by Tim Pilcher
The loopholes around adult genitalia also led to the unfortunate rise of lolicon (Lolita complex) comics. Soon the whole uncomfortable image of sexy schoolgirls would have a firm grip on Japan’s manhood.
The appropriately nicknamed Kondom (aka Teruo Kakuta) writes and draws the incredibly popular Bondage Fairies series. Here the bi-sexual nymphs, Pamila and Pfil, are victims to sexual predator and bad fairy, Urushira.
Masamune Shirow is a huge star, both in Japan and the west. He has often incorporated mild “cheesecake” pin-up in his more mainstream work, as well as drawing more explicit scenes.
Another sequence from Chiyoji’s Miss 130, the story of a “working girl.” Note, her large breasts could almost be serving this specific fetish, and the artist has indeed drawn bakunyu stories, including Miss DD.
Secret schoolgirl lesbian trysts are very popular in Japanese hentai, such as this scene from Misty Girl Extreme by Toshiki Yui, creator of Hot Tails.
Junko Mizuno’s cute heroines having sex have a certain charm, but “Some people seem to find it more shocking. To them, it looks like I’m trying to dirty innocents.”
This sequence from Immoral Angel by Koh Kawarajima first appeared in Japan in 1997 and was published in the west by CPM Manga in 2000.
LOLICON
The kawaii aesthetic (“cute”) is extremely popular in Japan, particularly in manga. “Super-deformed” or “Chibi” versions of classic characters are regularly seen, and the ubiquitous Hello Kitty belongs to this ideology. Equally, the uniformed schoolgirl has also become a highly erotic and fetishist symbol in Japan—just as Britney Spears videos and St. Trinian’s movies have in the West—only more so. These two concepts are so deeply ingrained into the Japanese psyche that, together, they create a strange collusion between the hentai and the kawaii, an eroticised ideal of anything cute.
When manga publishers realized they couldn’t portray adult genitalia, they encouraged creators to draw younger-looking cute characters, as there was no law preventing the depiction of children’s genitalia, an unfortunate loophole.
This genre of manga, lolicon, is perhaps the least defendable and most unpalatable to Western eyes. Also known as “Lolita complex” (after Vladimir Nabokov’s book, Lolita, in which an older man becomes sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old girl) it is a widespread phenomenon in Japan, where it is a frequently criticized, yet many general bookstores and newsstands openly offer lolicon manga.
A stylized depiction by Junko Mizuno.
Throughout the 1980s, notable lolicon mangaka included Nonki Miyasu, Kamui Fujiwara, Yoshito Asari, and Aki Uchida. Hideo Azuma’s 12-page story The Machine That Came from the Sea (Umi Kara Kita Kikai) was a good example of a self-published (doujinshi) sexual manga featuring young girls — as was Azuma’s magazine Cybele. His work became popular among schoolboys because most of the erotic manga up until then had featured mature women, whereas Azuma’s work was of the more traditional kawaii variety. While not always strictly pornography (apart from his 1992 strip Kusari) Azuma’s manga contained sexual elements and paved the way for more pornographic manga magazines—such as Manga Burikko and Lemon People — to feature prepubescent girls. The target audience is — predictably — male, white-collar workers in their 20s and 30s.
The main thrust of lolicon stories include taboo relationships, such as between a teacher and student, brother and sister; or sexual experimentation between two children. Female mangaka Kaworu Watashiya’s Kodomo No Jikan (Nymphet) is an example of a series that, while not pornographic, is still an extremely sensitive subject — that of a nine-year-old girl who develops a crush on her teacher. The series was originally licensed for distribution in North America in 2006 by Seven Seas Entertainment, but was ultimately pulled as it was deemed too controversial for an American audience, despite no sex scenes occurring in the series.
Author and sociologist Sharon Kinsella has suggested that lolicon evolved out of the popularity of 1980s manga created by female artists for women, such as the cross-dressing heroine, Lady Oscar, from Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles. She believed that men followed these styles and started developing their own fan-fiction. As the genre developed, it moved from these cute, tough heroines toward depictions of girls as sexual victims: naked, helpless, fearful, and sometimes bound or chained. This was expanded into computer games and animated videos.
