A Pink Digression

OK, it's long past time to check in on this blog again. I've been busy.

Recently-found poster image to Kôji Wakamatsu's Sei no hôrô (性の放浪; 1967)

I intended to spend all this year working on my new JAV Archive, but at the beginning of August I got a bit tired of it, and had a hankering to dabble in Pink a little. So I spent all the month of August, and some of October, working on my somewhat-neglected Pink Film Archives. I have been keeping up with the new Pink releases all year-- there are only three Pink films per month released these days, so keeping up with them is not very difficult-- but I decided to look around the 'Net and see if I could find any new images of older Pink film posters... I DID!... I found a few sources for older Pink film posters-- 1960s & '70s, mostly-- which allowed me to start new entries on those films. Some were just-barely-acceptable distorted images from Yahoo Auctions.... But most satisfactorily, some of these posters were to films for which I already had entries illustrated with just stills, or video covers. A nice theatrical poster is always my goal. I also found much better images of posters to a few hundred Roman Porno films for which I already had entries. I upgraded the images for my existing entries for those films.

Japan's first sex film star: Tamaki Katori

While doing this I happened to stumble on a few excellent stills of the first Pink Film starlet, and therefore Japan's first sex film star: Tamaki Katori. These show her in the mid '60s, I believe. The one film I've seen her in was Koji Wakamatsu's The Woman Who Wanted to Die (1971). She was plump, mature & gorgeous in that film. I'll add these images to my only-just-barely-started upcoming blog/archive on Pink film/JAV personnel, which I sort of plan on working on next year-- while coming back to this blog on a more regular basis as well.

Anna Ohura: Branded 'not notable' by a mob of bigoted know-nothing & deleted from Wikipedia

Due to Wikipedia deletions (rant to follow below), I also found a picture archive on lovely early '00s actress/model Anna Ohura. I'm not sure what format this actress/personnel blog will take-- Bios, & pictures, naturally-- but absolutely EVERY picture I can find (as I've done with Chihiro)?... or what?... I'd like it to be a full encyclopedia project-- not only articles on actresses, but also on directors/other personnel, films, videos, genres, etc... I'm thinking it over while accumulating the data in the JAV Archive this year...

Miwa Sasaki VHS covers... coming to the JAV Archives

At the time I took the Pink detour I was caught up with the JAV archives. So the bad thing about that detour, obviously, is that it has put me behind in the again... by one month. But by plotting my JAV course systematically, I was able to grab up a month's worth of images & data over the past couple days, and I still have ammunition for future entries while I translate, format & post the data & images. I finished this portion of the catch-up project this morning, allowing me to take time off for some non-JAV work, and to whip out this quickie post here.

Ellen Joe's VHS covers soon to grace the JAV Archives

I've been concentrating on building up the representation of VHS covers most recently at the JAV Archives. This results in older, less-spectacularly buxom/BBW subjects, but a better historical perspective. Also, having lived through that era-- even the later Roman Porno era-- it's nice to revisit some old favorites like Miwa Sasaki and Ellen Joe (whom we see above)-- who can still hold their own with today's zaftig lasses-- so I intend to revisit the early days of the busty/BBW genre many times.

A new Shizuku Amai DVD

But as soon as these are all posted, I'll dive back into recent debuts-- such as the incredible Shizuku Amai, above-- and catch up on recent releases by old reliables like GAS, Maguro, IZM, Bombom Cherry, & all the rest... The Pink Film Archives are my personal favorites, and, I think, the most important work I'm doing, but the JAV Archive at Tumblr is proving to be, by far, my most popular project. At only just over half a year, I am nearing 1,000 followers.

This concludes the post proper. What follows is another anti-Wikipedia rant, so you can stop reading here. Forgive me... I wasted five years working, writing and contributing information there, thinking that Japanese erotic film is part of the "uncensored sum of human knowledge"... and it is, of course, but Wikipedia has been taken over by Crusaders and bigots... If you want information on subjects they personally don't like, "Google is your friend", as they say-- in other words, Wikipedia is not...

