A year later it was defined as a genre in Good Vibrations Guide to Sex. The attribution has been applied retroactively to works such as Urotsukidōji, La Blue Girl, and Cool Devices.Īt the beginning of 2000, "hentai" was listed as the 41st most-popular search term of the internet, while "anime" ranked 99th. Urotsukidōji had previously been described with terms such as "Japornimation", and " erotic grotesque", prior to being identified as hentai. EtymologyĪ depiction of a male homosexual couple from the January 1928 edition of Hentai shiryō. The history of the word hentai has its origins in science and psychology. By the middle of the Meiji era, the term appeared in publications to describe unusual or abnormal traits, including paranormal abilities and psychological disorders. A translation of German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's text Psychopathia Sexualis originated the concept of hentai seiyoku, as a "perverse or abnormal sexual desire", though it was popularized outside psychology, as in the case of Mori Ōgai's 1909 novel Vita Sexualis. Continued interest in hentai seiyoku resulted in numerous journals and publications on sexual advice which circulated in the public, served to establish the sexual connotation of hentai as perverse.
Any perverse or abnormal act could be hentai, such as committing shinjū (love suicide). It was Nakamura Kokyo's journal Abnormal Psychology which started the popular sexology boom in Japan which would see the rise of other popular journals like Sexuality and Human Nature, Sex Research and Sex. Originally, Tanaka Kogai wrote articles for Abnormal Psychology, but it would be Tanaka's own journal Modern Sexuality which would become one of the most popular sources of information about erotic and neurotic expression.