Harms in Production

Harms in Production

Harms in Production

The harm of pornography starts with the women used in it. Although these harms are the starting place for all other harms, they tend to be ignored or forgotten. Curiously, when people talk about child pornography, they focus exclusively on the human rights of children used in it; but, when people talk about adult pornography, the human rights of women used in it are thoroughly forgotten, and even people who question pornography make an issue only of its sexist influence. As opposed to this, in the case of child pornography, because its socially harmful consequences tend to be ignored, many men in Japan assume that child-pornographic manga and animation are victimless. But in both child pornography and its adult equivalent, the first victims are

Table 1: Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group’s Classification of Pornography’s Harms

Table 1: Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group’s Classification of Pornography’s Harms

the persons themselves used in producing it. The harms of production category encompasses three items: (1) harms arising in the production process of commercial pornography; (2) harms arising in the production of non-commercial pornography; and (3) harms arising in the spy-cam filming of sexual acts or situations to produce commercial or non-commercial pornography.

When most people think of pornography, it is commercial pornography they have in mind. But even when produced for a non-commercial purpose (e.g., for personal pleasure), all sexually explicit materials produced for the fulfillment of sexual desire in a sex-based unequal context are pornography; in fact, many and severe harms happen in the production process of non-commercial pornography. The famous Japanese photojournalist Ryuichi Hirokawa sexually harassed most of the young women who worked or interned at his magazine office Days Japan over decades. This harassment involved not only demands for sex acts but also the filming of naked victims, and revelations of his behavior caused upheaval in progressive Japanese civil society in 2019, most of all, of course, for his many victims (Days Japan investigative committee, 2019 pp. 22-24) As we will see in the next category, harms in circulation, even such noncommercial forms of pornography widely circulating on the Internet, cause harm.

Commercial pornography is a significant sector of capitalist industry, and since the capitalist profit-seeking principle and the male supremacist sex-dominating principle combine in this field, as with prostitution, it continues to produce vast and longstanding harms for society. The harms in production category further divides into the following three subcategories.

Harms in which a naked victim or sexual act is coercively filmed or photographed by another person(s) through illegal or violent means such as assault, battery, threat, or fraud, or under the circumstances, making refusal difficult—for example, out of the necessity of debt repayment, contract fees, psychological pressure, the abuse of mental confusion or embarrassment, being caught by surprise, inducement by family members or intimate partners, or through the abuse of power by people in positions of authority (e.g., an employment relationship in an office).

A second harm of pornography’s production arises when a victim has agreed to pornography filming, but the acts demanded over the course of filming are different from what was agreed to in advance or what was contracted, or the contract agreed to in advance was so vaguely written that the victim was able to be coerced into unwanted sex acts, or even when the sexual performance demanded in the course of filming was not different from what was agreed to in advance or contracted, the actual acts exceeded expectations or an individual’s capacity for endurance, and explicit refusal was ignored.

A third harm of production arises when, even if the performance demanded in filming corresponds to a contract agreed to in advance or the performance is consensual, when this performance has a character that seriously violates or threatens personhood and dignity, or safety and health (including reproductive health), or integrity and respectability (e.g., SM, beating and abusing, vomiting and spitting, scatology, sexual exposure, internal ejaculation, oral sex and oral ejaculation, anal intercourse, sexual abuse with instruments, sex with many persons, choking and suffocating, bestiality, and so on), harm still exists.

The harms of the above-mentioned three subcategories are equivalent to MacKinnon and Dworkin’s “coercion into pornography,” which is a serious harm of pornography frequently arising in recent years in Japan.

Next, we present some concrete examples from Japan of these production harms of commercial pornography. To begin with, we consider an example that reflects the harms described in category (a) in the immediately previous section, categorized under the description “harms in which a naked victim or sexual act is coercively filmed or photographed by other person(s).”

This was a case in which a victim’s boyfriend consulted with APP staff after an incident that occurred in January 2002. His girlfriend needed money at the time through having lost her wallet, and was offered a day job by an acquaintance. This job required her to wear a nurse’s costume and be photographed. She was told to wait at a train station, and a man picked her up and drove her to a condominium building. As soon as they entered a room of the building, however, where there was nothing but a large bed, the man’s attitude towards her changed, and he told her they would be filming pornography. Then, several men suddenly came out from the back of the room and violently surrounded her. Her boyfriend told the story of what then happened to her, as follows, in a weekly magazine, after having approached APP.

