Transnational Japanese Adult Videos and the Emergence of Cable Television in Post-war Taiwan

This article examines how transnational Japanese adult videos migrated to Taiwan and how such a migration “contributed” to the advent of cable television in post-war Taiwan. It argues that the relationship between the migration of Japanese AVs and the advent of cable TV is not automatic but needs to be qualified. There is a huge gap between the migration of Japanese AVs to Taiwan and the advent of cable TV there. The advent of cable TV in post-war Taiwan cannot be directly reduced to the transnational Japanese AVs. Nor are transnational Japanese AVs the sole reason for the advent of cable TV in post-war Taiwan. Instead, cable TV in post-war Taiwan is the consequence of a very complex process in which transnational Japanese AVs reciprocally mediated with socio-political factors in Taiwanese society. We argue that it is only when Japanese AVs were mediated by a number of local socio-political factors that they together contributed to the introduction and legalization of cable TV in Taiwan.