Thanks to certain titles like La Blue Girl, the tentacle sub-genre is one of the most recognizable spectacles of hentai. However, tentacle porn actually predates anime and manga. Before hentai was coined, eroticism (even with some crazy features) already existed in traditional Japanese art. Prior to the Meiji era, through woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e, people could already enjoy erotic art, which was then called “Shunga (春画). Though it literally means “Spring Art,” spring or shun, tends to be a euphemism for sex, which still happens to have that meaning in Japanese to this day.

Shunga dates back to Heian period Japan, which is largely the 8th to 12th centuries. At the time, there were many sexual scandals and artists would depict them like political cartoons. As opposed to being drawn on woodblocks, they were portrayed in traditional scroll paintings. Ukiyo-e came into style during the Edo era (from the 17th century to mid-way into the 19th century), but the Shogun banned Shunga seeing them as criticism to his administration. However, the ban was about as effective as America’s alcohol ban in the 1920’s since artists were making them underground and they still continued to flourish like internet porn. Just about everybody and their mother owned Shunga until the West came to Japan towards the end of the 19th century. Prior to that, many people thought possessing Shunga gave them luck. In some instances, they were seen as the ancient Japanese version to the Kama Sutra for those that were inexperienced with sex.

As for ukiyo-e, even Hokusai, one of the most legendary ukiyo-e artists in history, made Shunga. Some of you may be familiar with The Great Wave of Kanagawa, his most famous work. Another notable work of his is Tako to Ama, or The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which depicts a maiden having intercourse with an octopus. Some fans and scholars have argued whether or not it has played in an influence in modern day tentacle porn, but many can’t deny the similarities. When Japan finally opened their ports towards the end of the 19th century, many Westerners who viewed them expressed shock at how crazy Shunga was. While some works came into the possession of some foreign collectors, for the longest time, museums were hesitant to actually display them. And thanks to Western cultural influences, Shunga died out.

As to how hentai came to be, that’s also a unique story of its own. While it didn’t explode until the 1980’s, there were still sexual oriented anime and manga, but not to the same extremes as what is portrayed today, and were more serious like actual adult dramas. As insane as it sounds, Osamu Tezuka actually contributed to a couple of sexual oriented anime films in his career. For starters, he helped produce One Thousand and One Arabian Nights in 1969, while Eiichi Yamamoto (director of Astro Boy and Space Battleship Yamato) was the director. And yes, it did get a dub and was played in North American theaters! As for the original Japanese track, Yukio Aoshima, the leading actor, would later become the Governor of Tokyo in the latter-half of the 1990’s! Another film Tezuka and Yamamoto collaborated on was an anime of Cleopatra in 1970. In Cleopatra, three men from the future transport their consciousness through time to the bodies of three men in Cleopatra’s time so they can have sex with her.

While erotic anime and manga were (arguably) a little more in taste prior to the 1980’s, its present day insanity didn’t really take off until Lemon People, a manga magazine dedicated to the weird hentai we see today, made its debut. In 1984, a few selected works from Lemon People would become one of the first ever hentai OVAs, Lolita Anime, which were six unrelated episodes depicting young ladies having sex with older men. Due to the nature of Lolita Anime, it has never been released outside of Japan.

Although A Thousand and One Arabian Nights did make it to American theaters, America wouldn’t see hentai again until Urotsukidoji, the first ever tentacle rape anime. The original creator happens to be Toshio Maeda, who would also further popularize the genre with La Blue Girl (while Miko is 16 in the Japanese version, her age is changed to 18 to release it internationally). If anything, Toshio Maeda can be considered one of the founding fathers of modern hentai. Thanks to the rise of VHS and OVAs, without needing the consultation of censorship boards, studios were free to get as crazy as they want, which is why hentai as we know it boomed. And with the PC becoming progressively popular around the same time, erotic games gained traction as well.