At first the guys sweet-talked her with assurances that her face wouldn’t be filmed and told her she’d gone too far to turn back now. When she continued to resist even after these verbal encouragements, one of the men pointed a knife to her groin and asked what would happen if he stabbed her with it. In other words, she was threatened with murder for not going along with what they wanted to do. She’s since asked me many times, “do you know what it’s like to think you’re going to be murdered? It’s a fear that can’t be put into words.” She couldn’t escape from that room. In the end she was gang raped and brutalized over a period of six hours. She was tied up and raped by multiple men. She was forced to urinate and defecate in front of them, and they stuck their hands and fingers in her anus. This made her scream.

Throughout the ordeal, they had cameras rolling, and every second of the gang rape was recorded in detail. The victim fell into a dazed state, and once filming was over the men threatened that they would send the footage to her workplace if she told anyone what had happened. They then gave her around one thousand dollars. She took the money in a state of confusion and left the apartment building, but then went to sit and cry on a riverbank, where she threw the money into the water. She began to develop symptoms of PTSD three months after the incident.

Afterwards, she tried everything possible to make herself feel better. She spent money like water—she used up all her tens of thousands of dollars of savings. She began drinking far more than usual, and developed bulimia. Anti-depressant medication has absolutely no effect. Sometimes when we chat her mood will change in a second, and she’ll fly into a rage. She’ll tell me I’m just like those guys. She’s not like her old self at all.

He took his girlfriend to see a psychiatrist, and she was admitted for treatment. But while she was an in-patient, she attempted suicide by cutting a vein in her groin area. She afterwards told him, “I did what I was told when I thought I was going to die, but now I wish I’d let them kill me.” He reflected on the level of suffering she was experiencing to make her feel that way. He concluded his interview with the weekly magazine in the following manner.

People have no idea of the severity of harm victims experience, the distorting effect it has on their lives, and the time it takes to recover. It’s not just the victim’s life that is affected, but the lives of people around them too. Family members, friends and lovers, too, feel like they’ve lived through the rape. I want people to know that crimes of this magnitude are happening here in Japan right now.

Unfortunately, this example is just the tip of an iceberg of similar crimes waged in Tokyo. This fact was later confirmed when a spin-off organization of APP members began operating in 2009 to offer outreach to victims directly. PAPS continues to be approached today by many such victims with similar experiences.

The next example shows that, even without explicit violence or assault, coerced filming can be orchestrated through penalty breach charges, psychological pressure, or marathon “persuasion.” By using these means, pornographers make victims believe they have no choice but to accept filming. As a result, victims may sometimes agree even to contracts for the filming of pornography, whether agreed to orally or in writing, but these contracts are not based on full knowledge. These means are frequently used in the process of filming pornographic videos sold in Japan.

For example, Honoka, another victim, was once one of Japan’s pornography industry’s most popular actresses. In her autobiographical book The Cage she confessed, though, that her filming debut was based on fraud and intimidation, including the threat of penalty charges. She closed a contract (though an oral one) with a talent agency to be filmed in a swimsuit, but when she went to the filming set, she found that she was the object of shooting: the filming was not of her swimwear but her naked body. She knew there was a world-renowned photographer, and many shooting staff on location, so it was simply impossible for her, a young and unworldly woman, to reject the shooting. Thus, she was forced to become a photographic subject of nude pictures under such circumstances. After that, it was pornography filming that the agency offered as her next job. She attempted to refuse but was threatened with contract breach fees of the equivalent of sixty thousand dollars. As will be later discussed, these fees are illegal in Japan. She had no choice but to comply: “All I could think about was the impossibility of escape…In the end, I just became the porn-star known as Honoka” (2010, p. 17).

