JAPAN: The Decline of Sex

Not long ago, a small-time Tokyo businessman named Tadao Nakata hit upon an idea that he hoped would bring him, as he later put it, “tons of money for the future.” He contracted with a California publisher to import 10,000 copies of a grossly prurient quarterly called Trio, which billed itself rather improbably as “a cultural, scientific and sociological publication.” Yet even though Nakata had the printers take an air brush to some of the more explicit photographs, Japanese officialdom was outraged. First, customs authorities forced Nakata to have 37 “undesirable” spots in each copy daubed with ink before they would allow the magazine into the country. Then the Tokyo police confiscated the magazine and indicted Nakata on charges that it was “damaging to the sanctity of decent home life in Japan.” He is now on trial.

The magazine was blue enough to make a Times Square news dealer wince, but Japanese intellectuals have since made Nakata into a kind of Ginza Ginzburg. Critic Isamu Kurita, writing in the influential Tokyo daily Yomiuri Shimbun, warned that excessive official zeal in enforcing Japan’s tough obscenity laws could lead to “the barbarization of our culture and civilization in its crudest form.” Tokyo Psychology Professor Kazuo Shimada sputtered that Nakata’s arrest was unfair because sex “is a personal and private matter.” Mitsuo Takeya, a leading Japanese nuclear physicist, worried that government repression “could end up by distorting the basic concept of sex.” Complained Printmaker Kiyoshi Saito: “Where there is no sun, no healthy arts can flourish.”

To students of the once exquisite Japanese art of pornography, Nakata’s stuff was a poor substitute for the celebrated Ukiyo-e erotica of the era before the first Westerners arrived more than a century ago. In the 1700s and early 1800s, when the great samurai families ruled the peaceful, isolated island nation, Japanese artists celebrated sex in extraordinarily direct and sensual prints and woodcuts. Every well-bred virgin was given at least one graphically instructive makura-e (pillow picture) as part of her trousseau. “There was no hypocrisy,” says Ukiyo-e Scholar Teruji Yoshida. “These artists dealt with the pleasures of sex as matter-of-factly as if they were dealing with other routine pleasures, like those of eating or even of just simply taking a walk in the countryside.”

Not any more. Most Japanese scholars trace the decline of Japanese pornography to the prewar era. It was then that the imperial government, in an attempt to focus the nation’s energies on making war, not love, enacted Japan’s first anti-obscenity laws. Later on, American G.I.s marched in with their pinups and introduced such shocking habits as handholding in public. Before long, the battle lines were drawn: a bureaucracy committed to the defense of a dated public prudery v. a society whose celebration of private sensuality has nonetheless produced, among other things, Japan’s ubiquitous “sex drugstores” and the most expert prostitution in Asia.

Porn Squad. In the arts the battle has been escalating. No fewer than 248 of the 417 feature-length films produced in Japan last year were quick, low-budget “eroductions” aimed at adults-only audiences. Japanese distributors imported a record 50 X-rated films, mainly from the U.S. and Scandinavia; almost all of them had to have scenes cut or blurred with special chemicals to pass tough national standards. Among other things, they direct that “bedroom scenes and outrageous activities shall be carefully handled so as not to arouse indecent passions in the audience.”

The Tokyo police department has recently acquired a color-TV recorder that allows the city’s 20-man porn squad to record the action on late-night programs and review it each morning for possible obscenity-law violations. Last year alone the cops piled up 571 arrests on obscenity charges and filled a storage area deep inside headquarters with a gargantuan haul of illicit erotica: 13,606 purple publications, 4,257 reels of film and 52,470 assorted “pictorial items.” As for Ukiyo-e, serious students of the ancient Japanese art acknowledge, without pleasure, that the best collection around nowadays is to be found in—of all places—the Boston Museum.