The new law called “relief” completely ignores the operation logic and laws of the AV industry.
On June 15, the Japanese Senate passed the “AV Appearance Victimization Prevention and Relief Act” bill, which had received a lot of attention before, and decided to officially implement it on the 23rd of that month. At the council meeting that day, only one member held an objection.
The purpose of the bill is clear and concise, which is that actors in adult films have the right to say no to things they don’t like.
Before the film is filmed, it must be confirmed with the actor in advance. If the actual situation does not match the contract, the actor can withdraw immediately; the actor can unconditionally cancel the contract, remove the work within one year after the film is released, or even ask the industry to stop selling it. or distribute related content without the parties bearing any compensation costs.
Too long to watch the version: sign the contract in person, the actor can refuse on the spot if he is not satisfied, there is a 4-month buffer time after the filming, and the contract can be terminated at any time within two years
In this regard, the government’s explanation is to “protect the rights and interests of adult film actors.” Legislators believe the bill will help save newcomers who have gone astray and inadvertently signed the overlord clause. At the same time, they also hope that this somewhat special industry can take this opportunity to pay more attention to the psychological and physiological demands of AV participants.
However, the lawmakers sitting in the parliamentary chamber probably did not expect that this bill, which was born to protect practitioners, would shake the entire industry overnight, and even put countless actors at risk of losing their jobs.
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27-year-old Nozomi Shinjo is an active AV actress with a mediocre popularity. If her tragic background is ignored, she is also an ordinary adult woman. Her father left her when she was a child, and her mother frequently beat and kicked her since then.
At the age of 19, Nozomi Shinjo left the family forever, and two years later, she entered the AV industry.
After that, the hardships and anguish that this little-known actor has experienced over the years almost overwhelmed her life. In 2020, when the new crown epidemic was raging, she once had thoughts of suicide. A year later, she adjusted her mentality, changed her stage name to Jin Miao Xi Shi, left the office and chose to go it alone, taking this as an opportunity to start a new life of her own.
Kim Myo Hee-sil also created a special Twitter account to provide psychological counseling for children abused by their parents
On the homepage of her Twitter account with 10,000 fans, she wrote a sincere confession: “Even if it is only once in a lifetime, I really want to be popular.” Not long after the implementation of the new AV law, her sentence inadvertently The complaints helped her achieve this dream.
According to Jin Miao Xishi’s self-report, she is currently a freelancer and has no background from a big company. How to spend the next month will be a big problem. For this reason, she can only pray that the occasional offline activities or related photography sessions will favor her during this time, so that the next life will be better.
Kim Myo Heesil’s current situation is not an exception.
Tsukishima Sakura ( Tsukishima さくら ) is an active actor who is well-known on Twitter. In a recent interview, she bluntly said that she “can’t pay the rent and moved back to my hometown”; an employee working in an offline store He also complained on Twitter that due to the new law, fewer and fewer new DVDs are being launched, and revenue is bleak…
Tsukishima Sakura added the tag “Guarding reasonable AV” after her name
Jin Miao Xishi’s bitter tweet reflects the downturn in the industry, expresses everyone’s heart, and makes passers-by who have no understanding of this industry understand the absurdity of this matter.
And what completely ignited the anger of the practitioners was the attitude of those congressmen who were unaware of this but showed a condescending feeling. Senator Shiomura Fumaka, who is quite active on Twitter, expressed his incomprehension after learning about the incident, and repeatedly emphasized that there is nothing wrong with the “Relief Law” itself, and if there is a problem, please find the reason from yourself.
But the fact is that after the implementation of this new law, which nominally protects actors, actors, big and small, well-known or unknown, collectively experienced a tragic phenomenon of large-scale shutdowns and even unemployment.
So, why does the new AV law in the name of “relief” make active actors face many problems?
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A large part of the reason for this result is that the new law completely ignores the operation logic and laws of the AV industry.
The new AV law announced on the final day of the National Assembly on June 15th will only take two months to complete from the establishment of the bill to its establishment, which is quite rare for the Japanese legal profession who often observes public opinion for a month and considers the implementation date of the law separately. .
In contrast, the red tape in the new AV law is not in a hurry, and it has adopted an almost desperate time limit for the entire industry.
According to the new law, adult film actors need to sign a contract for one month before they can participate in the photography, and 4 months after the end of the photography, the completed works can be sold on the market.
Although the original intention of the bill is probably to give the actors enough buffer time to consider their own actions and measures, this cold and blunt provision completely ignores objective industrial laws.
