The name of a single biblical figure travelled through eighteenth-century moral panic and nineteenth-century medical opinion before settling, in modern Japanese, as the everyday name for an ordinary human practice.

Overview

Onanie (Japanese: オナニー, romanised onanii; from German Onanie) is a Japanese term for masturbation, the act of producing sexual pleasure for oneself on one’s own body. Japanese also uses the Sino-Japanese compound jii (自慰, “self-comforting”) and the English loan mastābēshon; in casual subcultural use the word is sometimes shortened to ona-. The German-derived form was the term that entered Japanese medical writing in the Meiji period and has remained the standard everyday word.

Contemporary medicine and psychology treat the practice as a routine and healthy element of human sexual development, present across the full age range and across both sexes. The American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics both classify it as a normal developmental behaviour. This contemporary medical neutrality is itself the product of a long cultural and clinical history, which is the subject of most academic writing on the topic.

In the Japanese adult-media industries, masturbation is both a routine on-screen act and the organising premise of several distinct genres, including onasapo audio (instructional or companion masturbation tracks), the ASMR adjacent audio segment, and a continuing line of women-centred masturbation-themed adult video.

Etymology

The biblical figure

The name traces to Onan, a Hebrew character in the Book of Genesis (38:9). In the narrative, Onan is required under levirate-marriage law to father a child by his deceased brother’s widow Tamar; he refuses to produce an heir who would not be counted as his own and is recorded as spilling his seed on the ground. The text reports that the act was displeasing to God and that Onan was struck down. The act described is more precisely coitus interruptus, not solitary masturbation, but later Christian theological tradition collapsed the two together and used Onan’s name as a label for any non-procreative emission of semen.

Onania, Tissot, and the medicalisation of the act

The decisive shift from theological framing to medical framing took place in eighteenth-century Europe. The anonymous English pamphlet Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and All Its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes was published in London around 1716 and went through many editions across the eighteenth century, eventually selling in the order of 200,000 copies. The pamphlet asserted that solitary masturbation was the cause of a long list of medical conditions and offered, by mail order, restorative tinctures to treat the resulting damage.

The Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot’s L’Onanisme: Dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (Lausanne, 1760) consolidated the medical frame into formal European medicine. Tissot argued that masturbation depleted the body of nervous-system substance and could produce consumption, epilepsy, memory loss, blindness, and a long catalogue of further conditions. The book was translated into Latin, German, and English and became standard reading in nineteenth-century European medicine.

The result, traced in detail by Thomas Laqueur’s Solitary Sex (2003), was a roughly two-hundred-year period in which European medical and educational institutions treated masturbation as a serious pathology with extensive secondary literature, dedicated clinical treatments (cold baths, mechanical restraints, in some cases surgical intervention), and a prominent place in the moral education of children.

Entry into Japanese

Japanese medicine acquired the German vocabulary of the discipline during the Meiji period (1868-1912), and the word Onanie entered Japanese as onanii in this stream. By the 1880s, official Japanese guidance documents from the Ministry of Education and from the Imperial Army and Navy were warning against onanii as a habit destructive to health, in close translation of the contemporary European medical view. The Meiji-period literary record (Mori Ogai, Futabatei Shimei, Natsume Soseki) contains scattered references to the term in diaries and letters.

History

The Kinsey reports and clinical normalisation

The decisive twentieth-century shift came from large-scale empirical survey work. Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), conducted at Indiana University, reported that 92 per cent of surveyed adult men and 62 per cent of surveyed adult women had masturbated. The point of the data was that a behaviour classified by medicine and morality as pathological was empirically a normal element of human sexual experience.

The major US professional bodies (American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Academy of Pediatrics) shifted through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s onto a neutral or positively-affirming clinical position. The Japanese clinical and educational establishment followed, slowly, through the same decades; the older anti-onanism vocabulary survived in some popular literature considerably later but had effectively disappeared from mainstream medical writing by the 1970s.

The adult-media genre

From the 1980s onward, Japanese adult video, eromanga, and doujinshi all developed sustained genres organised around masturbation. The basic categories include the onanii kanshou (masturbation-watching) format, in which the camera observes a single female performer’s solo session at length; the masturbation-with-toys subgenre that runs alongside the development of the adult toy industry; and the onasapo format, in which a partner figure addresses the viewer-listener and accompanies the act through voice direction.

From the 2000s, the adult-audio segment (originally eroge voice work, later expanding into dedicated audio labels and ASMR-style production) generated a major sub-industry organised around the masturbation-companion format. The genre is structurally distinct from video pornography in that the viewer-listener is conceived as participating rather than watching, and voice-actress identity is the principal commercial differentiator.

Variants

Masturbation-companion (onasapo)

A second-person voice-led format in which a performer addresses the listener and accompanies their solitary act with verbal direction, pacing, and emotional script. Developed within the adult-audio segment in the late 2000s and now a substantial market in its own right. See Onasapo.

Mutual masturbation

Two or more people present in the same space, watching one another or themselves while masturbating. Common in chijo productions and as a component of group-play sequences.

Toy-assisted masturbation

Use of vibrators, wand massagers, onaholes, and other adult toys as part of the act. The category overlaps almost completely with the contemporary toy industry, which has been driven in commercial terms by precisely this use case.

Cultural reception

In literature, masturbation has been a recurring subject of twentieth-century fiction, with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) as the conventional reference point in the English-language tradition. Japanese fiction (Murakami Ryu, Machida Ko, Nishimura Kenta) has incorporated the act extensively into the confessional first-person novel.

In contemporary clinical writing, masturbation itself carries no medical risk and is described in straightforwardly positive terms in standard sexual-health literature. The clinical interest now centres on the smaller category of compulsive sexual behaviour, in which the act may form part of a wider pattern producing significant impairment; this is a distinct clinical category and is not predicated on the act itself.

Religious traditions vary. The Jewish and Christian traditions have, broadly, treated solitary masturbation negatively in their formal teachings, while the Hindu, Taoist, and tantric traditions include positive treatments of solitary sexual practice as part of broader frameworks of sexual cultivation.

See also

• Adult Toys
• Onasapo
• Ero ASMR
• Onahole
• Denma
• Chijo