Police have arrested a 24-year-old man on suspicion of violating the new adult video law after he was caught filming a sex act with a 16-year-old girl in a karaoke room.
One of the most common places to go to karaoke in Japan is a building with lots of small soundproof rooms, little more than booths really. This gives you privacy to drink and sing, and thus also ideal date spots. A bit of cuddling and smooching in the karaoke booth is the perfect prelude to moving on to your home or a love hotel.
Inevitably, sex does happen in karaoke rooms, but actually making a porn film without permission takes a whole other level of confidence.
AV production company head Takumi Shiota is accused of performing a sex act in May on a 16-year-old girl and making her appear in an adult video.
He apparently got to the know the girl through a dating app and invited her to meet him at the karaoke room. He filmed the sex and gave her a payment of ¥40,000.
In effect, this was a private sex tape that Shiota would edit and release.
The girl agreed to be filmed and to have sex, it seems, but was not told that Shiota would release the footage publicly.
This is why police have arrested him for violating the recent (and controversial) porn law, which requires performers to have proper contracts with such conditions stipulated and a cooling-off period between signing the contract and shooting the film. In other words, you can’t just make an impromptu porn flick with a new signee there and then.
The large production studios are no doubt able to deal with this new system in an efficient way but we expect it will make things very hard for small-scale producers whose bottom line is narrow and literally can’t afford to wait. (Another cooling-off period is required between the end of a shoot and the release.)
Arrests have already been made under the new legislation, which was introduced in response to coercion and consent scandals in the JAV industry.
Filming sex without consent is also illegal and could land you in jail.
Shiota, who was arrested last month, denies violating the law. It seems that he and his co-performer did exchange some sort of consent form (albeit not a proper contract), because it was this that proved his undoing. The girl’s mother found the paperwork in her bedroom and discovered what she had done. They went to the police and were able to stop the release of the film before it went online.
According to a police estimate, Shiota has made sales of around ¥22 million in two and a half years through making and releasing such AV in which he appears.