2010 compilation DVD with an appearance by the 'non-notable' subject of THREE documentaries: Maki Tomoda

Since my last report here, Wikipedia's deletions have finally started in on Japanese erotic cinema. Recently declared notable subjects who blatantly pass even Wikipedia's subjective, original and biased definition of 'notability' include Anna Ohura, Hitomi Tanaka, and Maki Tomoda. Maki Tomoda is not just an AV star, she's starred in several mainstream theatrical films, TV programs (thereby passing one porn 'notability' test), she has won Pink Film Awards and Pinky Ribbon Awards, thereby passing TWO porn notability tests, and has been the subject of THREE documentaries, including a French (international) one-- thereby passing even the GENERAL Notability Guidelines!... The discussion stupidly ignored the heavily reliably-sourced (i.e., 'notable') first award, noted only the second, more minor award, and THEN, when the first one was mentioned, assumed it was the second one, which-- without reading a word of Japanese-- they deemed 'not notable'. It would have been absolutely pointless to point out any of the buffoonish comedy of errors going on during the discussion which resulted from that fact that no one in the discussion either read Japanese or was not biased against the subject. Bigots are as arrogant in their opinions as they are ignorant in them... This is the state of Wikipedia today-- Crusaders gutting subject areas against which they have a clear bias. I have to admit, I was surprised at the brazenness of this Deletion-- she clearly passed Wikipedia's own biased guidelines, but they deleted her anyway. I expect the next step to be a rewrite of those guidelines because nobody objected to the deletion, and then virtually ALL Japanese cinema articles could be deleted if anyone chose to do so. They will be deleted with selective bias, though, naturally...

Fechi-angle kyonyû Ôura Anna (フェチアングル巨乳　大浦あんな - TWV-035; 2003)

Nearly 100% of deletion "discussions" now result in delete. "Deletionists" have driven off the contributors, and have completely free run of the project now. Anyone with interest or knowledge of the subject area has given up on Wikipedia and gon on to other projects. Contributing anything to Wikipedia is futile-- I've seen articles deleted after passing more than 20 nominations. That's a waste of the time of the editors who put the article together, and the editors who fought to save it after dozens of discussions. So, let them delete the entire subject of Japanese cinema. Wikipedia is already useless on the subject due to the bias of these few, non-productive editors. (When he's not searching WP for any mention of boobies or pee-pees to razor-blade out of the encyclopedia, sexually-repressed obsessive/repressive Hullaballo Wolfowitz, occasionally adds a little to articles on trivial 1950s paperback science-fiction compilations. There would be nothing wrong with that, if he weren't so active in deleting content on much more 'notable' subjects in other areas... and he insultingly sources these sci-fi articles only with open Wikis and databases which he would never allow at an article on a subject against which he is biased.) It will continue to be this way because it is infinitely easier to delete an article than it is to create one.

Hitomi Tanaka: 65 starring roles & growing at IMDb. Recently deleted as 'non-notable' at Wikipedia

I've seen some of the editors involved in these deletions admit on other sites that they are at Wikipedia only for the "drama", with no intention of ever contributing content... In other words, they are trolls. And I don't blame the trolls-- that's what they do: Have fun disrupting a project until they get caught and thrown off-- "Ha ha! I wasted their time!"... No, I blame Jimbo Wales & the creators of Wikipedia. These trolls are not being thrown off-- They are staying, and the CONTRIBUTORS are leaving... Crowd-sourcing is one thing, but allowing the crowd to govern itself results mob rule. Like at IMDb, editors should be allowed only to contribute information to Wikipedia. Experts/professionals need to be hired to investigate and accept or reject that information, handle formatting & deletions, content disputes & discipline, etc. Giving the editors free reign to create, interpret and enforce rules resulted in the Lord of the Flies atmosphere-- People with no interest in content are in charge, the real contributors are driven off, anti-content Crusades, subject-area purges, non-stop argument-- all to the harm of the encyclopedia. The takeover of Wikipedia by the "Deletionist" trolls. So, delete it all, trolls! Jimbo and the Wikipedia "community" don't care... And subject-specialist sites like IMDb become all the more valuable because of their tolerance of the intolerant...

Easter Update & Welcome to Twitter, Erika!

Erika, now on Twitter!

First the big news: Blog favorite, the gorgeous IZM model Erika is now on Twitter. Friends and fans of hers have been welcoming her, and she's started posting some nice pictures. I quickly added her Twitter page to her IMDb profile. Follow this lovely lady at: https://twitter.com/erika_bbw. Now on to blog business:

Hitomi Tanaka's AV debut, now at Tumblr & IMDb

As I wrapped up my week off last weekend, I made an experiment to see how quickly I'd be able to post. Rather than work on entire series-- since that takes in some videos outside the main topic of my BBW/busty JAV interests-- I'd like to just post what I find that catches my eye. Since Tumblr allows me to attach 10 images to one image post, I grabbed ten DVDs at random, gathered data, translated, then posted them to see how fast I could do it... not fast enough, it turns out... I'll have to work on a way to speed up the process... I think this may be the best way to work though, at least for a while... The last morning of vacation I did the same-- 10 posts-- with some Hitomi Tanaka DVDs. I have 1,335 entries in the JAV archive already. If I could manage to keep posting an average of 10 a day for the rest of the year, that would give me another 2,750 for a total of 4,085, which wouldn't be bad... So far I've been able to keep up the pace. One night I'll grab a few dozen images, post them in sets of 10s in the image blog, each set representing one day's work. Then I gather the data, translate & upload the posts to the main JAV Archive during the week. So the work isn't done exactly 10 each day... but does come out to 70 a week...

