Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan's Adult Video Industry

I can't remember a time when I have more wanted to recommend a single book to everyone I know. You might think that an ethnography of Japan's pornography industry would be a niche topic, or one of interest to only gender scholars, media scholars, or fans. But Akiko Takeyama's Involuntary Consent is instead deeply relatable and fundamentally connected to broad questions that exist well beyond pornography, including the nature of consent, extractive labor, and the assumptions built into legal structures. As an example of what the best ethnographic research can do, Takeyama's close examination of a particular topic reveals much broader truths while never losing focus on the specific context.The book identifies the titular “involuntary consent” as the ways in which any legal agreement is shaped by social, economic, and political structures surrounding it at the same time those very forces are ignored or elided. People regularly have to “agree to” things because there simply isn't any other choice, or no better choice. Daily life offers myriad examples, from (unreadable) user agreements required to open a particular app, to students required to accept monitoring software before taking an online exam. These are not real choices although, technically speaking, they require assent. Takeyama asserts that moments of involuntary consent center on contracts, a ubiquitous format that presumes both parties have enough knowledge to negotiate a reasonable agreement and enough power to refuse anything they don't like. In fact, to get through life we have to agree to unfair, unpleasant, or unwanted things and then also pretend that we had a real choice. As she writes, many people must live their lives in the “large, ambiguous, and often contradictory in-between area” between consent and coercion (39). Legal structures, especially contracts, presume individual autonomy and free will without confirming either, as if they were a speech act that could be merely spoken into existence.Pornography in Japan is a multibillion-dollar industry that hinges, to a large degree, on the contracts offered to female performers. Takeyama traces the way a contract was used to pull a young woman, Kozai Saki, into performing despite her lack of interest. Kozai wanted to become a model and already had some experience when she was scouted in a Tokyo train station. She was rejected as a model because she was twenty-four years old, but was redirected to other opportunities. A busy and elusive agent at a famous management company began meeting with her, giving advice about how she could reach her goals, focusing specifically on the mental toughness necessary to succeed. After months of (unpaid) training, journaling, and visioning, Kozai was told she would record short videos only showing her naked back, but when she showed up on set, she was asked to appear fully nude and have sex on camera. She was shocked and upset that the job was so different from what had been promised, and ultimately the pornographic video includes images of her tear-stained face. As Takeyama says, “the director never forced her to perform in AV [adult video] but rather employed a wide range of tactics—deceit, rhetorical questions, and psychological pressure—to induce her to make certain choices” (45). Many performers have signed contracts that they do not fully understand and that include high fees for refusing work, thereby setting them up to face exorbitant charges if they refuse to perform the on-camera sex that is suddenly demanded of them. Although some of the actors and directors with whom Takeyama spoke describe the business as including only people who actively want jobs, others reflect on their own experiences with implicit and explicit coercion.Debates about pornography occupied significant energy within the field of gender studies in the 1980s and 1990s, epitomized by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. In that case, the central questions at issue concerned the impacts pornography might have not only on the performers but on all women, and sexual violence and gender politics broadly. Takeyama builds on this extensive previous scholarship while also using ethnographic data to firmly situate her analysis within a Japanese context. For instance, when discussing consent in practice, she highlights the “Japanese-language middle voice—neither active nor passive” (44) in which the speaker's personhood is implied but not directly stated in a sentence. In quotes from her interviews with performers, Takeyama marks the words that drop out, thereby creating ambivalence about the speaker being the subject or object of action. One performer said, “[I] responded to [the request], as [I] was asked to ‘sign [the document] for the time being’” (30). Although legal language might be alienating in any cultural context, Takeyama demonstrates how everyday elision between passive and active voices in Japanese complicate any simple assertion of consent.After identifying the dynamics of involuntary consent, the arc of the book moves from actresses to their management teams and the industry more generally, before ending with a chapter focused on fans. For me, at least, the final chapter read like such a twist that I hesitate to write much about it so as not to spoil the ending. The dedicated fans who speak with Takeyama have experiences not identical to the actresses performing through coercion, but refracted through the funhouse mirror of gender in Japan. Coming of age during the “employment ice age” (1993–2005), these men were unable to become “regular” employees and instead cobbled together insecure or part-time positions. Many tell heartbreaking stories of what seems like serious mental illness, unaddressed trauma, severe family conflicts, and little connection with other people. Their interest in pornography is not only sexual but also a reflection of Japanese fan cultures. Indeed, one man found solace and community among fans of the girl group Morning Musume before shifting his attention to pornography. As in her excellent previous book, Staged Seduction, which focused on hosts and host clubs, Takeyama brilliantly describes the impacts of a highly gendered labor market with fewer secure jobs, the rhetoric of individual self-responsibility, and increasing disparity between the wealthy and impoverished.Involuntary Consent will be of interest to a wide range of readers, especially those focused on popular culture and fandom, employment, legal structures in practice, or gender. It is an eminently readable text, with vibrant human stories and powerful analysis that bring vital questions to life.