The popularity of adult anime content at the recent Anime Expo in Anaheim, Calif. highlighted the trend.
"Up until several years ago, it was mostly just traders who came over to Japan to purchase this type of merchandise," Masuzo Furukawa of the Tokyo-based anime seller Mandarake said. "But now, individual customers are willing to buy the products themselves. The best-selling product overseas now is a pornographic makeover of 'Gundam Seed.'”
According to Furukawa, one reason for the boom in pornographic anime is the Internet. Adult products account for 30 percent of his company’s international sales, and the online division reaches customers in 26 different countries around the world.
One trace of linguistic evidence for the growing popularity of pornographic anime is the word “hentai” — a common category on many free porn pages. The literal meaning of the word in Japanese is “perverted.” However, the word, which many fans see as synonymous with porn, has come to mean “sexually explicit animation or comics,” according to a Dictionary.com entry.
While merchants like Furukawa are making money trading in the booming pornographic anime market, others in the anime community aren’t eager to link their art form for so closely with porn.
Satoshi Fukuda of Tokyo-based Animaxis said that his company had decided not to increase its stock of adult-oriented anime because to do so would be “inappropriate.”
Despite the reluctance of many purists, one thing is certain, pornographic anime is and will continue to be a growing component of adult content viewed in America, anime critic Ryusuke Hikawa said.
"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."
Unlike content that features real models, anime is considered a cartoon, meaning that producers of anime are not restricted by federal 2257 record-keeping requirements. However, anime producers and distributors are not completely immune from censorship.
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. The board issued the ban saying that the book contained “reproductions of pornographic cartoons depicting sex acts, including sex with animals.”
