In 2003, in front of Shinjuku station, a high-school student stands with a feature phone in hand. On the screen, the i-mode logo and below it the words “looking for a dating-site pen-pal”. At the same hour another customer at a manga café in Ōkubo, before a PC on a broadband line, clicks the advertisement on a free video site. At the same hour again, in a rental video shop in Ikebukuro, the latest DVD packages lie stacked flat. The eroticism of the 2000s ran on three parallel lines, feature phone, PC and physical shop, an ecosystem that experienced peak and turning point at once.

The history of adult culture in 2000s Japan covers the trends of the sex industry, erotic media and the consumer culture of sex from 2000 to 2009. The rise of feature-phone dating sites, the quantitative expansion of the AV industry, the explosive growth of internet pornography on broadband, and the transition from DVD to streaming proceeded together as several structural changes at once. This article covers the media environment, the AV industry, dating sites and compensated dating, and the regulatory trend.

Feature phones and dating sites

The first half of the 2000s was the period of spread for mobile internet services led by NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode (begun 1999), and dating sites boomed among the young. Easily accessed from feature phones, dating sites numbered several thousand nationwide at the peak, run on varied fee models of monthly charge and per-message charge. Demand was broad across both sexes, mixing the single, the married, students and homemakers. The “compensated dating” phenomenon that had emerged from the late 1990s was further anonymised and enlarged by the dating sites, and the monetary contact of schoolgirls and university women with adult men occurred routinely in late-night karaoke rooms, love hotels and dating cafés.

In response to the surge in dating-site crime in the early 2000s (sexual offences, extortion, suicide, child prostitution), the Dating Site Regulation Law was enacted in 2003, building a regulatory frame centred on child protection. It set the operator’s notification duty, the user age-verification duty and the duty to delete illegal postings, greatly altering the industry’s structure.

The quantitative expansion of the AV industry

The 2000s were the quantitative peak of the Japanese AV industry. Annual production reached around fifteen thousand titles at the peak, and the market was estimated above 500 billion yen including related media. The shift from VHS to DVD, completed between the late 1990s and around 2003, sharply lowered production and distribution costs, and new makers entered rapidly. New major makers such as Moodyz (founded 2000), Prestige (2002), S1 No.1 Style (2004) and kawaii (2006) reorganised the industry through flashy promotion, the character-staging of exclusive actresses and the idol-styling of packages. Exclusive actresses of the major makers, Aoi Sora (debut 2002) and Asami Yuma (debut 2005) among others, began their careers in earnest in this period.

From the later 2000s, in parallel with the rise of free video sites, the structure of the AV industry began to waver. The closure and shrinking of rental shops, the shift to streaming (DMM, the forerunner of FANZA) and the move toward the mid-2010s market contraction were already visible by the end of the 2000s.

Broadband and internet pornography

From Yahoo! BB in 2001, the spread of ADSL and optical fibre made home broadband general. With it, the viewing of adult video and images by PC spread explosively, establishing a new consumption route in place of the magazine, VHS and DVD sales model. DMM (founded 1999, split into FANZA in 2018) and the overseas tube sites that began around 2007 made up the adult-video market on both paid and free models. In the same period, image boards, personal blogs and the social network mixi formed a distinctive ecosystem in which erotic images, accounts and amateur posts circulated actively. With the full-browser function of mobile phones and the arrival of the smartphone (the iPhone reached Japan in 2008), mobile video viewing became practical by the end of the 2000s; the base of the 2010s “smartphone and internet pornography” era was built through the decade.

Compensated dating and its socialisation

“Compensated dating”, which had emerged as a social problem in the late 1990s, became popular through the spread of dating sites across the 2000s. The selling of used underwear and uniforms, the telephone-club contact and the “JK business” developed in parallel as related trades. In 2004 the police’s arrests for child prostitution reached some 720 persons and about 1,800 cases, politicising the matter. As an extension of the 1999 child-prostitution and child-pornography law and the 2003 dating-site law, the later 2000s became a period of continuous strengthening of child-protection law.

Eroge, dōjin and the move to the mainstream

The 2000s were also a time when eroge (adult PC games), dōjinshi and dōjin games crossed rapidly into general culture. The rise of works such as Fate/stay night (2004) and the Tōhō Project series expanded the influence of eroge and dōjin origins on the mainstream. The attendance of Comic Market surged from about 330,000 in 2000 to about 560,000 in 2009, and the circulation of culture through the dōjin marketplace leapt both quantitatively and qualitatively.

See also

• History of AV
• The AV bubble
• Dating Site Regulation Law
• Asami Yuma
• History of American pornography
• Sexual revolution