Something which has a history in Japan that we don’t get as much in the US is political satire through adult film. We get some stuff in the US occasionally, but in post war Japan, it almost became an art form – when the film censors looking at adult films are more worried about whether you are properly hiding penises and vagina than whether you’re slipping messages about Japan signing on to the US mutual defense treaty puts them on the road to increased militarization and puts the country in Soviet nuclear crosshairs (or criticisms of the lack of equity in post-war reconstruction Japan, or just straight up Marxist themes) then you have the makings of a way to deliver political messages with a shovelful of smut to help the medicine go down. (Did the Right also know about this tactic and use it themselves? Absolutely!) So, when I read the premise of Nukitashi, I recognized pretty quickly what it was here for – like Shimoneta it’s doing social satire, in this case aimed squarely at the political messaging of Shinzo Abe (though the game it was based on was released before his assassination). Unlike Shimoneta, though, there’s fuckin’!

Nukitashi is set on a fictional island off the Japanese coast that is home to what is described in the subtitles as the Pervert Law: Thou Shalt Bone, for Recreation. However, monogamy is prohibited. Kink is prohibited. Not participating is prohibited. People with non-standard body types have difficulty getting some. Same-sex sex is prohibited. Violators, no matter the gender, are placed on “the guillotine” which basically rapes them, publicly, and doesn’t release them until they orgasm – and this isn’t depicted as sexy.

Opposing this government and seeking to reform the Pervert Law to allow for heterosexuality, LGBT+ people, kink, abnormal body types, Monogamy, and Asexual and Demisexual people, is the Anti-Copulation Front. Its leader, Junnosuke Tachibana, has impotence after being repeatedly bullied as a child for his incredibly large penis. His sister is a lesbian. Other members are stereotypes because they’re part of the Gal subculture, or they’re overweight, or they’re exceptionally petite. Together, they’ll fight against the government and work to fix the Pervert Law.

The version I watched while streaming had some fairly substantial censorship images over the actual genitals, or otherwise framed the copious amounts of sex going on in various scenes in a fairly softcore fashion. This generally works well, though there are a mix of bits where the censorship images work well for comedy (having a very large image over Junnosuke’s erection does a good job of playing up the size while leaving it to the imagination), there are other bits where I think it undercuts the tone (such as a scene where Junnosuke is sexually assaulted).

However, the satire of Nukitashi is clear. In addition to everything else I’ve mentioned, there’s stuff like the socially acceptable dirty talk being almost exclusively about reproduction and impregnation, even if everyone is using birth control – because Abe was trying to promote ethnically Japanese people having sex in order to boost the declining birthrate of ethnically Japanese people. There’s the fact that use of sex toys, of any kind, is frowned on, for similar reasons (along with the right wing obsession with opposing use of sex toys for masturbation – along with the co-opting of “No Nut November”).

And, from what I can tell, the game goes even further, and the anime has to cut a bunch of stuff to fit in a 12 episode Cour. Honestly, this show did a tremendous job of selling me on the game.

Nukitashi is available for streaming on OceanVeil.

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