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Paper short abstract

A hermeneutic analysis of Togawa Naoki’s 1966 essay on pinku eiga, published in the Polish film journal Film, as a case of the transfer of Japanese film theory into socialist Poland. The paper situates the analysis within the crisis of 1960s cinema and kasutori bunka.

Paper long abstract

In 1966, an essay by Togawa Naoki entitled “Pink Films,” or the Erotic Offensive was published in issue 37 of the Polish film magazine Film, one of the few texts by Japanese film critics to appear in the Polish film press during the socialist period. This short essayistic piece, devoted to the phenomenon of pinku eiga, was addressed to readers largely unfamiliar with both the phenomenon and its author.

Togawa Naoki (Naosuke, 1917–2010) was a key figure in twentieth-century Japanese film culture: a critic and theorist, a long-term contributor to Eiga hyōron, a lecturer at Nihon University, and an active participant in the international circulation of film-theoretical discourse. His essay published in Poland thus represents a compelling case of the transnational transfer of knowledge about Japanese cinema into a media context peripheral to its original cultural milieu.

The paper offers a hermeneutic analysis of Togawa’s text, based on close reading, and situates it within the context of Japanese film culture in the 1960s. The analysis discusses pinku eiga (Sharp 2011; Nornes 2014) and its aesthetic and historical connections to the ero guro current (Silverberg 2006), as well as the broader transformations of Japanese cinema: the crisis of the studio system, often described as the “end of Japanese cinema” (Yomota 2019; Zahlten 2021), and the emergence of alternative models represented by the Art Theatre Guild (Domenig 2005).

The interpretation further considers the wider socio-cultural context of postwar Japan: a normative crisis, the absence of a new moral code, and the liminal condition of a rapidly transforming society—conditions that facilitated the commercialization of corporeality and sexuality within kasutori bunka (Olson 1992; Kapur 2018). Japan’s relationship with the West is treated as ambivalent, functioning as both a driver of modernization and a source of cultural frustration.

Finally, the analysis maintains methodological reflexivity from the perspective of a contemporary Polish researcher, while reconstructing Togawa’s critical position through a comparative reading of the essay alongside other works in which his thought is articulated or referenced (Leslie 1972; Gerow 2012; Kitsnik 2016; Fujiki 2022).

Keywords: Togawa Naoki; Pinku Eiga; Japan; Film; Criticism

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An investigation in the under-researched area of Japanese erotic audio use, specifically the ways in which different genres of erotic voice media have been used since the twentieth century for non-sexual functions such as entertainment, parasocial connection, and wellness or self-care.

Paper long abstract

Scholarly work on erotic audio in both sex work and popular culture has formed a small but diverse international field in sexuality and sound studies since the 1990s, with research on phone sex lines (Hall, 1995) and Japanese adult messaging services (Kashimura, 1989), boys love cassettes and CDs (Ishida, 2019), pornographic “ero-games” (Kikawada, 2020), and narrated erotic fantasies streamed online (Cheng, 2025). Since the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars of "sexy" voice media aimed at women outside Japan have begun to examine the non-sexual functions of such texts, particularly with regard to wellness and self-care (Lee, 2022; Bellas & McAlister, 2023). Japan has a long history of erotic audio, but explorations of its purposes and pleasures outside the realm of sexuality are lacking. This presentation will therefore consider the ways in which various types of Japanese erotic voice media have been co-opted for non-erotic purposes.

I will begin with a brief discussion of an early form of mediated erotic voice, a subgenre of rakugo with roots in the late Edo period known as enshō. In a somewhat similar way to racy American “blue discs” of the same period, its purpose was to simultaneously titillate the audience and make them laugh (Smith, 2004). Released (and frequently banned) since the 1930s on short-playing records, this type of erotic-comic tale could be considered a foundation for subsequent voice media that comprise multiple functions, including arousal, parasocial connection, entertainment, and wellbeing. From ero-cassette tapes of the 1980s featuring the voices of gravure idols, whose often unprofessional performance has been seen as a way of prompting feelings of affection from fans (Yasuda, 2024), to anonymous online amateur recordings that fail to arouse commenters but make them laugh, and more recently commercialised audio streams that act as relaxation aids – engaging the listener as an imagined partner as the performer “makes love” to them and then helps them fall asleep – this presentation traces erotic voice media and its non-sexual functions through the twentieth century to the present. It will conclude with a short consideration of the potential uses of emerging interactive AI voices.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines yōgē (洋ゲー), a Japanese vernacular term for Western games, in over 800 Japanese-language user reviews, using inductive qualitative content analysis to explore how the term is used, associated with stereotypes, and deployed in evaluative discourse in the Japanese gaming context.

Paper long abstract

The Japanese digital game market is one of the largest in the world, both in exports and domestic consumption. However, in contrast to Western films, Western games are consumed only marginally. In the console game market, which is the best documented in terms of sales, only one non-Japanese game appears among the 100 best-selling games of all time. This creates a degree of self-sufficiency that has few clear parallels in other free gaming markets.

While Japanese players’ preference for domestic titles has been widely noted, this phenomenon has received limited focused attention in academic work. Koyama briefly mentions this issue, for example in relation to differences in visual styles that contribute to a divide between Japanese and foreign games (2023), but no detailed analyses are currently available.

This paper focuses on the so-called yōgē (洋ゲー), a vernacular term for Western games that has been in use for decades. In its early usage, particularly in the formative years of computer and console gaming, the term was often negatively affected by the quality of localization and differences in game design approaches. The paper explores the term in contemporary user-created discourse and maps the sentiments connected with its use.

To this end, the study analyzes a corpus of over 800 Japanese-language user reviews from the digital game distribution platform Steam in which the term yōgē is explicitly employed. While Steam primarily hosts PC games, which are not the driving force of the Japanese market, the platform provides a rare body of user-generated commentary suitable for examining evaluative discourse whose exploration helps uncover the users’ (often stereotypical) stances towards Western games.

The study employs inductive qualitative content analysis to identify common themes in the discourse. The findings will demonstrate the functions served by the term yōgē, the preconceptions commonly associated with it, and the contexts in which it appears. These results may also provide practical insights relevant to game marketing and localization strategies.