For example, the July photoshoot that Kim Mio Hee-sil missed, which is mentioned above, must be the keynote of the summer style atmosphere. Under the strict restrictions of the new law for up to 5 months, it is not appropriate to think about the summer planning that is late in the winter, and the cancellation of the entire project is naturally a foregone conclusion.
At the same time, since the actors have the right to remove the participating works from the shelves or even prohibit the sale, in order to avoid potential risks, the producers will definitely choose to reduce the number of participants to reduce the possibility of the works being unilaterally forcibly removed from the shelves. It’s a pity that in this way, the less famous actors at the bottom are bound to face the tragic situation of being eliminated by the big environment or even losing their jobs.
The excessively long window period brings zero income for up to 5 months. The capital turnover of manufacturers and the temporary changes of actors will have a huge impact on this market.
Of course, the stupidity and arrogance of the new law don’t stop there. In the explanatory text when the new law was announced, the AV industry was portrayed as a hell scene of “squeezing employees and forced labor”. In order to “relieve” these girls who are in dire straits, this “relief law” should be implemented. and live.
But unlike what most people take for granted, the shooting of adult videos is actually not as bad as everyone imagines. Even an actor who once lived on the scene admitted frankly that the AV shooting scene was the cleanest and most comfortable he had ever seen. Respect your work environment the most.
Active adult film actress Toda Makoto wrote a long article to justify the industry, but after the implementation of the new AV law, her homepage added the message of “exiting this industry in January 2023”
As one of the legitimate industries permitted by law, the current adult film industry is no different from other industries. It also pays taxes and abides by the law. Under the constraints of the law, this somewhat unusual type of work will respect the actor’s personal will, and will repeatedly emphasize the particularity of the work before shooting – these are the real status quo that countless active actors have repeatedly confirmed. After all, if this The industry has been riddled with filthy unspoken rules for many years, and the government’s iron fist will not fall until today.
Of course, the “coercive threat” mentioned in the new law is not nonsense. Ai Uehara, a senior in the industry, once said, “Although I have never seen actors who were forced to make films, such phenomena do exist.”
It’s just that for this decades-old industry, the stereotype of being behind the times should not be affixed to today’s AV industry. According to the report of the Japan AV Human Rights Ethics Agency, 95% of AV actresses in the entire industry are involved in normal work.
The remaining 5% is exclusively occupied by an alternative branch called the “Doujin Department”. Doujin series are mostly based on individuals, filming and producing their own or buyers’ favorite types. Not all doujinshi series are on the edge of the law, but the vast majority of illegal and criminal categories come from this category.
The new AV law failed to crack down on the criminals hiding in the shadows, and those regular production companies that obeyed the law were regarded as idiots. It is foreseeable that in the future, the number of practitioners who take illegal paths will only increase, and the standard rules and regulations established by the entire industry will be smashed by the law.
The top priority such as the formulation of laws should thoroughly investigate the general environment of the industry. If this is not possible, you can also contact the AV Human Rights and Ethics Institution established in 2016 to get a rough understanding of the current situation. In the interview and investigation of , everyone was “relieved” so vaguely and lost their jobs by accident.
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On April 1, 2022, the amendment to Japan’s Civil Code was officially passed. From this date, the age of majority in Japan dropped from 20 to 18.
The original intention of the Japanese government to lower the age of majority is to encourage young people living in Japan, whose population is seriously aging, to actively participate in social activities. Although there are still strict age restrictions for controversial activities such as drinking and betting on horses, the contract for shooting AV is not included in this list. In other words, once minors in Japan can now legally shoot AV.
Things you can only do at 20: drinking, smoking, public gambling, adopting a child, getting a driver’s license for a medium-sized vehicle
Considering that most countries in the world use 18 as the adult standard, reducing the adult age by two years does not seem wrong.
But from the perspective of Japan, this is the first change in the law of the ancestors after 146 years.
The contrast between the words “former minors” and “legal filming of AV” is too strong for conservatives. After the promulgation of the adult law, Japanese society is surging. How to protect these newcomers (before) The legal rights and interests of minors have become an unavoidable issue.
Affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the wave of unemployment has evolved into a social phenomenon that urgently needs to be addressed. For example, after the United States recently repatriated a large number of unemployed Japanese women back to China, young women who failed to find jobs in Japan rushed overseas to join the gray industry chain of “custom industry”. The local “competition” is too intense.
For some reason, the information on the overseas customs industry mentioned the status quo that “the Chinese are very rich”
It is in such a large environment that public opinion’s criticism and criticism of adult content is particularly intense and sensitive.
