What do you think of when you hear the word ‘Hentai’?
The first thought that crossed my mind is of something perverted, adulterated Asian cartoon pictures or videos. Most people are not even familiar with the word unless they’ve been acquainted with Asian or Japanese cultures. While others will tell you that Hentai is an adulterated version of Anime; and in some sense that’s just exactly what it is…
However, to be more specific, Hentai is…
a Sino-Japanese compound term widely used in modern Japanese to designate a person, action or state that is considered queer or perverse, particularly in a sexual sense. Unlike the English term ‘queer’, however, hentai does not have predominantly homosexual connotations but can be used to describe any sexual acts or motivations other than what might be termed ‘normal’ sexual relations. Indeed the loanword nōmaru (normal) is sometimes used as an antonym for hentai. Apart from this general use of the term hentai, it can also be used to designate a specific genre of Japanese manga and animation that features extreme or perverse sexual content and it is in this sense that hentai has become well-known among western fans of Japanese popular culture.
A Yahoo search for ‘hentai’, for instance, produces over 7 million hits—more than twice that of better-known loanwords such as samurai, geisha or sushi. This astonishing number is evidence of the popularity of a genre of erotic manga and anime referred to as hentai or sometimes the abbreviation ‘H’ (pronounced etchi in Japanese) by western fans. However, despite the popularity of the genre and its massive presence on the internet, the category hentai is not discussed in English-language studies of manga and anime such as Poitras’ The Anime Companion,[1] Napier’s Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke,[2] Allison’s Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics and Censorship in Japan[3] or Buckley’s Encyclopedia of Japanese Popular Culture.[4]
Why is this so? The reason is not prudishness but rather the fact that use of the term hentai to refer to erotic or sexual manga and anime in general is not a Japanese but an English innovation. In Japanese hentai can reference sexual material but only of an extreme, ‘abnormal’ or ‘perverse’ kind; it is not a general category. The Japanese use of hentai refers to both same-sex and heterosexual activities which are considered unusual but also extreme. While in Japanese both ‘H’/etchi and ero [erotic] can be used to refer to manga and anime with sexual content, hentai is only used to refer to unusual or perverse sexual situations— this might be number of partners as in gang rape, or bizarre partners as in aliens or monsters or illicit partners as in children (rorikon and shōtakon). Hence in the Japanese case, hentai manga/anime is a subdivision of the much broader category of ero manga whereas in English hentai has come to signify the genre of ero manga as a whole.
Before looking in detail at how the term hentai developed in Japanese and eventually spread to the English-speaking world, I will look briefly at how the term hentai is actually used in western manga and anime fandom. Hentai and its abbreviation H are used interchangeably on English fan sites in a context in which ero [erotic] or seinen [adult] would be the more appropriate Japanese terms. That is, both hentai and etchi are used to describe anime or manga with strong sexual content. However, the use of the term hentai, which in English refers to a much broader range of sexual scenarios than it does in Japanese, cannot properly be said to be a ‘mistake,’ as many fans are aware of the different uses of the term in Japanese and western manga and anime fandom; indeed as self-defining otaku, many fans pride themselves on just this kind of insider knowledge. For instance, Kagami’s ‘H does not mean HENTAI page‘ offers a detailed discussion of the differing uses of the terms H and hentai in Japanese and English.
Hentai is, then, in the context of western manga and anime fandom, no longer a ‘Japanese’ word but has become a loanword with its own specific meaning and nuance, just like loanwords into Japanese such as abekku (from the French avec, meaning ‘with’ and in Japanese used to refer to a dating couple) or arubaito (from the German word for ‘work’, signifying in Japanese a part-time job).
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