Anime is one of Japan’s most successful exports. But mainstream news coverage pays little attention to its controversial cousin. Visual and animated pornography, or hentai (ヘンタイ), also known simply as H, or ecchi, exists in a world of its own.
Mainstream manga and anime in the United States have mostly moved from piracy to licensed legitimacy. By contrast, much of the hentai market there remains pirated. In the 2010s, one company tried to legalize hentai anime’s largest pirate site. The result was chaos.
Aurélie Petit is a PhD Candidate at Concordia University, Montreal, whose work focuses on the intersection of technology, animation, and sexuality. In her latest paper, she looks at how the “war” between FAKKU and hentai pirate streaming sites played out. She also digs into why Japanese animated pornography still struggles for recognition even within the larger porn industry.
Note: Much of this article is based on Aurélie Petit’s paper The hentai platform streaming wars, with her permission. This article elides some of the rich details in Petit’s research to tell a story. We encourage you to read her work in full and follow Aurélie on Bluesky.
The Japanese patriarchy’s love-hate relationship with sex
Japan doesn’t have the same evangelical Christian baggage that stains discussions of sex in the United States. But Japan – maybe even more than the US – is a deeply patriarchal culture. This leads to a dichotomy. On the one hand, sex and sex work are in high demand. On the other hand, society and the law treat sex workers – mainly women – as a disposable commodity.
We saw an example of this during the public health crisis. At the time, the government said that night workers – people who worked at entertainment services such as host clubs and girl’s bars, as well as people involved in Japan’s sex businesses (性風俗; sei-fuuzoku) would be eligible for economic relief. Many people, such as comedian Matsumoto Hitoshi, complained that tax dollars shouldn’t go to cabaret club hostesses.
(Matsumoto’s comments were vile at the time. Somehow, four years later, they seem even worse. In December 2023, several women accused him of sexually assaulting them at private parties. Matsumoto sued Shukan Bunshun, the paper that ran their claims, for defamation. He dropped the lawsuit in November 2024.)
Similarly, in 2023, legislators in Japan passed new regulations meant to curb abuse and coercion in Japan’s Adult Video (AV) industry. The law addresses a legitimate crisis that saw women being coerced into signing binding contracts in what was essentially a form of legalized sex trafficking.
However, legislators never consulted anyone in the legitimate AV industry – including its actors – about the law, which imposes long waiting periods prior to release of new adult productions. That led AV stars to take to the streets in protest.
Hentai in the US
As yet another patriarchal culture, America isn’t much better. Sex workers there suffer punishment under laws supposedly meant to “protect” them. These laws are often passed by men who take full advantage of sex workers’ services behind closed doors.
However, even within the US sex industry, animated pornography struggles against exclusion and demonetization. Petit argues that we can see this in the way that sexually explicit anime was eventually divorced from its “mainstream” brethren.
Sexually explicit images are nothing new in Japan. Shunga (春画), or sexually explicit woodblock prints, were popular from the Heian era (794-1185) until the 20th century when they fell out of favor due to the rise of photography.
Shunga’s legacy, however, went on to influence sexually explicit manga and anime, or hentai. Hentai first drew attention during anime’s nascent international boom in the 1990s thanks to the manga-turned-anime Urotsukidoji (超神伝説うろつき童子, Chōjin Densetsu Urotsukidōji), or Legend of the Overfiend. Its depiction of rape and sexual violence made it instantly controversial. Additionally, the series’ use of tentacles as a stand-in for genitalia introduced many people to a fetish they never knew they had.
The journey from anime sibling to crazy uncle
At first, writes Petit, hentai distribution companies “were integral contributors to the US anime ecosystem, rather than operating as alternative entities.” However, that changed in the 2000s, says Petit, with a rise in piracy coupled with a rising tide of cultural libertarianism. FOSTA and SESTA – anti-sex bills disguised as sex trafficking laws passed under the Trump administration – have also made companies reticent about adult entertainment.
As a result, as large streaming companies gobbled up smaller companies, hentai found itself left out in the cold. When Crunchyroll bought anime merchandise retailer Right Stuf, it purged the site of its erotic goods. (They’ve since vectored all adult goods off to a secondary site, BuyAnime, where good, upstanding folk will never see it.)
“Because hentai anime is excluded from mainstream anime streaming platforms,” Petit writes, “it must exist on its own. Unlike in Japan where hentai anime can rely on an industrial structure that offsets production costs through collaborative ecosystems involving related adult video games and visual novels (referred to as the ‘media mix’ by Steinberg), such strategies are traditionally overlooked during hentai’s importation.”
