The ethics of imaginary violence, part 3: early animated pornography in Japan

ABSTRACT

Part three of a series on the ethics of imaginary violence in contemporary Japan, this article turns from manga, anime and games broadly to more explicitly pornographic texts. Concretely, it zooms in on Cream Lemon, the longest running and most influential pornographic anime series in the 1980s. Positioned as both a part of and apart from 'the lolicon boom', Cream Lemon is a rich resource that has yet to be widely explored in English-language scholarship. Drawing on manga/anime editor and critic Sasakibara Gō, this article offers a close analysis of an episode of Cream Lemon. This episode holds a mirror to its viewers at the height of their excitement, complexifying pleasure by putting it into the larger context of the lolicon boom and Japanese society in the 1980s. The supposedly marginalized manga/anime fan, the one labeled an 'otaku', is thus asked to scrutinize his own role in marginalizing others.

KEYWORDS:

• Manga and anime
• lolicon
• Japan
• Cream Lemon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In line with Japanese legal understandings of obscenity (Allison 1996, 146–175), explicit sex scenes brandish the obvious mark of censorship with genitals blurred. For more, see the special issue of Porn Studies (vol. 7, no. 3, 2020) ‘East Asian Pornographies and Online Porn Cultures’, edited by Katrien Jacobs, Thomas Baudinette and Alexandra Hambleton.

2 According to one survey: ‘Hentai [Japanese animated pornography] became the most popular search term in the world after it moved to the top spot in the United States, Pornhub’s biggest audience. Hentai was a top ten search in almost every country in 2021’ (Pornhub 2021).

3 In his focus on ‘sex that injures’, Sasakibara can be understood as a man thinking sex under patriarchy. Indeed, Sasakibara is without ambiguity in acknowledging that his writing on manga/anime culture, matching male engagements, adopts a somewhat ‘“pornographic” perspective’ (2004, 196).

4 For an example of how entertainment and escape can prop up exploitative masculine systems in Japan more broadly, see Allison (1994). The empowerment of men at the expense of women also appears in discussions of fans outside Japan. For the USA, see especially Petit (2022); see also Salter and Blodgett (2017).

5 For more information on the series, including the official release dates, order of episodes and summaries, see: http://creamlemon.jp/index.html. A live-action special was released in 1997, followed by a film and series in the 2000s. Reviews of individual episodes are in McCarthy and Clements (1998).

6 For more on this bias in Japanese pornography generally, see Hambleton (2016).

7 For more on the construction of women in their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, see Mulvey (2009).

8 Hyper-vigilance concerning a scene like this one is not unprecedented. The character designs for Mobile Suit Gundam are by Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, who also did the character designs for Combattler V [Chōdenji robo konbatorā bui] (1976–1977). Alleged special attention to the heroine’s shower scene in this television anime became a subject of heated discussion among fans (Sasakibara 2004, 101).

9 The official synopsis can be accessed in the original Japanese online: http://creamlemon.jp/story/3.html. Note that some creative uses of language are being employed. For example, the word for transformation, henshin, switches from the typical two characters meaning ‘change body’ to the homonymous ‘change heart’. This suggests that Ruri is not only looking more like an adult in her Konami body, but also feeling as such. It should also be remarked that there is an error in the official synopsis, which refers to the idol character as Suzuki Konami, but it is absolutely clear to hear in the episode that her name is Saitō Konami. The alien being also provides a character name, as does the neighbourhood pervert (introduced later), but these are not included in the official synopsis.

10 The approach presented by Nagayama, who later discusses feeling with male, female and other characters across gender and sexual lines (2020, 217–218), is also there in the phenomenological reading of animated pornography. Theorist Mariana Ortega-Brena goes as far as to state that anime offers ‘both masculinized and/or feminized points of view’, which shift ‘depending on the context and narrative moment’ (2009, 27; see also Shigematsu 1999). Men feeling with female characters has been widely observed, for example by the anthropologist Anne Allison, who writes that anime viewers not only desire bishōjo characters but also ‘want to be them’ (2006, 140; original emphasis). On male readers of lolicon and bishōjo comics in Japan, the sociologist Sharon Kinsella advances that ‘the infantilized female object of desire held so close has crossed over to become an aspect of their own self-image and sense of sexuality’ (2000, 122). This should not, however, distract us from the possibility of feeling with and as the beastly or brutish male character.

11 Such an ethics is also observed outside Japan, where it is said to underpin ‘a special kind of sociability‘ (Warner 2000, 35).