Japanese anime director and Oscar-winner Hayao Miyazaki said in a 1988 Animage interview that he preferred to make his protagonists girls, but “it’s difficult. They immediately become the subjects of lolicon gokko [a play toy for Lolita complex fans]. In a sense, if we want to depict someone who is a positive role model, we have no choice but to make them as lovely as possible. But now, there are too many people who shamelessly depict [the heroines] as if they just want [the girls] as pets, and things are escalating more and more.”
“Of course, I was influenced by all the Japanese ‘cute’ stuff,” revealed Junko Mizuno. “It’s almost impossible to avoid them if you grow up in Japan. But I also like many other different things such as horror movies, fetish art, Buddhist art, etc. I’m even influenced by TV shows, fashion magazines, toys, food, conversations with people…almost everything that surrounds me.”
Toshiki Yui’s cover to hot Tails #8.
The fairly inoffensive cover to The new Bondage Fairies #8 by Kondom.
Kondom’s Bondage Fairies series featured nymphs having sex with all manner of creatures, from grasshoppers to squirrels. Here, the Western translation parodies Stan Lee’s writing style for 1960s’ Marvel Comics, adding a dimension of humor to the bizarre scene.
SHONEN-AI
Shonen-ai literally means “boy love” and is manga that focuses more on romance, rather than explicit sexual content. Shonen-ai started out as a shojo (girls’) sub-genre in the early 1970s, with titles like Keiko Takemiya’s Kaze To Ki No Uta (Song of the Wind and Trees), which took place in the romantic setting of late 19th century Europe. As one editor noted in Frederik L. Schodt’s Manga! Manga! book, “Love between boys in another country is so completely distant from [adolescent girls’] own reality that it’s not threatening, yet it still gives them a vicarious experience.”
One of the most popular shonen-ai mangas of all-time is Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish. A simultaneously brutal and humorous tale of gang warfare in 1980s New York, it featured a slow-burning romance between the two male protagonists, gang leader Ash Lynx and Japanese photographer’s assistant Eiji Okamura. Because of the action sequences and excellent storytelling the homoerotic tale had a huge crossover audience, despite very adult themes—such as Ash’s past as a “sex toy” of his criminal mentor Papa Golzine. The series was translated by Viz Media into English in a staggering 19 volumes, each one 192 pages long.
Another shonen-ai that was recently translated by DC Comics’ CMX manga line in the United States is From Eroica With Love, about an openly gay English lord and art thief—the ridiculously named Dorian Red Gloria—also known as Eroica, whose purpose is “to pursue and capture beautiful things…and people.”
The actual term shonen-ai is pretty much obsolete in Japan these days, and the more popular phrase “Boy’s Love” is being used instead to describe this romantic gay stories. But invariably romance and love leads to sex and—in typical Japanese compartmentalism—this spawned yet another subgenre, yaoi manga.
Cover to shonen-ai magazine, June Launched in 1978, the “Boy’s Love” magazine sells around 80,000 copies a month, to a mostly female readership.
This 2005 cover from the gay comic, Bakudan, (published by Furukawa) is by Gengoroh Tagame. “On magazine covers, the publishers require very ‘soft’ images, but these kind of innocuous pin-ups are not so interesting to draw,” revealed the artist.
Yu-shin~Virtus (Virtues~Manliness) first appeared in Gekidan magazine in 2005 The story is about Roman gladiators and it struck a middle ground between true gay comics and Yaoi titles. “I really enjoyed drawing this romantic’ love story,” explained Taga
me.
YAOI
The yaoi genre focuses predominantly on male/male sexual relationships and is marketed at older women. In Japan, it is better known as “Boys’ love” or “BL.” Originally, much of the material was called Junè, named after the 1978 anthology that launched the genre. It featured male/male “tanbi” romances (the old fashioned term for the worship and pursuit of beauty), with stories written using flowery language and gentle graphics, inherited from the shojo manga. Yaoi was originally named after the English letters in the acronym of the Japanese phrase, YAma nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi, “no climax, no point, no meaning.” The term appeared as early as the 1970s to describe any self-published doujinshi that was a bizarre, playful parody. However, it has since been associated with sexually explicit homosexual stories.
