ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to the so-called ‘censorship’ of adult videos, the process that every Japanese adult video title must go through before it can be on the market. But we have to point out immediately that it is misleading, if not totally incorrect, to call it ‘censorship’ as such. The organization involved is merely a self-regulatory association voluntarily founded by adult video makers for the matter of ensuring adherence to the local obscenity laws in order to prevent the government from doing it for them. Thus, while the industry people do not hesitate to use the English word ‘censorship’ to refer to their job, what it has been doing is nothing more than the screening of adult videos. Founded in 1977, Biderin 1 was the first such self-regulatory body to handle adult videos, followed by Medirin 2 established in 1996 and Eizōrin 3 in 2010. As we mentioned in Chapter 3, Biderin was formed by the early participants of the adult video industry and was later taken over by the Big Five. Endorsed by the active participation of former police officers, Biderin was rendered a quasi-state agency manipulated by the Big Five to dominate the market and exclude new competitors, so much so that it functioned more like a cartel. While Medirin also functioned like another cartel founded by indie makers to resist the dominance of Biderin, it was by and large seen as inferior to Biderin and hence illegal. Eizōrin is distinctly different. Frightened by the police’s crackdown on Biderin in 2007, Eizōrin has from the beginning been haunted by the nightmare of being prosecuted. As we shall see in a moment, its whole mission has been to address this nightmare by promoting itself as a neutral, fair and socially reflective organization that represents the views of the wider society on sexual morality by devising various measures and taking a moral high ground on the inspection of AVs. In the final part of this chapter, we will analyse some problematic cases in order to delineate the general logic of the AV inspection done by Eizōrin and spell out its consequences for the production of AVs.
