Postwar sexual culture is the total change in sexual custom, media expression, law, and mass mentality in Japan from the August 1945 defeat in the Second World War to the present. It is used as a periodisation that grasps as a whole the roughly eighty-year span from the founding of the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) in the occupation period, through the era of kasutori magazines, the end of the red-line districts, the rise of pink film, the Roman Porno line, the era of erotic gekiga, the appearance of adult video, and on to the so-called AV protection law of 2022.

Overview

The term applies the concept of “postwar” from political and economic history to the domain of love and sexual custom, placing the political rupture of defeat at the starting point of the social institutions surrounding sex. Inheriting the prewar licensed prostitution system while marked by the intervention of the Occupation, GHQ censorship policy, the 1956 Anti-Prostitution Law, and the shifting application of Penal Code Article 175, the continuity and rupture of law characterise the sexual culture of the period. In media history, the lineage from the immediate-postwar kasutori magazines through the 1960s pink film, the 1970s Roman Porno and erotic gekiga, and the 1980s adult video developed with continuity, interacting at each step with social conditions, technical innovation, and regulatory trends, on into present-day sexual-expression media.

The occupation period (1945-1952)

On 18 August 1945, the Home Ministry’s police bureau directed industry bodies to open “comfort” facilities for occupation troops, and on 26 August the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) was founded, expanding facilities to garrison areas nationwide. Behind it lay the old Home Ministry’s idea of avoiding sexual violence by occupation troops against general women through organised prostitution. In January 1946 the RAA was effectively dissolved when the use by occupation troops was banned on grounds of venereal-disease spread and the GHQ order abolishing licensed prostitution; its workers turned to streetwalking in the red-line districts. The debate over the RAA holds both a position stressing its character as state-policy prostitution and one stressing the women’s agency and economic choice, and it is an object of critical re-examination.

After the January 1946 abolition order, the former pleasure quarters survived in form as “special restaurant districts” (red-line areas) that tacitly permitted prostitution, while private-prostitution areas unknown to the police were called “blue-line.” Women serving only occupation troops were called “only,” and streetwalkers soliciting unspecified clients “pan-pan,” symbolic figures of postwar society who appeared often in newspapers, magazines, novels, and film. Meanwhile, GHQ was relatively lenient toward sexual and entertainment publishing, and with the easing of paper control and a reaction against wartime repression, the low-quality popular magazines printed on pulp paper, the kasutori magazines, appeared in volume from around 1946, themed on the erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical, the starting point of postwar sexual expression’s liberalisation and popularisation.

The 1950s: red-line districts and mass sexual culture

Against the special-procurement boom of the Korean War (1950-1953), the Japanese economy turned toward recovery, and the sex business found a degree of stability. Red-line districts existed in cities nationwide, with early-modern quarter lineages and new postwar areas coexisting; the period’s red-line districts are preserved visually through documentary photography and films such as Mizoguchi Kenji’s Street of Shame (1956).

The Anti-Prostitution Law was promulgated on 24 May 1956. It punished the solicitation, arrangement, and provision of place for prostitution while not adopting dual punishment for the act itself, making only the prostitute subject to guidance disposition, a lack of thoroughness that drew later debate. With full enforcement on 1 April 1958, the red-line districts were legally abolished, and the lineage of public prostitution reaching back to the early-modern licensed system nominally ended. In practice, prostitution continued in forms such as Turkish baths (later soapland), and was reorganised into new sex businesses within the business-control law.

The 1960s: pink film and the popularisation of eros

In 1962, Kobayashi Satoru’s Flesh Market was released, the starting point of the low-budget independent adult-cinema genre of pink film. By the late 1960s it was mass-produced at hundreds of titles a year and turned out directors of great later influence, including Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao; the genre held the singular character, even in world adult-cinema history, of fusing political avant-gardism with sexual expression. After the Anti-Prostitution Law, businesses within the “amusement-trade” frame, Turkish baths, snack bars, and cabarets, expanded, providing sexual service under the guise of cross-sex hospitality; these were explicitly positioned as “sex-related special businesses” by the 1985 revision of the business law, the legal foundation of present-day sex businesses.

The 1970s: Roman Porno and erotic gekiga

In 1971, the financially troubled Nikkatsu began its adult-film line, Roman Porno. Keeping its contract actors and staff while producing on low budget and short schedule, it turned out directors of distinct authorial vision such as Kumashiro Tatsumi, Tanaka Noboru, and Sone Chusei. Balancing artistry and commerce under tension with censorship (the application of Penal Code Article 175), it continued for about seventeen years, ending in 1988, an institutionalised major-studio adult-film line without parallel in the world. In parallel, youth-oriented erotic gekiga magazines were issued in volume from the late 1960s, fusing the realist line of gekiga with sexual expression, the prehistory of the later eromanga and adult-comic market.

The 1980s: the appearance of adult video

In the early 1980s, against the spread of the home video deck, adult video (AV) appeared as packaged sexual imagery. In 1981, the Japan Video Ethics Association was founded, introducing the mosaic processing of genitals and pubic hair as industry self-regulation. Through the 1980s, makers formed the market, and AV grew rapidly into a sexual-imagery industry exceeding pink film and Roman Porno in scale; its dawning figures were recorded by non-fiction writers, with the activity of the director Yoyogi Tadashi, the actress Kuroki Kaori, and Muranishi Toru greatly influencing later AV culture. The 1980s were at the same time the golden age of adult magazines and photo magazines, with the gradual opening of visual sexual expression leading to the lifting of the pubic-hair ban in the early 1990s.

From the 1990s: digitisation and diversification

With the spread of the internet in the late 1990s, DVD and streaming in the 2000s, and VR and social media from the 2010s, sexual-expression media digitised and diversified at an accelerating pace. Doujinshi, doujin games, eroge, and adult streaming platforms formed a situation in which varied forms beyond the commercial AV industry coexist. Meanwhile, the child-pornography law (enacted 1999, with the ban on simple possession added in 2014), the revenge-pornography law (2014), and the AV performance-damage prevention and relief law (2022, the AV protection law) followed one after another, greatly shifting the legal framework around sex.

Historiographical position

Postwar sexual culture is a composite object of research at the crossing of political, economic, media, gender, and legal history. The preservation and digitisation of primary materials, kasutori magazines, adult films, and AV packages, advances at university and national institutions. Main points of debate include the structure of sexual exploitation in the occupation period, the evaluation of the Anti-Prostitution Law, the auteur theory of pink film and Roman Porno, labour problems in the AV industry, and the industry reorganisation after the AV protection law, all continuing subjects of discussion.

See also

• Kasutori magazines
• Pink film
• Golden age of pink film
• The history of AV
• AV protection law
• Anti-Prostitution Law
• Licensed prostitution system
• Museum of sexual culture