Japanese pornography 99% about female resistance overwhelmed by repetitive insistence of male.
First commandment of Japanese censorship:pubic hair and genitals may not be shown.
This generates intellectual issue:invention/development of possible substitutes, and sexual program:larger sensual impact through elimination of responsible parts.
First stylization is reduction of color scheme:black (hair), yellow (skin),lilac with,in the beginning, white
(panties); for some reason,the frisson of racial mixing leaves Japanese cold(rare arena of doubt?).
Four techniques regulate living with(out) sex.(Ways of both transcending and maintaining taboos.)
1.Excision
Most radical in print: surgical elimination of offensive elements from image; in drawn material attention is pulled irresistibly to white areas;in photos to black absences.Transfer of importance from the defined to the residual:”open regions” inserted in areas of high specificity subject to continuous, heightened speculation. In unstable material (i.e., video and film) this tactic would be almost technically impossible: a kind of reverse animation of elimination.
2.Cover
“Everything” implied through (more or less flimsy)material; can bring its own suspense through, for instance, wetness or form changes;this low-tech, classical strategy is so effective that Japanese lovers often stay marooned indefinitely in state of semi-undress.
3.Burnout
When nakedness is achieved on video,camera may linger on inoffensive part of body, whose motions convey activity beyond the frame;in long shots bodies organized to shield actual points of engagement; explicitness means “hole”(of light)-a miniature bouncing “sun”—burned into image, always there where the action is, giving the potentially sordid an almost exalted dimension.(Buddhism?)Me, her, and the sun.
4.Digitization
Within the otherwise normal image appear gridded zones of varying size,each square a color:black, cafe-au-lait,pink in ever-shifting relationships; more subtle Mondrians. Sometimes, a momentary constellation suggests “the idea” of identifiable parts.
The fault line between the gridded censorship cloud and the conventional image, where the traditional world -expressions,intensities,suspense, love (?), desperation一yields to digitization, is a potent metaphor for this fin de siecle: prototype of possible traffic between real and virtualworlds, and utopian model, maybe,of their eventual coexistence.
Emerging from the pure abstractionof the censored zone:jets of sperm –white squares that turn into small blobs and land on real flesh.