This practice of pornographers in Japan threatening victims with breach of contract fees if they refuse filming is also seen in another example. An incident occurred in 2014 that eventually brought the problem of coerced pornography filming to public attention in Japan through its widespread reportage in the mainstream media and eventual tackling even by the government. The incident involved a victim who was approached in high school by a recruiter at a train station. He told her he was recruiting for entertainment industry roles, and she believed him. But he had targeted her for a genre of Japanese pornography in which underage girls are filmed in underwear or other skimpy clothing in sexualized poses. Once the filming was over, the victim, Midori (pseudonym), told the man she wanted to quit, but she was threatened with contract cancellation fees of the equivalent of ten thousand dollars. As a result, she was coerced into appearing in many more films. Then, once she reached age 20, which is Japan’s age of majority, she was coerced into pornography filming. Again, she tried to refuse, and, again, she was threatened with cancellation fees that stopped her from quitting.

On the first day of pornography filming as an adult, she was gang-raped, and this scene was filmed. After this experience, she signed a contract that included agreement to pornography filming. She was so distressed by the pornography filming, which was her first sexual experience, too much space that she was in no psychological condition to refuse to sign. This signed contract led to continued filming thereafter. Midori again tried to get out of filming after her second appearance in pornography. Again, this time she was told cancellation fees would amount to the equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars if she did not appear in another nine films. The financial threat had ballooned 10 times. Unbeknownst to Midori, behind her back the talent agency and pornography production company had contracted another 10 films. Midori faced the looming prospect of the next date of filming.

In a state of desperation, she emailed PAPS after finding the organization’s website. A PAPS staff member consulted with her the following day. Given the looming filming date, they decided to approach the police. They placed a phone call to Midori’s agency informing it she would no longer accept any jobs involving pornography filming. In reaction to this, an agency representative turned up at her house and forced his way in. Police then attended, but, astoundingly, they suggested to Midori a “compromise” solution whereby she would appear in just two more films.

Following this, Midori formally approached a lawyer, and a letter was sent to her agency informing them of her wish to dissolve the contract. But the agency did not accept this withdrawal, and, in retaliation, brought a civil suit against her for the extraordinary sum of the equivalent of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. However, in September 2015, the Tokyo district court set aside the claim and ruled that contract cancellation is the legitimate right of people subject to unwanted sexual demands. In the end, the plaintiffs withdrew the civil claim and launched no appeal, so this decision still stands today. After Midori won this case, she released her diary from the time she was in the industry, and it included the following passage.

I appreciate beyond words the help I got from PAPS and my lawyer, and from my family and friends. I first came across PAPS when I searched the internet for information about pornography appearance cancellation fees. Until I consulted with PAPS, I thought I was totally bound by the contract, that I had no freedom to act differently. I felt scared for my safety at the possibility of going against what my agency and the production company were telling me to do. There wasn’t anyone I could talk to; I just spent all my time worrying. I felt like dying. Even when I would ask them to stop during filming because my vagina and genitals were hurting, everyone would just look at me blankly and tell me I had no choice but to continue. Of course, this response from agency and production people was predictable, but even the director and female make-up artist ignored my pleas (Bengoshi dot.com News, 2015).

Because this case attracted widespread media attention in Japan, and Midori’s lawyer succeeded in spreading information about the case, it ended up being a case that changed Japanese society’s face. Problems of coerced pornography filming that had been previously ignored were picked up in Japan’s mainstream media, television broadcasts, parliament, and even by the ruling cabinet. National and local governments drew up concrete measures to tackle the problem. Thanks to Midori’s bravery in approaching PAPS, and the full-hearted response of PAPS members and her lawyer in offering help, Japan has seen wholesale changes in its society.

Other survivors of coerced pornography filming began stepping forward after seeing Midori’s case. One of these survivors was Hoshino Asuka, who was a popular pornography “star.” On her online blog on 21 November 2016, she disclosed that, over six months of brainwashing and manipulation, she had been coerced into appearing in her first pornographic film. Over the next three years, she was coerced into making many subsequent films.

Hoshino was initially involved in nude and sexualized photography for publication in titillating “girly” magazines orientated towards Japanese male youth. She became well-known through these publications. According to Hoshino’s blog posts, she was approached by a man introduced by her talent agency who used good-guy-bad-guy tactics on her over six months to brainwash her into pornography filming. One day, Hoshino attended a set where she had been hired for nude modeling but arrived to find the set was a pornography studio. This was even though the hiring contract she had signed said not one word about pornography filming. She consulted with police and lawyers at the time about the contract she had signed, but they told her such fraudulent things were not done in the industry anymore, and so she felt like she had overreacted and decided to stay silent. It wasn’t until 2015, when the issue of coerced pornography filming was taken up by the mainstream media in Japan, that she began to write of her own experiences on her blog. Because of the pornography filming she subsequently endured, she developed anorexia, panic attacks, depression, and social anxiety. She was debilitated with these conditions for three years, and, even now, she suffers trauma that makes her fear men and sexual relations (Bengoshi dot.com News, 2016).

