filming in Japan, but unlike Japanese films the region is not pixilated. So most pixilation is in fact covering the genital covering. The anus is not required to be seasoned so they don’t.

Its still hard to say why the anus is okay. At the same time it appears the pubic hair was more permissible in the past, and you can find eighteenth and nineteenth century Japanese erotic woodcuts showing pubes.

So it comes down to why the anus is okay. I have read in the past that in Japanese culture does not consider the anus a sex organ (I know, what a sad backward people) in a similar way that bare breasts are traditionally less sexualized then in the other parts of Asia and the West. Hopefully that answer is close enough to the mark.

For more information about the history of Japanese censorship in film and other arts see the link bellow, it also talks about the role of the Pinky genre in changing perceptions of the law.

http://es.geocities.com/eiga9/articulos/obscenity.html

Edited by lemmy caution (08/06/08 06:38 PM)