On April 4 this year, the first working day after the implementation of the Adult Act, the national newspaper “Nihon Keizai Shimbun National Edition” took over an advertisement for a cartoon and published it on the front page. The comic is called “Monday’s Plump”, and its selling point is the plump figure of the heroine of the work, which belongs to a very common edge ball work.
In hindsight, the timing of the ad was really bad. The excessively ostentatious figure of the heroine of the comic angered some readers, and the war intensified in the subsequent debates, which once became a social-level topic in Japan.
The Japan branch of the United Nations Women’s Organization also mentioned the matter
When adult content is on the cusp of public opinion, the related crimes that it may trigger are once again brought to the table. Among them, the most potentially risky adult films are straight balls, and legal measures to prevent and control related criminal incidents were immediately put on the agenda.
There was a rumor in Japan that “the government has made it clear that adult content will induce sexual crimes”, and the police personally refuted the rumors
Under the combined effect of multiple factors, the Japanese Diet formulated the basic framework of the bill at the end of April, announced it on June 15, and officially implemented it on the 23rd of the same month. Its high efficiency can be seen from the government’s response to this matter. It is highly valued, but the roughness of the formulation of the bill also makes people in the industry complain. Since the original intention is to protect 18- and 19-year-old (former) minors, it is still an unsolved mystery why the entire industry should be put on a shackle that is difficult to break.
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It’s not just the new AV law that overwhelms adult film actors.
At the beginning of this year, the Japanese government officially introduced the consumption tax “invoice system”, and it is planned to be officially implemented in October 2023. Japan’s taxation model is relatively complex. In simple terms, the significance of the invoice system is to adjust the current taxation model, and for small-scale practitioners, they are the focus of the adjustment.
Previously, employees with an annual income of less than 10 million yen would be recognized as tax-exempt businesses, and the consumption tax they should pay would be borne by the company. However, after the implementation of the invoice system, the concept of tax-free business operators was cancelled, and regardless of income, they had to pay the consumption tax of about 10% stipulated by the Japanese government in person.
Japanese animators with dismal income have collectively protested the invoice system a while ago
Most of the actors who participated in adult films belonged to the tax-free business before. After all, it is not easy to make a lot of money in this highly competitive industry. There are also many individual practitioners such as Jin Miao Xishi mentioned above. . After the invoicing system, their incomes were not too healthy, and they faced a sudden extra expense.
At the same time, the drawbacks brought by the invoice system are far more than that.
In the corresponding tax benchmark description, the Japanese government has stipulated tax reduction policies for products such as books, magazines and daily necessities.
Tax cuts are of course a good thing, but the question is, what items can be counted in these so-called “necessities of life” depends on the government’s words.
Former Japanese cabinet Yoshihide Suga once emphasized that pornographic magazines are “harmful books”
In recent years, whether “the so-called harmful content is unilaterally determined by the government” violates Article 21, Paragraph 1, “Freedom of Expression” and Paragraph 2, “Browsing Prohibition”, has been a topic worthy of discussion. At present, the situation is urgent. To this end, the entire industry, under the banner of freedom of expression, resisted the new AV law, trying to save the industry with its own power.
Freedom of expression is a very ambiguous statement. Japanese lawyer Abe Yura discussed whether the new AV law is unconstitutional from another aspect.
The signing event organized by the active AV actress Nakayama Miri has attracted the attention of people from all walks of life within two weeks. Now the number of participants has approached the goal of 10,000 people, and I am sure I will be able to push forward my plan immediately;
And the popular actress Angel Moe (Angel もえ) also charged on the front line, using her Twitter account of 350,000 fans to meet those congressmen and lawyers who don’t eat fireworks.
“Now is the moment when the history of the industry is about to change, and it is also a critical moment of life and death”
Some congressmen who understood the current situation of the industry also held high the banner of justice, hoping to wake up the Japanese legal profession and draw more attention to this group of special practitioners who should not have been discriminated against.
Akihabara was chosen for the “place of decisive battle” for the councilor’s street preaching
Not only in Japan, but also unrelated people from overseas, after learning about the incident, marked it with a language that they could not understand, and resisted this unreasonable new law with sincerity.
‘Sex work is work’
Whether their efforts and actions can change the status quo of the industry or even shake Japanese laws, we still don’t know. But this group of innocent AV actors, just because they are engaged in this not-so-common profession, was put on the verge of unemployment by a piece of paper, which does not seem to be what should happen in a modern society ruled by law.
This article is reprinted from: https://www.yystv.cn/p/9428
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