There are a growing number of survivors of pornography production in Japan speaking out- for example, the YouTuber Kurumin Aroma who, in 2011, as a university student, was recruited in Shinjuku for “modeling.” As a university student, Kurumin was keen to forge a singing career, and the recruiter told her that nude modeling would help with this, so she was persuaded to go with him. But when she was allocated assignments, she found they were for pornography in addition to nude modeling. Aroma did not want to go ahead with these assignments, but she was persuaded by the idea they would lead to singing work, and so she was coercively “persuaded.” Then she ended up appearing in pornography that led to nothing but harm. She suffered as a result and did not want to admit to her experiences but decided to come forward as a survivor because she hoped her actions would help others. Kurumin publicly disclosed her story and continues today to speak out as a survivor (Bengoshi dot.com News, September 2016).

There are other examples of survivors in Japan recently coming forward to disclose their experiences. For example, Matsumoto Ayase, in 2016, was working as a freelance television announcer at the time, as well as YouTuber Kosaka Kino in 2019. In Matsumoto’s case, in 2010, she was targeted on the street by a man who pretended he needed her help as a university student. As a result, she was detained in a van where she was made to lick a man’s penis as if she was sucking a lollypop. This filmed recording was then used as a lead-in to a pornographic film that went on sale. Matsumoto went on to work in television, but, a few years later, the footage was reported in a gossip magazine. As a result, she was forced to give up all her television work. She has said of this time that “I couldn’t even swallow my food, and spent every day crying. I thought of suicide” (Bengoshi dot.com News, 2016). In Kosaka’s case, in 2010, she was asked to fill in a survey by a man on the street, and, as a result, similarly came to be detained in a van from which she could not escape. In the van, she was forcibly filmed participating in pornographic sex acts (Yamashita, 2019).

As shown in Kurumin’s experience described above, the pornography industry commonly tricks women into filming based on promises of modeling or entertainment industry work. To capture data about this situation, Japan’s cabinet office ran an Internet-based survey in September 2016, whose results it released in February 2017. According to these results, of 197 respondents of a total of 2575 people who had the experience of signing a filming contract, 57 testified to being pressured to undertake sex acts they had not been told about at the time of signing the contract or to which they had not agreed. Of these, 17 respondents had acquiesced to the pressure and had been filmed in pornography. When asked why they acquiesced, respondents wrote, “because I’d signed a contract agreeing to the acts,” and “because they threatened me with exposure of films/photographs they’d already taken.” Further, another 60 respondents to the online survey answered that they had been forced into sexual filming or photography with neither consent nor contract (Bengoshi dot.com News, 2017). This is the first survey of its kind undertaken in Japan, and it revealed one dimension of the serious problem of coerced pornography filming in the country.

The next two subcategories of harms involved in pornography’s production, described in items (b) and (c) above, apply respectively to situations in which, even when a victim has consented to the filming of pornography, they are forced into nonconsensual or not-contracted acts, or violent, dangerous, and violating acts in the process of filming. These harms frequently happen in the production of pornography, and more often since the mid-1980s because of the trend to produce more violent and more “real” footage with new kinds of so-called “reality porn.” Its archetype is a series of violent, pornographic films titled Nyohan [Women-fucking] (produced between 1990 and 1991) directed by Baksheesh Yamashita. This series of pornographic films was made after almost no information was given to victims about what would be filmed. Further, the women were forced into all manner of abusive and degrading acts to film them exhibiting “real” reactions of fear and response. This was a theme of the film series and its selling point (see Yamamoto, Norma & Weerasinghe, 2018)

