Though it’s understandable that different cultures have different taboos and fetishes that manifest themselves in adult entertainment, Japanese porn can be quite the culture shock. After all, why would someone want to watch a young, often underage girl get banged nearly to death by a tentacle monster, usually against her will? While there isn’t a clear reason why young girls or rape fantasies became popular, beastiality, in the form of tentacle porn, was caused by one thing: censorship.
In one of the biggest backfires in pop culture history, some of Japan’s most depraved and strange genres of pornography came about in response to the country’s decision to censor the naughty bits of real-life porn stars.
According to Kotaku, Japan restricted pornography way back in the early 1900s in an effort to make the country seem more appealing to the Western world. Under these new laws, people were banned from making uncensored porn unless it was meant for immediate export.
After World War II, when the U.S. swept in and changed many of Japan’s laws, they kept the strange pornography law intact for some reason. According to Washington City Paper, these laws remained in place all the way up until 1993. Despite the law no longer existing, much of Japan’s porn still features pixelated genitals today.
So what does any of this have to do with tentacles? Well, according to Vocativ, Japan’s tentacle lust started in 1986 when Toshio Maeda, a famed manga creator, published his hentai novel Urotsukidōji, which featured graphic sex acts involving tentacles and supernatural beasts. Basically, Maeda was able to subvert the censorship laws by replacing penises with things that resembled them. Though everyone could tell that the tentacles were supposed to stand in as male genitals, the censors were powerless to stop it.
From there, the strange pornographic subgenre took off and became quite popular in Japan and around the world. Eventually, it got so popular that Japan obtained a reputation for it, which goes everything that the censorship laws were put in place to prohibit.
