A production system that began when the major studio Nikkatsu, facing a management crisis, sought a way out in adult filmmaking ended up constituting a singular auteur-incubation platform in postwar Japanese cinema.

Roman Porno is the series of adult theatrical films produced and distributed by the major Japanese film company Nikkatsu from November 1971 to May 1988. This article covers the production background, the establishment of low-budget auteurism, the principal directors and actresses, the decline after the arrival of AV, and the twenty-first-century reassessment.

Overview

Roman Porno was a production system in which commercial rationality and authorial expression coexisted in a rare way in postwar Japanese film history. Begun in 1971 as a response to Nikkatsu’s management crisis, it strictly operated three basic constraints, low budget (roughly 7.5–10 million yen per film), short shooting (about ten days), and a set quantity of sexual depiction (a sex scene at roughly one-tenth of the running time, while granting directors substantial freedom in story, staging, and cinematography within those constraints. This combination of constraint and freedom functioned as an auteur-incubation platform, producing important postwar directors: Tatsumi Kumashiro, Noboru Tanaka, Chūsei Sone, Kichitarō Negishi, Shinji Sōmai, Yōjirō Takita, Yōichi Sai, and others, who later took up principal activity in mainstream and big-budget cinema, securing Roman Porno’s reassessment as a training ground for the auteurs who sustained Japanese film after Kurosawa and Ozu.

Industrial background and formation

The direct background was Nikkatsu’s management crisis. From the late 1950s into the 1960s, Nikkatsu had flourished with action and youth films starring Yūjirō Ishihara, Akira Kobayashi, and Jō Shishido, but the spread of television and the younger audience’s drift from cinema in the late 1960s rapidly cut its audience. In 1971, as a final management pivot, Nikkatsu decided to convert its production wholly to adult film while preserving its own studio (in Chōfu, Tokyo), its distribution network, and its contract actors. On 20 November of that year the first Roman Porno works, Danchizuma: Hirusagari no Jōji (dir. Shōgorō Nishimura) and others, were released, opening the system.

The series name combines the French roman (story, novel) and the English porno. Nikkatsu’s publicity department adopted “Roman Porno” as a designation indicating not mere pink film but “adult film with narrative”, a strategic naming differentiating it from existing independent pink film and stressing the quality assurance of a major-studio product. In January 1972 the Metropolitan Police seized four Roman Porno works on a charge of obscene-image distribution (Penal Code Article 175) and indicted nine Nikkatsu executives, directors, and writers (the “Roman Porno Trial”). The trial ran eight years, from 1972 to 1980, and all defendants were finally acquitted; it is remembered as an important precedent on the interpretation of obscenity and influenced the later self-regulation practice of the AV industry.

Authorship and expression

The system strictly operated the three constraints of production cost, shooting days, and quantity of sexual depiction, but granted directors substantial freedom in story setting, casting, staging, and technique. The requirement to include a set quantity of sex scenes posed directors the creative task of how to integrate that constraint with their own authorship. Among the principal directors: Tatsumi Kumashiro established an idiosyncratic style of improvisational staging and natural-light shooting (Ichijō Sayuri: Nureta Yokujō, 1972; Yojōhan Fusuma no Urabari, 1973). Noboru Tanaka won critical acclaim for poetic imagery and forays into the documentary genre (A Woman Called Sada Abe, 1975). Kichitarō Negishi (Enrai, 1981) later took up principal activity in mainstream film, and Shinji Sōmai went on from Roman Porno to become a master of the youth film. Yōjirō Takita, starting from Roman Porno, later won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Departures (2008).

Among the principal actresses, Junko Miyashita, Mari Tanaka, Naomi Tani, Kazuko Shirakawa, Etsuko Hara, Yūko Katagiri, and others appeared under Roman Porno’s exclusive-contract system, sustaining the series’ consistency. Junko Miyashita, a regular in Kumashiro’s films, is remembered as an important postwar actress.

Decline and end

From around 1981, with the formation of the AV industry on the spread of the home VCR, Roman Porno’s audience was rapidly eroded. As the viewing of adult film, which had required a trip to the cinema, became possible at home at any time, Roman Porno’s theatrical box office entered a long decline. From the mid-1980s Nikkatsu tried revising the content toward general youth film, but failed to recover box office. On 28 May 1988, the final works were released and the seventeen-year system ended; Nikkatsu thereafter returned to general filmmaking. At its end, Roman Porno had left a cumulative 1,133 films, the largest single-series body of work in postwar Japanese cinema.

Twenty-first-century reassessment

From the 2000s, Roman Porno has undergone reassessment as an important object of postwar Japanese film history. Ken Terawaki’s Roman Porno (Nikkatsu, 1971–1988) (2012) and Toshiyuki Matsushima’s A Complete History of Nikkatsu Roman Porno (2000) presented systematic domestic study; abroad, the introductions by Jasper Sharp and Tom Mes positioned Roman Porno in an international cult-film context. Retrospectives have been held continuously at the Berlin, Busan, and Hong Kong international film festivals, and its standing as a core rather than peripheral body of postwar Japanese film is being established. In 2016 Nikkatsu launched the “Roman Porno Reboot” project, producing five new works by contemporary directors (Kazuya Shiraishi, Akihiko Shiota, Isao Yukisada, Hideo Nakata, Sion Sono), inheriting the original constraints (low budget, short shooting, set quantity of sexual depiction) while exercising their own authorship.

Related terms

• AV
• Pink film
• Penal Code Article 175
• Kasutori magazines
• Postwar sexual culture