Although the genre is marketed at women and girls, a portion of gay and bisexual men also read BL titles such as Be X Boy and Dear+ and Japanese mangaka, such as Kodaka Kazuma, are careful to distinguish their works as yaoi, rather than gay, when describing them to Westerners.
Yaoi has become hugely popular in the West on the back of its more mainstream cousins. So much so that there are numerous Western creators drawing new stories, and even several conventions dedicated to the genre across America, such as Yaoi-Con in San Francisco which has seen attendance triple since its launch in 2001. What started as a small subculture has, in the last three years, become a burgeoning market, with new publishers such as Yaoi press, Better With Boys press, and Yaoi House emerging. In 2006, Dramaqueen publishers debuted their quarterly anthology RUSH, featuring art from global creators. Japanese yaoi is also regularly translated across the world by companies such as Digital Manga Publishing’s imprints 801 Media and June, as well as Dramaqueen, Kitty Media, and Tokyo Pop’s adult BLU imprint.
Originally published in 2000’s Sabu magazine, Tagame’s Akafun-jigoku (The Red Loincloth Inferno) was partly inspired by old shunga prints and traditional Japanese brush work.
Kimi-yo-shiru-ya-minami-no-goku? (Do You Remember the South Island’s P.O.W. Camp?) was originally serialized in G-men magazine between 2001-2006. The story explored sexual abuses in a US-led WW2 P.O.W. Camp, but strangely mirrored the events at the Abu Gharib prison in Iraq. “This story is one of most important works,” said Tagame, “Because drawing the ugliness of our world is an important theme for me.”
The story, Sarashi-dai, by gay Japanese artist Tagame. “The beauty of cruelty is another very important theme in my work. I am drawn to the historical tortures in all countries, and this story is about one example, the pillory.” This strip was published in Nikutaiha in 2008, though his work doesn’t always make print.
TENTACLE PORN
One of the more surreal and outlandish sexual subgenres to permeate Japanese manga and anime is what is crudely referred to as “Tentacle Porn,” which is the generally nonconsensual penetration of a person (male or female) by either octopuses, squids, or, more usually, evil demons or aliens with multiple tentacles. As one pundit put it, “the Japanese can fetish-ize anything.”
But this is not a new phenomenon. As far back as the Edo period, shunga masters like Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) were creating scenes like the notorious The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, created in 1814. Hokusai was the artist who first coined the term manga (meaning “whimsical” or “irresponsible drawings”), and his famous image of a woman having sex with an octopus inspired numerous Japanese fine artists to follow suit including Masami Teraoka’s 2002 work Sarah and Octopus/Seventh Heaven and Toshio saeki’s Octo-girl. Saeki—Japan’s master of erotic illustration—explained his run-ins with the law. “My books have received cautions from the local government agency that monitors such things,” revealed Saeki, in a 2001 interview with Stephen Lemons. “If you receive three cautions in a year, your book is prohibited from being sold in a bookstore. Of course, my publications have been unpopular with the police, but not enough to be banned,” said the godfather of Japanese erotica.
This seemingly niche fetish became more mainstream in Japan with the release of Toshio Maeda’s 1986 Urotsukidöji saga (Better known as Legend of the Overfiend in the West). It is a story of demons and “man-beasts” merging with the human world, so that all women become never-dressed prostitutes, ever happy to perform sexual acts on any man. The main reason for tentacle erotica is Article 175’s ban on depicting penises and so inventive anime and manga artists have used the tentacle as a replacement. “At that time it was illegal to create a sensual scene in bed. I thought I should do something to avoid drawing such a normal sensual scene. So I just created a creature. [His tentacle] is not a [penis]. I could say, as an excuse, this is not a [penis], this is just a part of the creature. You know, the creatures, they don’t have a gender. A creature is a creature. So it is not obscene—not illegal,” Maeda spuriously justified.
Before Urotsukidoji , Maeda was already infamous for his frank depictions of sex and violence in his work. He had grown tired of the cliché-ridden world of early erotic manga, and was looking to take the genre into a new direction. “i really wanted to create something different, but the editor wanted me to create some regular manga for adults—like a typical type of salaryman falling in love with an office lady…a boring story. But i just wanted to make something different. The chief editor was against my idea, but i insisted,” the artist recounted.