The opening scene of one film in the series shows a woman surrounded by unattractive, lecherous men. When she exhibits some resistance to their actions, several “strongmen” enter the scene and inflict violence on her to “punish” her for this reaction. The men repeatedly rape her, but they also inflict various types of violence on her, such as beating her around the head, hitting her in the stomach and back, kicking her, and dragging her around by the hair. They repeatedly spit in her face and force her head into a toilet. When the woman shouts out in protest at this treatment and attempts to run away crying, they catch her and beat her brutally till she stopped, and then they show prolonged footage of her whimpering. This kind of torture pornography is praised as “progressive” and “radical” by intellectuals and liberals in Japan, including the Asahi Shimbun-produced AERA magazine. In the case of this violent, pornographic series, the victim was unable to report to the police, and the perpetrators remained untouched by the law.

Moreover, a range of subsequent films were produced and sold in Japan based on the model inspired by this film series involving the same techniques of violence and torture. Eventually, however, one of these subsequent series became the subject of police and legal intervention. Specifically, a case known as the Bakky case involved Japan’s worst post-war filming of violent pornography.

In June 2004, the pornography production company Bakky Visual Planning (launched in 2002) produced a film in which a woman was subjected on set to violence by a group of men. The violence was so severe it resulted in a punctured rectum and other injuries requiring four months of treatment. Upon being discharged from the hospital, the victim lodged a complaint with police in October 2004, and eight men were arrested in December. But these men were not prosecuted, and, apart from one man who was charged on another count, all were released without charge. However, the company’s violent practices came to be known about more widely because of this case and police began to keep watch on it. As a result, its staff ended up being charged, prosecuted, and tried in court.

In the filming of an earlier Bakky Visual Planning September 2004 series called “water torture,” a woman was subjected to violence over a period from 1 pm to 9 pm, and had her head repeatedly forced into water to cut off her breathing, and sustained severe injuries, including bruises and sprains throughout her body, including whiplash. According to the prosecutor’s court brief:

The victim was subjected to violence even after she had passed out, and her life was endangered. Since the incident she has been unable to leave the house and has become anxious to the pointing of believing that someone will come and try to kill her. She has trouble breathing just at the sound of a raised voice, and she now has serious problems of social anxiety (ESPIO!, 2005).

In this case, the victim approached police the following year, and, on 31 March 2005, a total of seven men were arrested and charged, including the film’s director, actors, and cameraman.

Further, in the second film of the “water torture” series released in November 2004, a victim was beforehand intimidated with the choice of either “having sex with twenty men eighty times,” or “being dunked in water.” Before filming, staff assured her that if she chose dunking, she would not be harmed, and they would stop filming whenever it got too difficult. But, when filming started, none of these assurances were delivered. There was no let-up in the violence inflicted with male performers, and she was dunked to the point of drowning in a pool on set many times. She appealed to the director to stop because she thought she would be killed, but he ignored her. She was brought close to drowning in water, forced into a box into which water was funneled, strung upside down, and had her head repeatedly forced into a bucket of water. In the end, her head smashed a mirror in the bathroom where she was being raped, and a broken fragment of the mirror sliced deeply into her ankle, causing massive blood loss. An ambulance had to be called. The victim sees this serious injury as a piece of “luck in the midst of misfortune” because it meant filming finally stopped. Her torture had continued for 12 hours, from 8.30 am to 9 pm. She now lives life in a wheelchair and has a severe fear of water that prevents her from taking a bath (see Amaki, 2007; Amaki, 2008).

A few brave victims among the many victims of this kind of violent pornography produced in Japan have stepped forward to lodge complaints. This has resulted not only in the arrest of their perpetrators but also in their prosecution and trial. Moreover, nearly all have received custodial convictions at trial. It should be noted that Bakky Visual Planning’s executive director, who did not attend the set where the violence was inflicted, was also sentenced to an 18-year term of imprisonment. This action was finally taken against violent pornography producers, whose products were left unaddressed for so long, and was the first time in Japan that the harms of pornography’s production were subject to legal judgement, even if this judgement did not result in legislative action against the country’s pornography industry.

