Mandarake's online division has customers in 26 countries, and adult products
account for 30 percent of its international sales.
The general intolerance toward pornographic animation and comic books in the
West is another factor for overseas fans to seek out Japanese products,
Furukawa said.
"Fans in America seek something special in this anime, and reading them is
cathartic," he said.
The pornographic anime boom has even made the word "hentai" (perverted)
recognizable among anime fans worldwide. Hentai is now used overseas to
describe anime with strong sexual content.
While Mandarake capitalizes on the kinky boom, other retailers are reluctant to
export such products.
Satoshi Fukuda of Tokyo-based Animaxis Inc. said hentai began to gain currency
overseas around 2001 and online shops saw a corresponding growth in sales of
adult products. His company, however, has elected not to focus on the kinky
goods and instead continues to provide a wide range of other merchandise.
"There have been proposals within the company to stock a larger number of
hentai anime to gain more sales," Fukuda said. The company has opted not to
because, he said, it would be "inappropriate."
Fukuda said there will be, and should be, tighter rules against adult anime.
According to a report by the Japan External Trade Organization, the number of
Japanese anime DVDs exported to the United States increased from 2.1 million in
2000 to 12 million in 2005.
Experts see the infiltration of sexual content as an inevitable outcome of
Japanese anime gaining ground worldwide.
Ryusuke Hikawa, a critic who has collaborated with NHK in producing anime
programs, explained that there has been a market for Japanese pornographic
anime in the United States since the late 1980s.
"Whether pornographic anime is a good or bad is for each individual to decide,"
Hikawa said. "But this genre has established a foothold in America because it
is unique there," he said at a lecture on anime culture at the Foreign Press
Center in June.
Hikawa said Japan tends to be more tolerant of pornographic materials than the
West, and even anime not regarded as kinky often includes sexual content and
violence.
However, he also noted that Japanese anime in general is unique among art forms
in its way of "depicting modern-day Japan."
But whether this depiction is well-received is open to question, as there has
been opposition against Japanese anime in the United States.
In April, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors in California ordered
the anime reference book "Manga: Sixty years of Japanese Comics," to be banned
from the county's libraries, because the book contained "reproductions of
pornographic cartoons depicting sex acts, including sex with animals."
Fans of nonpornographic anime in America are also lamenting the kinky craze.
Caroline Silva, president of Harvard University's Anime Society, said, "Most
people (in the US) immediately think of hentai when they think of anime."
Yet she also believes in the creators' right to freedom of expression, and does
not wish to shut out the genre.
"The way we have chosen to approach that problem is to educate (the general
public)," Silva said. She plans to promote the art form for what it truly is by
showing "the amazing anime that do exist out there."
The Japan Times
