ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of the changing ways in which sex, sexuality and pornography culture have been understood and perceived in postwar Japan, and investigates how these changing sexual scenes, alongside technological advances and business competition, paved the way for the ultimate advent of Japanese AVs in the early 1980s. The first part of this chapter investigates how the policies of the American Occupation Authorities in postwar Japan, on the one hand, provided a chance for the widespread import of the notion of gender/ sexual equality into Japan, but, on other hand, gave rise to an extremely flourishing publishing culture whereby the notion of such equality was ultimately reinterpreted, if not distorted, by the industry people and appeared in so-called couple-magazines or pulp (kasutori) magazines as pseudo pornographies.