Filming and recording technology are highly developed these days, so even an individual can produce pornography. Many serious harms happen in this process. These can be categorized as the second kind of production harm: harms arising in the production of non-commercial pornography, with three sub-component harms, as follows:

a. Harms in which a victim is sexually violated at the same time this violating act is shot or filmed;

b. Harms in which a naked victim or sex acts are unwillingly photographed or filmed by a husband, lover, father, or brother; and

c. Harms in which, through fraud, threat, or psychological control, a victim is coerced to photograph their own naked or semi-naked body and to send the resulting selfie(s) to an offender.

A typical example of the harms in category (a) above is a rapist filming his crime and/or victim to later repeatedly enjoy it by himself or to silence his victim by fear. Serial rapists tend to do this, but today when almost everyone has mobile phones that can be used as personal filming equipment, sex offenders shoot their criminal acts and victims’ violated selves. For example, in Japan, journalist Shiori Ito won a civil case against her sexual attacker in 2019 in relation to crimes described in her 2017 memoir that she suspected he had filmed on his laptop computer. The perpetrator, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, was a former Washington bureau chief of the major Japanese broadcasting company TBS. In 2015 he spiked Ito’s drink and escorted her semi-conscious back to his hotel room where he raped her (see Ito, 2017, p. 49). In this case, victims suffer harm not only through sexual violence but also the additional harm of having the violence filmed. The filming of a victim being raped or in the aftermath of rape perpetuates the damage initially done, and this perpetuates their suffering and pain. When victims are forced to imagine their offenders repeatedly watching the film or photographs, they may feel they are repeatedly being raped. On top of that, imagining the possibility of the crime being used in various ways, victims can descend into fear, because the footage can be uploaded to the Internet, or edited as pornography and distributed. Or a perpetrator may circulate recordings among a victim’s company/school or among her acquaintances.

A famous example of a perpetrator taking spy-cam footage of his sexual violence occurred in 2014 when a 40-year-old male oil massage shop manager was arrested and prosecuted for raping and sexually assaulting female customers. He filmed his criminal acts using a hidden video camera located in his shop. After he was arrested, his attorney urged victims to withdraw their charges, even with no money paid in outof-court settlements, in exchange for disposing of the videos. One of his victims later confessed her pain when the deal was proposed:

I felt extreme fear like my life was over…The proposed condition of no settlement money meant, I believed, that they had not recognized me even as a victim…I had to watch the video in which I was raped. After watching it and going home I suffered severe headache. I could not sleep due to nightmares that night, so I was forced to take time off work the next day (Mainichi Shimbun, 2015).

The harms described in (a) immediately above also include harms in which samesex acquaintances forcibly film a naked victim or sex acts as a bullying or punishment technique in schools or workplaces or within any type of institution. In this case, not only do women become victims, but men frequently become so, too. These acts are forced on them not to gratify offenders’ sexual desires but to impose deep humiliation and fear on the victim and to increase the effect of punishment and submission.

There are many news stories reporting this kind of harm, including an incident from 2014. According to a news article of the time, four male students at a public high school stripped their male classmate bare, kicked his bottom, and filmed these acts with a smartphone after a school swimming class. The following month they uploaded the movie to a video-sharing website. The school found out about the incident when it was tipped off by an anonymous informant a few months later (Yomiuri Shimbun, 2014).

The category mentioned above (b), coerced appearance in pornography filming, is limited to that by strangers. Still, this coercive filming can also be done by a husband, lover, father, or brother in a private place like a home or motel. As the development and popularization of video cameras and VCRs early on made the private production of pornography much easier at home or elsewhere, this became a form of domestic violence and date rape.

In the category (c) above, described as harms in which, through fraud, threat, or psychological control, a victim is coerced to photograph their own naked or semi-naked body and to send the resulting selfie(s) to an offender, victims are mostly underage girls. They are manipulated, threatened, or cheated by adult men to photograph their own naked or semi-naked bodies and are induced or coerced to send the selfies to the men by e-mail or social media. In case that these victims are under 18 years old, as the incidents are cases of child pornography, offenders are arrested and punished, so we can know of their harms through newspaper articles reporting them. For example, a Japan Self-Defense Forces member was arrested in November 2019 for loan-shark activity offering women loaned money on the condition they would send photographs in their underwear as “collateral” (TBS News, 2019). But if the victims are over 18 years old, we have no law against the acts themselves. Offenders sometimes induce or coerce women to self-photograph by making use of their economic plight or other vulnerabilities.

Harms in Production

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