Maeda’s manga was adapted into an controversial anime film and the artist/writer went on to create even more perverse tentacle-related works such as demon Beast invasion, injukyoshi (aka obscene Beast Teacher) and la Blue Girl, with the latter even becoming a live action version.
But tentacle rape hasn’t remained on far Eastern shores. In september, 2007 Marvel Comics in the united states caused a furor when it published a cover to heroes for hire #13, painted by respected female Japanese manga artist sana Takeda. It featured the three heroines tied up in extremely submissive poses, with their clothes loosened and sweat and slime dripping down them. Several tentacles were seen making their way toward the unfortunate trio. Fans slammed Marvel for portraying “hentai tentacle porn” on the cover of a comic intended for 13+ year-olds, and the misogynist nature of the image—an argument the publisher failed to successfully counter. It’s probably this aspect of tentacle porn that gives it such a bad reputation, as so much of it is based on rape fantasies and non-consensual sex, and definitely reveals a darker side to manga’s psyche.
The Dream of The Fisherman’s Wife shunga print, by Hokusai, is one of the earliest surviving examples of “tentacle sex.”
This cover to Heroes for Hire#13 by female mangaka Sana Takeda caused controversy in the USA when published.
A dream sequence from S & M University, by Nariaki Funabori, has one of the main characters, Yuki, attacked by five tentacle/penis creatures.
FUTANARI AND BAKUNYU
Other niche manga fetishes include futanari and bakunyu. Futanari (“two form”) manga specializes in erotic tales of hermaphrodites, intersex, or characters with both sets of genitalia. Also referred to as “dickgirls” or “shemales,” futanari are more politely known as “newhalf.” It is generally drawn in a cutesy anime style, such as Q’s Behind Moon, Haruki Genia’s Raijinkai, and the less explicit Boku No Nutatsu No Tsubasa (My Two Wings) by Toshiki Yui.
A specific fetish within the futanari subgenre is having characters having objects inserted into their urethra from which the futanari derives sexual pleasure. But when two futa characters get together one futa impossibly inserts her penis into the other’s urethra.
Futanari obviously shares the same fetish as Western shemale pornography, but its execution shares more with the yuri (lesbian) genre and is an extension of the lesbian theme where a strap-on dildo is used. This allows storylines to take a more lesbian context, which is more appealing to straight Japanese males.
There are numerous hentai manga and anime that feature futanari, including the wonderfully descriptive Alice In Sexland, Bondage Game, Dickgirl Bride, Erotic Tort
ure Chamber, Hot Tails, Pink Sniper Maniax, Project Boobs, Shemale Behavior, and Sister, Sperm, Glasses.
As in most types of hentai, there is some overlap between fetishes, and futanari is no exception, often combining with bukkake, BDSM, catgirl, lolicon, and tentacle sex. Often futanari characters have almost comedically enormous phalluses which have a similar appeal to those of another fetish, “bakunyu”— women or futanari with huge breasts— and the two fetishes frequently cross over.
Bakunyu focuses on women with unfeasibly large breasts (literally “bursting breasts”) and most likely relates to the Japanese desire for all things Western, as the majority of Japanese woman have smaller breasts than their Caucasian cousins. This is in the same vein as Japanese retailers selling pre-padded panties to give women a fuller, “Western” bottom. Bakunyu stories are not just about sex —although that is a central theme—and many focus on the male protagonist’s relationship with his object d’amour as it builds over a long time. This “romantic” approach usually results in them having sex.
Bakunyu are also not limited to only heterosexual relationships—they may also contain some lesbian (yuri) manga as well. Examples are Blue Eyes, a nine-volume hentai manga created by Tohru Nishimaki, and Anyone You Can Do…I Can Do Better, a two-part bakunyu anime (part of the Milk Junkies series aka Boobalicious in the United States) which features a male tutor who is hired to teach a very well endowed girl whom he predictably seduces, along with her equally mammoth-mammaried mother.
