Japanese porn exporters put their money where the mosaic is

While stateside audiences are familiar with Asian-American porn, their experience with porn shot in Japan might be limited to tentacles, underpants, and frogs.

And with all those slimy distractions, viewers might not notice the mosaic pixelation of the performers’ parts.

“You can’t show penetration of female genitalia in Japan,” said Steve Scott, owner of Third World Media, a company that sells porn shot in Japan (and countries like Thailand and Brazil) to United Staes customers, mosaic-free.

“The mosaic is like a psychological barrier,” Scott said. Scott’s company is based in Chatsworth but the New York native is fluent in Japanese and shot movies in Japan for several years. “Even if we are shooting without anything covering that area, the performer knows that her genitalia will be obscured for Japanese audiences.”

Because most movies shot in Japan are filmed with the expectation of a mosaic, the cinematic style is also different, Scott said.

“They shoot softer shots from a greater distance,” he said, “because a close-up would not make sense if the image was just going to be mosaiced anyway.”

Do non-mosaiced movies ever get back to Japan to shame the performers?

“Yes,” Scott said, “and the blacklist is pretty fast. If word gets back to performers and agents that a filmmaker is selling non-mosaiced masters over the Internet, for example, people tend not to work with him again.”

So the Japanese taboo is penetration, and for the privilege of showing it close-up, American-style, without pixelation requires a rate increase. It just can’t be sold in Japan. In fact, Japanese performers tend to make a great deal more money than their American counterparts.

“For a top-tier performer,” Scott said, “they can make up to $400,000 for an 8-picture deal.” Scott said that Japan’s big stars tend to appear in “single girl” pictures, in which she appears in every scene. “The bigger stars can make between $20,000 and $50,000 per movie.”

But it’s more expensive to live in Japan, what with the overhead involved in making watermelons square.

Could American porn stars go to Japan and cash in, like aging NBA players go to Italy?

“Japanese audiences tend to like Japanese performers,” Scott said.

Third World Media does not use the top tier stars, especially since the lack of mosaic is a detractor.

“It’s not as if [the top-tier stars] don’t think they’re doing porn since the mosaic is there,” he said, “but it is an image thing.”

I find this fascinating, but only because there would be no porn if there weren’t any taboos, and every culture has its own.

The company also shoots bar girls in Thailand and trannies in Brazil.

“Do Brazilian trannies have any mosaic restrictions?” I asked.

“No, they want to be superstars, so they show everything,” Scott said.

Nebulous laws about what we can and cannot show on the front page of websites have driven me to cover what the Empire of Japan might obscure with a mosaic with a yellow Hummer 2. I feel it is more patriotic.