JAV industry uncertain of future, looks to China (Part One)

(Header image from "A Half-Chinese Beautiful Babe..." by kawaii.)

DISCLAIMER: The following has been translated from Japanese, and all opinions belong to the original author.

Recently, the JAV industry has been in such a severe deadlock that some say it is already beyond help. However, in the midst of such times, there is a shining beacon of hope: the advancement of JAV into foreign markets.

The future of JAV: China

From now on, China is predicted to be an especially huge market for JAV. Many people in the JAV industry say that it needs to have its eyes set on China in its future endeavors.
Since around the year 2000, Japanese adult video actresses have been visiting China more and more. Even in the beginning, thousands of Chinese men would congregate at JAV actress events, requiring the security of over a hundred police and causing quite a stir. It is said that such events are often a collaboration between JAV producers and Chinese adult goods businesses. Since China produces 95% of the world's adult goods, it takes up a fairly big chunk of the industry.

Long ago, adult goods were manufactured in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as China, but at some point, all adult goods started flowing straight through China, making it number one in the world's adult goods business. Right now, China is known as a world superpower, also called "the world's factory." People say that you can get anything there, including when it comes to adult goods.

(Sola Aoi, the most popular JAV actress in China, from "Mistress Sola Breaking in Masochists" by S1.)

However, adult goods are strictly regulated by the law and adult videos cannot be produced there openly, so there is an awful amount of bootleg copies in circulation. Chinese adult goods manufacturers have been making products using photos of JAV actresses without permission. Since they are not allowed to sell their own adult videos, it is not hard to imagine why JAV has gained a lot of popularity over there instead. Naturally, public events with JAV actresses have also been on the rise.

Whenever JAV actresses make a visit to China, an unbelievable number of people line up to attend their events. It seems that, in the beginning, big names in the JAV industry would often take offers from the Chinese adult industry to take their JAV actresses over to visit. These turned out to be quite successful endeavors, with the events making quite a good name for themselves in Beijing, where the price of entry was set at around 5000 yen ($47 USD). Nowadays, it is completely normal for adult video makers, producers, and adult goods manufacturers to take JAV actresses on trips to China.

People were not just excited about these events; they were crazy about them. As mentioned above, it got so crazy that crowds of police had to gather at the scene. Some of the best seats at the event were also occupied by higher-ups in the security police.

The frenzy resembled the early days of JAV in Japan. At that time, Japanese men were crazy about the appearance of new adult content, too. These days, Chinese fans of JAV are the same. This is why the future survival of JAV now lies in China.

However, since China still has strict rules about what is considered too obscene, the sale and distribution of adult videos - let alone the creation of them - is prohibited. Since China is an atheistic country, it seeks its moral basis in the law instead, which has a strong tendency to crack down on content that it deems immoral. Its laws have prohibited the appreciation of "obscene" videos and, in the past, non-marital sex between men and women.

(From "Sell-Debut: Minimal Mosaic" by S1.)

JAV actresses can flourish in China

Due to the restrictions mentioned above, adult videos cannot be officially distributed in China, and so all Chinese men are allowed to watch are bootleg copies.

If you make adult videos in Japan, you would be doing well if your video sold a thousand copies in-store or online. However, they say that if you look instead at the whole of Asia - including China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand – there would be about a thousand times as many bootleg copies as the amount you would be able to sell in Japan. Of course, the Japanese producers hold the copyright for these videos, but they cannot earn a single yen from the bootleg copies. Hypothetically, if they were able to get their share of the profit from these copies, they would gain such an enormous amount of foreign income that they would even enter into the top section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Here is an interesting story that demonstrates just how passionate Asia is about JAV.

Some Japanese people involved in JAV went to stay in a hotel in Hangzhou in China, a city near Shanghai, and ordered a massage. When the middle-aged masseuse arrived, she flew into a rage when she found out that they were Japanese. When they asked why, she said that her husband had been watching adult videos so much that he had neglected his health to the point that he might even die. He had become addicted to JAV and was barely sleeping as he stayed up until 2 or 3 AM watching them. Perhaps it would have been okay if it was just the husband acting this way, but the men of the neighborhood's association, male relatives, and even the men at work would gather and have some kind of meeting to swap JAVs with each other. It seemed that she felt as though JAVs were making her family and the local area go weird and improper. Recently, it seems that this kind of phenomenon is happening all over Asia, starting in China.

The JAVs that the men were swapping at those meetings were probably bootleg copies. If those copies were turned into an actual business, it might have been gigantic, making hundreds of billions, or even trillions, of yen.

A culture of pirating videos is deeply entrenched in China, with copies selling for approximately a few dozen yen, or under a dollar in USD. Chinese law is not the only problem for adult videos in China; bootlegging is a big problem, as well. It is predictable that people become less interested in watching these videos if they are sold at retail prices when they can be found somewhere else for so cheap. Because of that, selling that content as a business became impossible, and so the idea emerged of dispatching JAV actresses to China instead.

(From "Yui Hatano - Pleasure of Exposure" by ORGA.)

For instance, JAV actresses such as Sola Aoi and Yui Hatano became so famous in China that almost everyone knows who they are. If actresses at that level of popularity expanded their career into China and did some kind of performance there, there was a high chance that they could make a lot of money.

The Japanese idol group AKB48 is a similar example of this. Since they have fans scattered all over the world, they can perform overseas, so why not have JAV actresses do the same? That way they can discover many other means of success that are not at risk of being pirated. For instance, they thought of having contracts with coordinating companies and web portals, as well as holding performances where actresses are wearing swimsuits to avoid infringing on Chinese indecency laws. There are a lot of JAV actresses who have achieved extraordinary popularity in China, so they could make a lot of revenue with this style of business.

China can be considered a very unequal society, but since there are 1.4 billion people living all over the country, there are endless locations where JAV actresses can go to perform. If they can maintain a way of working that avoids violating Chinese indecency laws, then they are sure to succeed there. If Sola Aoi were to perform there, her events would draw tens or hundreds of thousands of attendees. Other famous JAV actresses could draw a crowd of around 30 thousand people, and even less famous actresses could draw around 5 thousand people. What is more, these would not be people just taking a look out of curiosity, but very enthusiastic fans.

There are no other entertainers in China who could draw such huge crowds. Even though it has such a huge population, problems such as the indecency laws stop Chinese people from becoming sexual entertainers. That is why business involving JAV actresses coming to visit is so viable.

Right now, China's movie industry is booming, with computer-generated technology catching up and even surpassing that of Hollywood. However, the only thing they can still not surpass is the success of Japan's adult videos. There is the same feeling of not being able to catch up to JAV in South Korea and Southeast Asia, too.

Though China is a communist country, it is becoming less rigid and the market is being opened up more and more. Because of that, there are all kinds of new occupations available, to the point of China being named the "world's factory." Things have rapidly developed at the industrial level, but there was a gap that JAV actresses were able to fill.

(From "Yui Hatano - Pleasure of Exposure" by ORGA.)

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