Japanese Porn Crackdown

Never say NEVA again | The Japan Times Online

"That morning, more than a dozen police investigators came charging into the office and began confiscating documents and personal computers. Nobody told us why. We were ordered not to leave, or to contact anyone."

The man, a staff member of a producer of adult videos (AVs), relates to Weekly Playboy (Sept. 17) what befell his company Aug. 23, when a 300-strong force from Tokyo Metropolitan Police spread out to conduct raids on some 20 locations.

During the bust, office staffers were even ordered to empty their pockets so the cops could make photocopies of personal data from health-insurance cards.

Police launched the raids in reaction to the current crop of DVDs, which it claims fail to sufficiently mask on-screen action, thereby qualifying them as obscene.

Until recently, the main players in the AV industry cooperated with the Nihon Ethics of Video Association (NEVA), which applies its seal of approval to discs that comply with self-imposed censorship.

"Participation in NEVA is voluntary, but most makers joined because major distributors wouldn't touch their products otherwise," an AV producer tells Weekly Playboy. "Their influence was such that an old saying went, 'Your video won't succeed without girls who squeal and NEVA.'

"But then a certain company developed 'digital masking' (which typically appears as a mosaic). In a scene showing oral sex for example, the mosaic would perfectly overlap with a man's procreative member, so it was like watching the real thing . . . and the main business shifted to the independent operators that applied these digitalized mosaics."


Faced with this challenge to its authority, NEVA began relaxing its own inspection standards concerning the appearance of mosaics (from October 2004) and other anatomical displays (from August 2006), and it was this, reports Asahi Geino (Sept. 6), that led to the crackdown.

The DVDs responsible for getting their manufacturers in the latest hot water with authorities included At One's "Bad Hole" disc series, and two items from H.M.P. titled "Kyonyu Okusama Nettori Yuwaku Etchi!! (Big-breasted Wife — Sopping Wet Sex Temptation)" and "Moeeee — Ijirareru no daisuki (Bursting Forth — I Love to be Pawed)."

Reviewing the evidence, the reporter agreed that when compared with more staid DVDs, the mosaics on these productions left practically nothing to the imagination.

"They were pretty raunchy," he writes.

"In the beginning, rental shops wouldn't put out discs unless they complied with NEVA standards, but now only about 30 percent of the items for rent are NEVA-approved," observes Ganari Takahashi, a former president of Soft On Demand, who adds that "digital coverup" work is expensive.

"It's done one frame at a time, outsourced to overseas labs that employ as many as 100 technicians," Takahashi tells Asahi Geino. "A skilled technician might devote 8 hours to a single minute's worth of mosaic. But for a long time the mosaics in NEVA-approved AVs didn't incorporate this level of craftsmanship and were crude by comparison. That was one problem. And I also suppose NEVA pressured the producers to go along, telling them, 'We've hired retired policemen, so you won't get busted.' "

But at least some in the trade are taking the recent raids in stride.

"These kinds of crackdowns have been going on for a long time," a veteran AV director remarks in Weekly Playboy. "When they happen, the usual practice is for us to keep our heads down until it all blows over."