Erisa Natsumi in her latest: ICD-269

I spent my online time today submitting the week's work to IMDb. I managed to get 32 submitted, and still have two days to go... The IMDb posting slows things down a little, but I find I can adjust that by uploading a set of non-IMDb-worthy videos so I can catch up-- videos without release dates, or with amateur/un-named performers... It would be nice to keep up this pace, but my attention will no doubt wander... The Actress database especially has me thinking about actually writing-- bios, descriptions of actresses and their works, etc. Even a general history of bustiness/BBW-itude in Japanese adult entertainment, writing more subjectively than any of the ~pedia projects would or should allow... All this data/image collection & translation will be valuable for such project if I ever do get around to it.

VCA's D-Cup label: VC-031

After my week of concentrated work on the JAV Archive, real life has kept me too busy this past week to do much online work. However I did finish up the VCA/D-Cup label project. I found a whole new section to the label I hadn't known about-- the VC- prefix videos-- so it turned out to be more work than I expected. I wouldn't be at all surprised, of course, if there were still a LOT more videos on the label out there that I don't have yet. In fact I KNOW there are several missing. But since these videos are almost 30 years old, it's pretty challenging finding information about them online. I know I have at least one-- maybe more-- of those videos in my own collection, in boxes somewhere in the garage. One of these days I should dig them out, scan them, and add them to the databases...

Game-changer Kimiko Matsuzaka in a compilation video

this takes a first stab at filling in Japanese "Big bust" entertainment in the days before Kimiko Matsuzaka's debut in February 1989. As can be seen from these video covers, "Big bust" before Kimiko wasn't anything to compare with today's BBW girls like Erika. Kimiko's career raised the bar on the big-bust genre, and Mariko Morikawa's debut in 1994 raised it even higher. Eri Kikuchi, who debuted in 1986, was probably the major big-boob actress before Kimiko. Ran Masaki debuted the same year, but apparently only worked for a year, while Eri has a very prolific career. She was still working a few years ago.

BBW icon, Yôko Koizumi in TFC-4093

This weekend, in preparation for the coming week's work, I've discovered a treasure trove of early BBW videos, some of which I'd known before, some of which are new to me. Most of these are not IMDb material, since the models are either anonymous amateurs, or one-timers, but we do glimpse the occasional BBW celebrity: Yôko Koizumi and Anna Watarai among them.

Hitomi in Pink

I've been busy with IMDb submissions lately. A big problem seems to be looming with them. I mentioned earlier that they have stopped accepting the links to the Pink film posters at my Picasaweb album. Now, not only that, it seems that the older ones have been removed. If this reflects some official policy change, then my enthusiasm for contributing there will certainly dampen a bit. I might redirect my efforts to making my Pink film blogs more self-sufficient, and only add information to IMDb for links from those entries... The problem with working at another site is you're always at the whim of people who don't have your own interest... I just hope Blogger / Picasaweb never get the Puritan bug...

Anyway, as far as this blog, I'll just throw out a quick Pink Film entry tonight to tie in with the more specialized interest here. Left entirely to my own devices, I've drifted into my own Asian BBW fixation at this blog, but the original intent was to reflect Boobpedia's interests-- boobs-- albeit, again, with my own Asian specialization. While certainly not a BBW, Ms. Hitomi Tanaka quite obviously qualifies for any boob-interested project. As far as I am aware, she has starred in only two Pink films so far. The poster above is to her debut film, Yoshikazu Katô's Gokuraku sentô: Kyonyû yumomi. Besides the obvious pleasures of viewing Ms. Tanaka, the film appears to be rather worth watching in itself, having been given Honorable Mention and Best Screenplay at the annual Pink Taishô awards-- the big event in the Pink Film world. It was released in August 2011.

We reported on Hitomi's second film in February last year. Again directed by Yoshikazu Katô and titled Dosukebe kensa: Nurse bakunyû-zeme, it was released that same month-- February 2012.

Above are a couple stills of Nurse Hitomi in the movie. Let's hope she continues her Pink film career, and that other ultra-busty / BBW actresses take the step from AV to Pink, which is my personal preference for more intellectual/artistic erotic entertainment.
My IMDb work was going full-steam and enthusiastically, but with the apparent rejection of links to posters, I won't be surprised if my enthusiasm wanes now... If my energy shifts to the Pink Film blogs, I'll still try to fill in the days I've missed at this blog and try to get back to posting more regularly.

