The JAV Origins of Bukkake

(Header image from "Tsubomi - Dream Shower," available on ZENRA.net.)

"Bukkake" is the Japanese term used for the act in which a man ejaculates semen onto a woman's face. It comes from the Japanese verb "bukkakeru," meaning "to throw or forcefully pour a liquid onto something; to souse something." This term, which originated in the JAV industry, is now spreading all over the world.

Worldwide bukkake

You've probably seen or heard the word "bukkake" before. It's also used to refer to the Japanese dish of "bukkake udon" - thick udon noodles doused in a thick dashi broth - but here, we're talking about the sexual act of bukkake. The technique was first created in Japanese adult videos, but now it has become more commonly known through hardcore porn in the US and Europe. Bukkake is often mispronounced overseas, with the "ke" pronounced as "key" rather than "keh." If you want to know just how popular bukkake has become outside of Japan, all you need to do is look it up online and you will see a large number of non-Japanese video results.

The genre of bukkake in JAV, just as was mentioned above, refers to the act of a man ejaculating on a half-naked or fully naked woman. However, it's pretty rare when shooting this genre to have only one man ejaculating onto the woman's face and body. More often than not, it's several or even dozens of men doing it one after the other. This bukkake style of JAV uses these scenes to build up to a climax, which of course influenced the overseas genre of the same name. This was not a misuse of the word "bukkake" used in Japanese cooking, of course, but rather an export from Japan's adult video industry to Western porn.

 
(From "Dream Shower with Yui Hatano," available on ZENRA.net.)

By looking up "bukkake" on the internet you can judge just how much it has permeated the non-Japanese porn world, but it's not quite enough to know how much it has actually entered the public consciousness in the West. However, it may just be as well-known as other Japanese words we commonly use, such as sushi, sukiyaki, and tsunami.

To prove this point, there is the story of when the Major League Baseball Yankees' batter Hideki Matsui came out onto the field, a fan of the opposing team heckled him by yelling "BUKKAKE!"

There are a few reasons why people think someone yelled this at Matsui. One may simply be because he is Japanese, but another reason is that he was known to be a fan of porn. So much so that he often professed his love for porn and was a special judge on a competition organized by JAV producer Soft on Demand. It is thought that after the opposing team's fans learned of this, they decided to use "bukkake" as something to heckle him with. You can see how much the word has taken hold in the West by the fact that ordinary Americans coming to watch a baseball game decided to use it.

It's astounding that the word "bukkake" became this mainstream, given that the JAV industry and Western porn industries made no efforts to popularize it.

(From "Dream Shower with Tsubomi" available on ZENRA.net.)

How it all began, and how it got overseas

So how was "bukkake" born, and how did it get all the way to the United States?

The English version of Wikipedia recounts the story of how bukkake entered into the US porn market. Wikipedia may have some errors, but these facts seem fairly accurate.

Apparently, bukkake made its appearance in Japan in the latter half of the 1980s. In JAV, all genitalia must be censored with a pixel mosaic before release. In response to this censorship, semen became the representation of the male climax instead, in order to sexually arouse the viewer without being able to show any genitalia.

Muscat Note (series that introduced the world to bukkake)

The first JAV ever released that contained bukkake was "Muscat Note," released in December 1986 starring Aiko Matsumoto. At the time it was called "gansha" (JP: 顔射, "ejaculating onto partner's face"), not "bukkake." American porn producers noticed the work in the late 1990s, and from there it spread to the West.

 

(From "Dream Shower with Tsubomi" available on ZENRA.net.)

Kazuhiko Matsumoto is credited with creating the bukkake genre in 1998. He is the one who brought bukkake to the US. If you take a detailed look at the trends of the JAV industry at the time, it seems that Matsumoto actually went to the US himself, bukkake JAV in hand. Even now Matsumoto is still working as a freelance JAV director and has many achievements contributing to the commercialization of independently-made JAVs.

Matsumoto has had other ventures related to semen as well, not just the development of bukkake. For example, in June 1994 he opened the adult video store called Milky Shop M's in Dogenzaka, a famous street in Shibuya, Tokyo. The store was said to be one of the most sacred places for fans of the "semen mania" trend. The store became a huge hit due to selling JAVs that depicted a sexual act that was considered radical or extreme in those days, despite being ordinary nowadays: several actors approaching an actress for a blowjob, who then swallows their semen when they ejaculate in her mouth.

