An editorial by ZENRA

One of the most common messages we receive from subscribers is about the overwhelming distaste for mosaic in JAV. Yes, it’s frustrating to see private parts totally covered in pixelation. Yes, it’s restrictive, draconian, and in this day in age where adult content has become as close to mainstream as it’ll ever be, makes little sense.

In particular, we receive many variations of the following question: “why don’t these JAV studios just sell uncensored movies abroad and stay censored within Japan?” A good question. A salient one if you’re not familiar with the workings of a JAV studio and just how massive the market is within Japan. To provide a simple answer as to why a studio simply won’t do such an ‘obvious’ thing: it’s illegal.

At least through the eyes of a law-abiding JAV studio openly operating in Japan, uncensored distribution is straight up illegal. It can’t be done. Do it and you go to jail. Sure, there is a decent amount of professionally-shot uncensored JAV out there, but it’s done by studios incorporated out of the country and is not available within Japan (except on the internet…). Law-abiding studios would never do this. The risks are just too great. And the rewards? Questionable.

First, as crazy as it may sound, if you shoot adult content in Japan, you’re supposed to register your company with the local police. Visit the official sites of some of your favorite makers and you may see text at the bottom that says “映像送信型性風俗特殊営業届出済” and “無店舗型性風俗特殊営業届出済”. This is followed by the location of their registration and the registration numbers. These are official and come with paperwork that makers must always keep in their offices to avoid any potential issues. So ‘closing up shop’ to secretly shoot adult content when you’re already on the police’s radar is beyond risky.

(Fun fact: Many a JAV fan may have seen movies with ‘mousouzoku-av’ written on the back of the box. Mousouzoku is a distribution company that helps out smaller studios and individuals get their content on big platforms. While they take a larger cut than what you’d make if you did it all on your own, one of the benefits to using them is not needing to register with the police.)

Second, the size of the market, as mentioned earlier, is gargantuan. DMM, aka FANZA, is by all measures the largest paid-only adult platform in the world. With an Alexa rank of 399 (as of writing this), it’s almost as large as some of the biggest Western free tube sites, yet without any free content. I’ve heard from several studios that a single title that does extremely well there can net them $100,000+ USD in profits from a single month of sales. No sane studio will walk away from the chances of that kind of payday for questionable (at best) legality.

Third, good luck convincing big name JAV stars to go mosaic-free. It almost never happens. The biggest complaint we hear about uncensored JAV is the quality of actresses (and shoddy production values, but we’ll talk about that another time). Now I am a firm believer that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I do agree that you rarely will see any recognizable names doing uncensored JAV. You generally get either new faces that do a few titles before bowing out or a few legacy actresses. Go back a few years to the time before that two-pronged attack against thin mosaic and uncensored cross-overs (don’t worry, we’ll be covering this more in detail later too) and it was almost a given that famous JAV stars would do a few uncensored movies before retiring. In a short time span, we had some truly impressive releases by Ai Uehara, Ayumi Shinoda, and Minako Komukai. Now? Once a popular JAV star retires, the only mosaic-free movies you may see are potential leaks and AI deconstructs. Far from the same if you ask me.

Going back to the original question: a studio secretly releasing uncensored content abroad would not only put themselves up against great legal peril, but would lose the trust of nearly everybody in the industry if they were caught. While contracts for JAV productions, until recently, did not mention mosaic censorship, it was a given that if you were signing a Japanese document for a Japanese company to shoot you in a production filmed in Japan for a Japanese audience, then they’d abide by the laws of the land by covering up your privates. A studio that then took this production and put it up for sale sans mosaic would destroy the trust and cause great harm to the industry. There’s been rumors of renegade directors releasing uncensored masters, but never (to my knowledge) of a studio doing it–at least not for many years.

Will uncensored JAV ever become legal to sell in Japan? This may be something of a buzz-kill, but I don’t think so. Not in this generation at least. There are simply too many hands to feed, from shooting to distribution, to make mosaic a goner. We’re already quite deep in this editorial, but before we finish, allow me to introduce the biggest reason why mosaic is here to stay: Ethics companies. Most notably the IPPA and the now defunct NEVA, there exists about four organizations that may or may not have unique government connections. To get your content up for sale on any big domestic platform or brick and mortar store, you first need to submit it to one of them. For the equivalent of several hundred dollars (USD), a group of criminally underpaid employees will look over your work to ensure mosaic is correctly applied and that there are no theme violations (and in JAV, this is thankfully almost a non-issue). I suggest checking out The Naked Director on Netflix if you wish to find out more about how NEVA came into being. TL;DR: it has nothing to do with protecting the children and more about big studios wanting to make even more money at the expense of everyone else.

So there you have it. Mosaic in JAV. It will be here for awhile longer. Your average studio will adhere to the laws of the land. Yes, uncensored JAV has existed, currently exists, and with the rise of user-created content stores like FC2, will prosper. In fact, I think given time, “FC2 amateur content” along with the ever-increasing influence of Western tube sites may impact the future of mosaic censorship, but like everything else in corporate Japan, expect progress to happen at a snail’s pace.

This editorial was written by ZENRA. ZENRA is a JAV site specializing in subtitled content. It is one of the very few foreign-owned sites that maintains close relationships with dozens of studios and only shows content that is licensed. All downloads are DRM-free and most updates focus less on vanilla themes and more on what makes JAV truly unique.