People will be arguing for years to come about the legacy of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but one of the undisputed losers was the country’s porn industry.
In 2019, Japan’s three biggest convenience store chains announced that they would stop selling adult magazines in an effort to clean up the country’s image ahead of an expected influx of international tourists. Having weathered moral campaigns and the rise of internet porn, skin magazines were finally vanquished by a more implacable foe: corporate public relations.
Aside from elderly men without internet connections, you’d struggle to find many people who mourned the disappearance of titles like “Soft on Demand” and “Real Wife Thirty” from their local 7-Eleven. But the industry gets an unlikely sympathy vote from Shoichi Yokoyama’s “Goodbye, Bad Magazines,” a breezy portrait of the end of an inglorious era.