
Hi i'm Junebug, the bug from online. I'm very cool and everyone who has ever met me loves me.
I want to make a point about the age of consent thing, since it's a common talking point among westerners about japanese culture that's trying to explain why japanese media seems to have more kids in it that kind of misses the mark. In japan, it's not really legal anywhere for someone in their 20s to have sex with a 13-year-old, it's folklore.
The actual reason is a kind of long process. In japan, porn is illegal, like completely. It's quite actually just illegal to portray naked people sexually without jumping through tons of hoops. This results in that, if you're making porn, there isn't an extra legal barrier to any specific kind of porn, same with finding it. Effectively, if you're a japanese person hosting porn made by japanese people, you're already breaking the law and the only barrier left to hosting porn of teenagers is a moral one.
This ended up meaning that, in earlier days of the internet, if you knew where japanese people uploaded porn then you knew where to get porn of teenagers, or really any porn that's illegal in your country. So, japanese porn hosts got incredibly popular with people looking for porn of teenagers, and a huge industry popped up of making porn tailored to the tastes of importers. It's not really uncommon for local porn artists' skills to transfer into the rest of the art made locally, and there was now a huge export market for art from japan serving customers who had been profiled as being among that group.
In result, as the group represented in this export market grew to include more and more people who were just curious about foreign art or their friends' collection hobby, some excuses were made for why there was so much horniness for teens. "Sexualizing teenagers is considered fine in japan!" no, not really, opinions are pretty similar to Germany on that "Look! Age of consent minimum is 13!" this is the flexible opening side of age of consent which has an age gap limit, Canada's lowest is 14 including that but it's still illegal for a 19-year-old to fuck a 14-year-old here. It would be convenient if there were a permissive difference but no, it's just that porn is illegal.
There's an additional part that asian computing industries focussed heavily on high-quality image presentation really early on, in contrast to western computing which focussed nearly entirely on text for a long time, so japanese porn hosts had pictures earlier and their pictures were higher-quality than western porn hosts that had them, but that's a whole other rant.
Thanks for the really insightful comment! I definitely would like to track down more information on the history of this, and if you have any sources I could read more on regarding the history of japanese porn distribution I would love to get my hands on those. Either way though I super appreciate the insight!