ABSTRACT
Japanese adult video (AV) represents a kind of softcore pornographic material that emerged in Japan in the early 1980s. Since the late 1990s, Japanese AV has begun to take other media forms, including DVDs, cable programmes, and digital files. Japanese AV is no doubt also a cultural product and its spread to Taiwan should thus be understood in the framework of cross-cultural migration of cultural goods. Emerging in the 1970s, family-use video recorders gave rise not only to a new media form, but more importantly to a new mode of pornography consumption. Since the late 1990s, Japanese AVs have become available on cable and satellite channels. Even for pornography offered on Japanese websites, non-Japanese users might have difficulties in accessing them because these websites are often in Japanese only and for some websites the purchase has to be made with a credit card issued in Japan.
