Make Believe Bonus: Hentai
Thank You Drake
I recently wrote a feature for Japanese website Newspicks about the cultural and economic rise of hentai and erotic doujin, as part of my “Japan Rising” series of columns for the site. It got the folks talking online, because a lot of people didn’t realize…well, how this corner of Japan was enjoying newfound cultural attention globally.
After recieving interest from folks on Twitter and checking with my editor, I’m sharing the original English draft of the story below, with a few minor grammatical / stylistic adjustments (I get sloppy with repeating words sometimes). Enjoy!
Story is NSFW, but c’mon it’s about hentai.
Canadian rapper Drake is among the most famous musicians in the world today. His albums and mixtapes always top global music charts, and he boasts songs easily shooting past a billion views on YouTube. He doesn’t need to shock anyone…he just needs to release new material.
Yet, ahead of new collaborative album with rapper 21 Savage Her Loss, Drake did surprise many on Instagram by posting…hentai.
The four pics ranged from buxom anime-style women posing suggestively to more explicit images, all featuring English-language phrases underneath, including references to the album itself. Users on social media freaked out, as did news posts expressing disbelief that he would share erotic anime to an audience of hundreds of millions.
While unexpected from Drake, it really marked the biggest mainstream moment for one of the most surprising Japanese pop cultural exports of the 21st century. Hentai and erotic manga from Japan has enjoyed newfound attention and success globally, albeit in more hushed revelry than Demon Slayer or Attack On Titan. Once something only accessible via shady websites, sexually explicit anime has become a legitimate business. Companies like Fakku! have found success distributing erotic manga in the West, while hentai video games routinely top the charts on online video game store Steam.
Just as tellingly, hentai has become something people reference in pop culture. Television shows such as Workin’ Moms and Gary And His Demons have referenced the field’s tropes before, while Spanish pop star Rosalía’s latest album kicked off with a single called “Hentai.” It has reached a point where a famous actor like Samuel L. Jackson will just bring it up on his own in a video interview.
“I think when the internet really started for people, including me, when people thought of Japan they thought of porn,” Sydney Poniewaz, better known by her YouTuber name sydsnap, tells Newspicks, recalling coming across JAV videos online while in middle school in rural Wisconsin and this being one of her first glimpses into Japanese culture…an experience many around her age share. She developed an interest in anime from a young age, in particular by the farming video game Harvest Moon. “I was just honestly obsessed with it. Especially romance games…when you’re becoming a teenager, I didn’t know that existed! The options were endless.”
That interest snowballed, though she was alone in her small, conservative town in being intrigued by anime. “I started getting really into manga. And eventually I accidentally came across…spicier manga. It was the first time I’d ever seen a penis.”
Poniewaz kept digging deeper “into the abyss,” and today her interest in all things Japanese lewd has powered her YouTube channel, which boasts more than 750 thousand subscribers and features uploads routinely earning over a million views. She focuses heavily on Japan’s sexual side, especially via erotic manga and hentai. Topics range from relatively vanilla topics to digging into subcultures that probably won’t fly on Newspicks (but which she says earn the most engagement online). She currently lives in Japan, as part of Kadokawa’s GeeXPlus team of influencers.
Japanese adult entertainment has always been a point of fascination for the outside world, albeit often through weirder fascinations like tentacle pornography or used underwear stores. Yet the JAV industry has been growing in recent years, and is lowkey a pillar of soft power, especially in Asia. Hentai and erotic manga, though, always existed as a much more niche interest, more of a punchline on forums than something broached by the mainstream. That is, until the niche became mainstream.
“I think either 2015 or 2016 is when hentai blew up. I remember some of them became memes, like Metamorphosis,” Poniewaz says, referring to a particularly grim hentai comic that became a go-to for jokes.
The evolution of memes as language on social media helped to spread the genre even further, with the best example being the boom in the use of the ahegao face, which has now been referenced by real life humans on TikTok, appeared on clothes and has shaped at least one Russian pop music video.
This can even be seen at the ground zero of youth culture in the United States…the shopping mall. Japanese pop culture is everywhere at most malls today, as I observed in Southern California earlier this year, appearing in adolescent clothing haunts such as Hot Topic and the little carts scattered about the building selling iPhone cases and stickers. Stepping into a Spencer’s Gifts — a store best known for selling novelty t-shirts and lava lamps — I saw their own line of Naruto inspired streetwear. Lurking just out of view from the entrance, though, was a surprising manifestation of how Japanese pop culture has blossomed internationally. I laid eyes on their “hentai” clothing section.
While Poniewaz’ channel often looks at extremes in the genre, she’s also someone who wants to cast a light on a wide variety of titles, ranging from ones geared towards women or trying to elevate the style via better animation. “I think the Western perception of sexual stuff in Japan is still so small minded. That’s why I like to surprise people. It’s like…you don’t even know the beginning. It’s anything you could imagine and more1.”
While hentai isn’t at the forefront of Japan’s pop cultural push — Poniewaz says that the country is still too conservative to make that a major element of any soft power campaigns — the way the internet globally works now allows anyone to at least play with ideas presented in the form…and find others interested in it. Other YouTubers explore the topic in detail, while the Virtual YouTuber undertaking Projekt Melody brings the idea of hentai into the OnlyFans age, all in English.
“One thing I appreciate about Japan is that it caters to every kink,” Poniewaz says. “Every fetish you could ever think of. Just finding things related to that and showcasing it to the world is so fun to me. Well, shit, how far does it go? Do I even want to know? Probably not.”
While a famous rapper like Drake busting out the lewd hentai might be shocking to many, it’s really a reflection of how even Japan’s more underground and explicit offerings have left an impact globally.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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My interview with Poniewaz went for about an hour, and touched on a whole lot more going beyond hentai, into the world of Japans’ sex industry and “girls bar” culture, which she documents very well on her YouTube channel. She’s a great example of someone who has found her lane in Japan…and just loves it, and wants to share with the world.