I don’t go to chat rooms often. I have my reasons! The conversation you’re about to read is one of them. This is a true story, despite what you may think, and only the names have been changed to protect the ignorant.
One afternoon in January, while home nursing a flu-ravaged stomach, I logged onto Yahoo and joined an anime chat room. Every now and again, I like to go online and do this; it’s fun to talk with total strangers about anime. There’s always the chance that someone will mention an anime series besides Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon, or Pokemon. I might actually learn something.
I can also informally assess the nationwide availability of anime videos. Evidently, despite the smash success of Pokemon, anime is still a fringe cult.
Most people eventually left the room I was on, and I was left alone with a young fellow I’ll never forget. The topic on the chat room before most people left, was "What was the last anime you saw?" This fellow asked me, "What was the last Hentai you saw?"
My younger readers may not know what Hentai is. I’ll explain. Hentai is the animated equivalent of X-rated films, with frequently bizarre kinky situations. That’s all you need to know about the topic for now.
I told him that I don’t watch or enjoy Hentai. I told him I prefer to watch story-driven anime, and that I didn’t watch animated films for the types of reasons a Hentai fan would.
"I’ll bet you don’t even know what Hentai is," he said.
"Actually I do," I said. I proceeded to list some of the clichés of Hentai – schoolgirls in distress, aliens with multiple tentacles, crude humour, rape scenes . . . in short, anything except a normal, adult depiction of sex.
"Oh, it’s more than that," he said.
"Really?" I asked. I could tell that this wasn’t going to be a conversation that would rival My Dinner With Andre in intellectualism.
"Yes," he typed proudly. There are also Sailor Scouts."
I thought we’d already covered sailor suits under the schoolgirl category and told him so.
"No," he said. "The Sailor Moon TV series is really Hentai."
I told him it wasn’t.
He told me it was.
I told him that there was no way anyone could watch an episode of Sailor Moon and confuse it with Hentai.
"The American version, perhaps," he conceded. "But not the Japanese."
I didn’t try to remind him that the "American" version was actually dubbed in Canada by a Canadian animation studio.
"I’ll bet you never even saw the Japanese version," he said. He obviously had no idea who he was talking to, eh? He also loved betting that I never did things. When in doubt, dare someone to reveal his credentials must have been his motto.
"I have," I said, "and there’s still nothing in the series that anyone would classify as Hentai."
"But what about the panty shots and nude transformations?"
"They’re considered okay in mainstream Japanese animation," I explained. "They’re mildly naughty at best. At their worst, they’d only be considered Ecchi." Ecchi is the Japanese term for what we would call "cheesecake" or "pinup" imagery.
The conversation paused for a moment as my words sank in. The Hentai-happy expert then asked me another question, perhaps the most surprising of our conversation.
"Um, what’s Ecchi?"
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