Japanese culture
What does Hentai mean?
Hentai (変態) is the Western name for pornographic Japanese manga, anime, and games.
Definition
Type hentai into a search box and you usually get a folder, a tag, or a drawn video. In English the loanword names pornographic Japanese manga, anime, and games. Oxford Dictionary Online files it as a subgenre of manga and anime with overtly sexualized characters and sexually explicit plots. The same romaji covers erotic games, eroge.
That sound in Japanese is written 変態. Daijisen reads a change of form, an abnormal or pathological state, the short form of hentai seiyoku (変態性欲, sexual desire treated as deviation), and, in biology, the metamorphosis from tadpole or pupa. 「この変態！」 is an insult: you pervert. Jisho and Wiktionary keep that sense. A Japanese newsstand sells adult manga as seijin manga or 18禁, and explicit drawings as ero manga or ero anime. Live-action Japanese porn usually takes the initialism AV.
Search also drags in ecchi (エッチ). Western fandom keeps that word for the lighter cut: fanservice and innuendo, without the graphic sex the loanword hentai names. The letter H, read etchi, came from hentai. The two collide in search; in a Japanese shop the explicit stock is still ero.
Origin
変態 joins 変 (hen, change, strange) and 態 (tai, state, condition): a change of state, hence metamorphosis and anomaly. The sexual sense is an ellipsis of 変態性欲. Mark McLelland, in A Short History of Hentai (2005), points to the 1894 Japanese translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, titled Hentai seiyoku shinrigaku. In 1917 the journal Hentai shinri was popularizing abnormal psychology still without the sexual slang. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten cites Yokomitsu Riichi's novel 時間, from 1931, already using 変態 for sexual deviation.
History
Using hentai for the whole erotic manga and anime genre is an English innovation, McLelland writes: Japanese does not use the word as a shop label. On rec.arts.anime, a 1990 post already brings the word up around Happosai from Ranma 1/2; in 1991 the board argues the sense, and a 1995 glossary still mixes pervert and sex treated as deviation. The Anime Movie Guide (1997) already treats ecchi as milder than hentai; a year later the Good Vibrations Guide to Sex files hentai as a genre. Oxford and Dictionary.com date the English loan to the 1990s, literally abnormal, perverted.
How it emerged
Importers of tapes and files needed a noun for drawn Japanese porn, as against live-action film. Ero, seijin manga, and 18禁 already held the Japanese newsstand. The romaji hentai took the English, Portuguese, and Spanish search slot; spoken 変態 kept insulting the person and naming metamorphosis.
Usage examples
The whole folder was tagged hentai.
In the episode she yelled hentai and shoved him.
Translations
- pt hentai
- en hentai
- es hentai
Synonyms
- 変態
- ero manga
- 18禁
- seijin manga
- ecchi