A famous entry to this series was a JAV where Hayashi Yumika drank the semen of 50 actors. JAV fans from that time might recognize the title: "The Summer Siege of '95." It sold over 3,000 copies, despite the high price of 15,000 yen per copy (approx. $140 USD).

(From "Nagomi - Dream Shower," available on ZENRA.net.)

With this kind of success under his belt, Matsumoto headed to Hollywood in July 1996. At the time, Hollywood held an adult video trade fair called the VSDA, where porn producers and sellers gathered from all over the world. Matsumoto set up his own booth there, using the word "BUKKAKE" on it to catch people's attention.

Perhaps the reason why the word caught on is that people were curious about what it meant. Though they pronounced it "buck-ah-key," the newness of the word drew attention to the booth.

The JAV projected at the booth was "The Final Battle of '95" starring Rumine Minamiguchi, who gives a blowjob to and swallows the semen of 100 actors. A JAV had never been shown at an international convention like the VSDA before then, but the booth attracted many visitors thanks to the extreme content in the video that had not yet been seen in non-Japanese porn.

Box Cover for "The Final Battle of '95"
 

The video caused such a stir that it even went to the FBI. Matsumoto was told, "This video is abuse, stop showing it." However, even though the FBI was dispatched, this actually turned into a lot of publicity for Matsumoto as the story was featured in the tabloids.

The exhibition made huge waves and Matsumoto was invited to direct works for porn producers in the US and Spain. And of course, the word "bukkake" was used on the packaging for the videos he worked on there.

(From "Kaho Kasumi - Dream Shower - MILF Edition," available on ZENRA.net.)

The Western porn industry

Let's take a look at the context of the Western porn industry at that time. While a style of porn that attracted viewers with stylish images from MTV was becoming more and more popular, from 1993 onwards the orgy style of porn with one actress and multiple actors was also gaining attention, aka the "gangbang."

Symbolic of the emergence of the gangbang is the 1993 video "The Orgy," directed by Paul Norman, which included 40 actors and actresses getting it on. Another example from the same time is the series "Gangbang Girl," which produced 37 videos up until 2007 with four actresses and dozens of actors. Early on in the series, a scene in which an actress drank an actor's semen especially caused a lot of commotion.

Nonetheless, it can be said that JAV exceeded these kinds of videos in terms of radical or extreme content at the time. No kind of videos existed that were as extreme as Matsumoto's videos with 100 actors to one actress. And that's where "The Final Battle of '95" came in.

The popularity of the gangbang genre in the West lay the foundations for their acceptance of the bukkake genre. At the time, the gangbang genre of porn was often filmed in one shot like a documentary, but Matsumoto's works were filmed with many short cuts from many different angles strung together. You could say that this gave it a satisfying sense of completion that was far more entertaining than gangbang videos.

Although Matsumoto's bukkake genre may have gotten popular due to its extremeness and shock value, it is even more likely that it was received so well due to the scrupulous attention to detail and perfection that is often associated with Japanese works. The fact that Japanese porn is often separated from the crowd as "Japanese porn" or "JAV" rather than just "porn" in the West just goes to show the West's affinity for Japanese porn in particular.

(From "Asahi Mizuno - Dream Shower," available on ZENRA.net.)

The West: a breeding ground for reverse imports

In 1997, American pornographers sent offers to sell material for several JAV producers in Japan. Two companies named Momotarou Eizou and Hokuto (also known as DMM.com) responded, but this then led to the flow of uncensored videos into Japan through reverse importation much later on. In other words, because porn didn't have to be censored in the US, Japanese people made and sold uncensored videos in the US and then brought copies back to Japan. These black market adult videos are called "reverse imports."

Nowadays, the black market for adult videos circulates all kinds of videos, but this all stems back to 1997. Back then, an underground series by Hokuto named "Bukkake Gangbang" in English was reverse-imported and circulated all over Japan.

So JAV spread throughout the West with bukkake, all because of Matsumoto's radical Japanese adult videos. And it all started with that international convention in 1997!

Translated from the original article HERE