Caroline Norma
(Australia)
Challenging Pornography in Japan: the Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP)
Over the organisation’s 10-year history, members of the Tokyo-based Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) have initiated a wide range of research projects and campaigns against pornography and prostitution in Japan. These activities are described in the organisation’s yearly journal (Poruno/kaishun mondai kenkyuukai: Ronbun/shiryoushuu) and Webpage (http://www.app-jp.org/), as well in a number of books. The Group’s activities mostly focus on the harm of pornography for women and children in its production, distribution, and consumption in Japan.
The harms of pornography production are documented in the Group’s investigation into a Japanese pornography production company called Bakkii Visual Planning. This research has involved APP members monitoring a chat forum run by the company for consumers of a particular film series in which women are dragged around by the hair, pushed face first into bathtubs of water, set alight, and beaten up. In the chat forum, pornography users discussed with the series producer what sex acts and abuses they wanted to see women undergo in the next release of the series. APP members documented the harms that were requested by pornography consumers, and then matched them to the abuses that were perpetrated in the next release of the film series. These findings were published in a 2004 article that discussed producer/consumer collaboration in the abuse of women in pornography (Poruno/kaishun mondai kenkyuukai, 2004, pp. 6–9).[223]
In another major project to document the harm of the distribution of pornography in Japan, APP members received funding to survey counsellors and lawyers working with women’s support organisations in Tokyo about their experience of assisting sexual assault victims whose abuses featured pornography or prostitution. The APP collected a large volume of qualitative data on this issue, which was presented in an article published in 2003. The Group identified 7 different ways in which pornography is used by sex offenders to victimise women. These include women being: 1) forced to watch pornography, 2) forced to re-enact scenes in pornography, 3) forced to appear in pornography by boyfriends or husbands, 4) raped by men provoked by consuming pornography, 5) blackmailed by pornography made of them, 6) having pornography made of them distributed on the Internet, and 7) women having their faces superimposed onto pornographic pictures distributed on the Internet (Poruno/kaishun mondai kenkyuukai, 2003, pp. 5–73).
The APP has also led a campaign to mobilise support for an amendment to be made to the Tokyo metropolitan youth development regulations to regulate the selling to minors of graphically animated pornography that glorifies rape or incest. In this campaign, the Group has faced strong opposition from gamers, manga authors and publishers, gaming industry associations, lawyers associations, and the heads and other leaders of the Socialist Party of Japan and the Japan Communist Party.
Another one of the Group’s activities includes a campaign against ‘upskirting’, and the secret filming of women in public places like bathhouses, fitness clubs, public toilets, and ‘love’ hotels. The Group believes this kind of activity is not just a sex crime of individual men, but is closely linked with the sex industry in Japan, because the footage is often compiled and edited into films that are sold as pornography. The small cameras that are used to secretly film women and girls are sold in Akihabara, which is a shopping district where pornography is sold in Tokyo. The APP campaigns for a national law to be enacted against this filming activity, as well as a ban on the small cameras being sold or possessed when used for unlawful purposes.
The Group also campaigns against the producers of DVDs and Websites dedicated to pictures of underage girls wearing bathers and other revealing clothing. This genre of pornography is openly sold in districts like Akihabara, and is recognisable from shelf labels that indicate the age-range of the children in the different films (e.g. ‘second year primary school’). These films evade Japan’s child pornography law because they are perceived not to be arousing or provocative enough because children’s genitals are not shown. Nonetheless, the APP has audited chat forums of online sites selling the films, and has documented sexualised discussion among consumers. On the basis of this research, the Group campaigns against the films as a form of child pornography.
Other research projects by the APP have included content analysis of 32 different violent pornographic films with findings published in the Group’s 2000 edition journal, and sponsorship of Catharine MacKinnon to speak in Tokyo in 2002. Group members publicise their availability to speak at forums against pornography, and run workshops to promote abolitionist activity in Japanese society against pornography and prostitution. In its daily activity, the group further aims to foster support networks for women harmed in the production of pornography in Japan.
Bibliography
Poruno/kaishun mondai kenkyuukai (2003) ‘Ankeeto chousa kekka no bunseki’ pp. 5–73.
Yamamoto, Yukino (2004) ‘Seisaku genba ni okeru henka’, Poruno/kaishun mondai kenkyuukai pp. 6–19.
Susan Hawthorne
(Australia)
Quit Porn Manifesto
Just as lung cancer and other illnesses were identified as having links to tobacco consumption, pornography is linked to an increase in harm to women. The tobacco industry, like the pornography industry, pumped billions of dollars into advertising and sponsorship around the world. Particular targets of that marketing were young people at a point in their lives where they are especially vulnerable to peer group pressure and to the idea of looking and being cool. Advertising towards men emphasised manliness (think ‘Marlboro Man’).[224] Advertising towards women emphasised beauty and sexiness (think Virginia Slims). Cigarette placement in films was the norm, and holidays in Europe were associated with Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes.
Pornographers use all the same tricks to get their message across to consumers. But this time it is not a product, but a person. By and large, that person is female and young. The purchasers, on the whole, are male. Boys are groomed through masculine culture to become purchasers, responding to pornography as propaganda (Jensen, 2007). Propaganda for a particular kind of social structure that fosters the exploitation of women by men, that is, patriarchy. The message for men is about manliness, about power and pleasure. Just as in tobacco advertising, the message for women is different: it’s about presenting an aura of sexiness and of being appealing to men.
The first reports of the dangers of cigarette smoking appeared in 1964 when the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee Report on Smoking and Health was released in the USA. Tobacco advertising is banned in many countries and sponsorships of sport almost unheard of 45 years after the Surgeon General’s Report. While feminists have been providing evidence for the harm of pornography for many years (Dworkin and MacKinnon, 1988; McKinnon and Dworkin, 1997) the Surgeon General has not appointed an Advisory Committee to report on Pornography and Health.
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1 An English translation of this article will be published in a volume edited by Caroline Norma in 2012.