Naked Pink Pursuit

Since finishing the first stage of the Pink film archive on February 19, I have been doing some pick-up work: New re-release posters from Xces, new Nikkatsu Roman Porno films and other posters from Cinepo, etc. One of the big news items in the Pink film world is Pink debut of the bountiful AV-idol and former gravure model, Hitomi Tanaka. Here she is, at right, standing next to Ren Azumi in a still from director Yoshikazu Katô's Dosukebe kensa: Naasu bakunyû-zeme (どスケベ検査　ナース爆乳責め), released by OP on February 3rd. Despite her ginormous bazoom, she's too thin, and disproportionate to the Dekkappedlian eye, which prefers an all-around pleasing plumpness. But I can certainly see the attractions... Dare we hope this move could be followed by the recruitment of genuine BBWs like Tamaki Yasuoka!?

Yesternight's viewing combined two of my passions: old, obscure films and Asian eroticism in one unsatisfying package. Naked Pursuit (released by World Eiga in March 1968 as Kôfun [昴奮]) is one of the few examples of early Pink cinema currently available on DVD to the Anglosphere. Slave Widow (1967), Madame O (1967) & The Bite (1966) are the others, and Naked Pursuit is easily the weakest of this quartet. It is, basically, one long rape with a little talk at the start to give the attacks some context. The director-- Toshio Okuwaki-- tries a few camera and sound tricks in a futile attempt to make things a little more interesting, and Pink film stalwart, Masayoshi Nogami (also featured in Slave Widow, as the son/Naomi Tani's fiancee) makes an adequate rapist. But even watched in Fast-Forward, this was pretty hard to take. I'm glad I saw it anyway, to get some historical perspective on the genre. The other three films are of a much higher quality, but this one probably gives a better idea of the average genre entry of the time. If Slave Widow had represented the norm, then Donald Ritchie's 197 essay condemning the "eroduction" ("The Japanese Eroduction", reprinted in A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan, 1987) would be inexplicable.

Naked Pursuit owes its current existence to its importation to the U.S. by exploitation mogul Harry Novak. The cross-pollination between the exploitation industries of Japan and the U.S. in the '60s is something that interests me very much, but about which there is very little written. Jasper Sharp devotes a chapter to this subject in his Behind the Pink Curtain, but this is only enough to make one want to know more. One wonders, for one thing, why Naked Pursuit, out of the hundreds of others of presumably higher quality (judging from the other three '60s Pink films on DVD), was selected for U.S. audiences. True, even the fleeting glimpses of partial nudity on display in this film would have been enough titillation to draw in a grindhouse/drive-in audience in the '60s. (The Internet generation probably cannot grasp how difficult it was to come by visual depiction of the nude female form in those days.) But the other existing Pink films from that era show that nudity and quality were not mutually exclusive at that time.

Like many fans of the Japanese erotic entertainment, the violence towards women irritates and bores me, but I don't pretend that this sort of entertainment is unique to Japan. In fact, I suspect the U.S. "roughies" explored this misogynistic territory slightly before the Japanese did. The U.S. "roughies" were shown in Japan during their first release, as attested by contemporary Japanese posters to films such as Scum of the Earth! (1963), Lorna (1964) and The Defilers (1965; Japanese poster at left). It has been claimed that the violence acted out in these softcore productions is to compensate for the inability to "go all the way". (Though misogyny is certainly present in the earlier, non-erotic cinemas of both Japan and the US-- My beloved films noir, for example, are very misogynistic...) The U.S. erotic entertainment industry moved into hardcore, killing off not only the "roughies", but the entire domestic softcore industry. The Japanese, instead, stayed with softcore, and the older "roughie"-like themes. Is hardcore really more acceptable than softcore with sexual violence? Certainly not to me. (I will watch a Japanese Sasori film-- loaded with over-the-top softcore sexual violence-- over any non-violent U.S. hardcore porno any day.) And the U.S. slasher films of the '70s and '80s did mix up violence and sexuality just as many contemporary Japanese softcore films-- Nikkatsu's Roman Pornos for example-- were doing.

Anyway, back to Naked Pursuit: Rape, rape and more rape. Nothing much more to say about it... Three out of Ten stars for the historical value, IMDb's lowest rating (One star) for entertainment value, averaging out to a Two. To get an idea of the type action which your humble servant, old Dekkappai would rather see in a film bearing the title Naked Pursuit, take a look at the scene below, from Karen Toudou's QDN-17.