FAKKU, Hentai Haven, and “the Crunchyroll of Hentai”
And that, writes Petit, set up the great Hentai Platform Wars.
Online hentai distributor FAKKU got into manga the old-fashioned way – by stealing it. Like Crunchyroll, which started life as a pirate anime site, FAKKU started as a pirate platform for erotic manga in 2006. Over time, the company struck multiple licensing deals. By 2015, FAKKU, like Crunchyroll, had 100% license-washed its business.
That led FAKKU to set its sights on its competitors. And most of its competitors were pirate sites that continued to revel in their piracy. Today, sites like NHentai and HAnime still rake in hundreds of millions of monthly visits, compared to FAKKU’s mere four million/month.
In 2017, FAKKU founder Jacob Grady struck a deal with Papa HH, the owner of Hentai Haven, to buy out the site and make it legit. Papa HH posted a meme to the official Hentai Haven Twitter account at the time depicting FAKKU as the site’s white knight, saving it from evil federal law enforcement agencies hellbent on shutting it down.
A good deal gone bad?
However, it was later reported that FAKKU and HH had planned the buyout months in advance in exchange for FAKKU absolving Papa HH of legal responsibility for copyright infringement under the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Fans soured on the deal, says Petit, as they accused Grady of taking advantage of a legally marked man.
Papa HH also turned on his supposed benefactor, saying Grady had “taken over” Hentai Haven and “booted” him out.
“I had such high hopes about this whole thing,” the site’s eponymous creator wrote on Hentai Haven’s front page. He continued:
“I remember emailing FAKKU in 2016 telling them about a vision I had of HH being the Crunchyroll of Hentai….When FAKKU told me (conveniently) about some legal trouble headed my way and offered to bail me out last year, I was elated. I still am in fact. But had I know that would’ve cost me my entire website, my baby, I would’ve fucking gone at it on my own, spending every cent I had to protect this community.”
He ended his statement with what can only be called a very hentai send-off:
“TLDR; FAKKU played me like a cum-stained violin.”
Papa HH later relented and called the whole tantrum a “misunderstanding.” But the damage was done. As a result of fan backlash and the public battle between FAKKU and HH’s founder, the Certified 100% Legal HentaiHaven.org that FAKKU dreamed of never materialized.
Hentai struggles for recognition – and respect
To this day, many hentai pirate sites – including self-crowned replacements of Hentai Haven – continue to flourish. Many operate as non-corporate entities with servers hosted outside of the United States. Their elusiveness makes them hard to catch or shut down. The only option for most Japanese and foreign license holders is to file DMCA requests with Google. That strips these titles from the search giant. However, that doesn’t make them any less easy to find.
Grady depicted his attempt to legitimize Hentai Haven as a service to the industry’s artists.
“It’s heartbreaking to talk with an artist and have them explain that when they Google their name, they don’t see their website, or their Twitter, or any way to actually support them,” Grady wrote in 2017.
For her part, Petit paints the struggle of hentai as part of the larger effort by porn workers “to acknowledge that the labour involved in sex work is ‘work’.” Pornographic animation in particular, she argues, “still struggles to be included in this discussion as a copyrighted media” – even within the larger porn industry itself.
Major sites like Pornhub are hesitant to monetize animated porn content creators due to copyright concerns. The AVN Awards, the largest adult video awards show in the United States, eliminated its Best Animated Release category altogether in 2013.
So what’s next? An uphill battle, says Petit. The platforming of hentai in the West is a tangled knot. Like sex work in general, it’s inextricably bound up with issues of “governance, anti-sex policies, [and] labour.” She concludes:
“The establishment of a healthy hentai anime streaming ecosystem will require that pornographic animation be integrated into broader discussions about platforming pornography, including those on governance, anti-sex policies, labour, and not confined to specialized subcultures summarily fighting about piracy.”
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Sources
The hentai streaming platform wars. Aurélie Petit via ResearchGate
What’s the deal with Japanese tentacle porn? The Straight Dope
Urotsukidōji. Wikipedia
Crunchyroll bought a leading anime store, and now you can’t buy hentai there anymore. Polygon
What Is SESTA/FOSTA? Decriminalize Sex Work
【日本初上陸】日本の成人向けコミックを世界に向けて出版・配信する「FAKKU（ファック）」のアイテムが原宿のショップ「PARK」で発売スタート！PRTimes (WARNING: Contains sexually suggestive images)
Inside the porn civil war between Hentai Haven and FAKKU. Daily Dot
「松本人志VS文春」訴えの取り下げをした“決定的な理由”。「強制性の証拠なし」の違和感. SPA!
