Behind the genre, often dismissed as purely entertainment of recent decades, lies a far stranger and more tangled history than it appears. Financial collapses, accidental technological coincidences, half-century-old scandals, and linguistic confusion that persists to this day—yet almost no one watching hentai today suspects any of this. We've gathered five stories, some of which will surprise even those who consider themselves experts on the subject.
#1: The "Father of Manga" Saved His Studio with Erotica
There's a fact that almost never comes up in conversations about anime, even though it could drastically reshape one's understanding of the genre. Osamu Tezuka—the very person called the "father of manga," creator of Astro Boy and the author of that iconic style with huge eyes recognized even by those who've never watched a single anime—directed the first full-length erotic animated film in 1969. Not out of inspiration, not as an experiment. But because his studio, Mushi Production, was financially crumbling and needed money.
The film was titled "The Thousand and One Nights," and it was the first part of a trilogy proudly named "Animerama"—animation plus cinerama plus drama. It was followed by "Cleopatra" and "Belladonna of Sadness." The irony in this story is even greater than it seems at first glance: the person whose style would later be replicated in hundreds of children's cartoons worldwide literally saved his company with erotica.
#2: OVAs Appeared Almost Simultaneously with Hentai. And It Was No Coincidence
Another detail rarely known even among genre fans. In the early 1980s, VCRs and laserdiscs gave Japanese animation an entirely new distribution format. The so-called OVAs—Original Video Animations, not shown on television but sold directly on tapes.
The first such work was released at the end of 1983. And already the third OVA in history was hentai. Moreover, out of seventeen OVAs released throughout 1984, eleven turned out to be pornographic. This creates a strange but truthful picture: the very format that would later gift the world dozens of cult anime series was, in its first years, sustained mainly by erotica. It was the product that paid for the new distribution technology while the rest of the industry was still observing.
#3: A Scandal That Happened Fifteen Years Earlier Than People Think
Many believe erotic manga is a relatively recent phenomenon, almost from the 1990s. In reality, the first major scandal occurred as early as 1969, when artist Go Nagai released the humorous manga "Harenchi Gakuen." Nothing explicit by today's standards—more fan service and school humor. But the reaction was so fierce that parent committees and women's associations across the country openly protested against the manga.
Interestingly, it was precisely this scandal that largely determined the genre's subsequent trajectory. The industry realized: such content draws enormous attention. And began carefully, step by step, testing the boundaries of what could be shown legally.
#4: A Quarter of All Japanese Computer Games Are Erotic
A figure that usually causes genuine surprise even among those long familiar with the topic: approximately every fourth game developed in Japan for personal computers belongs to the eroges genre—erotic visual novels.
By the way, it was from eroges that some cult hentai franchises grew, which many watched as standalone anime, unaware of their gaming origins—Bible Black, Discipline, and several others. The visual novel format was ideally suited precisely for drawn erotica. No actors needed, no sets required; everything relied on illustrations and text. Thus, there were virtually no restrictions on plot and imagery from the very beginning.
#5: A Word That Doesn't Mean What Everyone Thinks
And finally, something worth knowing. The word "hentai" itself in Japan is almost never used in the sense it became established in the West and the Russian-speaking internet. Literally, it translates as "perversion" or "anomaly." In Japan itself, other terms are far more commonly used to denote the genre, such as "jūhachi-kin"—"eighteen plus."
That is, the word which the entire non-Japanese-speaking world perceives as a genre label sounds in the genre's country of origin more like an insult or a medical term than a neutral category name. A funny example of how a word, ripped from its cultural context, acquires an entirely new life—and it is precisely in this new meaning that it spread across the globe.