At the peak of its popularity in the 1980s, the innocuously named “Shashin Jidai” (“Photo Age”) sold 350,000 copies a month. Edited by the self-made publishing impresario Akira Suei, the magazine featured cutting-edge photography by the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama and in-depth articles about underground culture, but most of its readers were just there for one thing: porn.
This was the era in which censorial prudishness forbade the depiction of even a single pubic hair, so editors had to get creative — and get good at apologizing. When we first meet Suei (Tasuku Emoto) in “Dynamite Graffiti,” he’s sat at a police station while an officer scrutinizes his latest issue, with the exasperation of a teacher reviewing a half-assed homework assignment.
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