Overview 1971 to 1975

Collapse in 1971

In 1971, Daiei went bankrupt.

In 1971, Nikkatsu began to produce and distribute soft core porn movies. From this time on, most of the productions of Nikkatsu were porn movies. Nikkatsu's porn movie is called a "roman-porn" movie.
"Roman porn" movies were produced under severe conditions (i.e., they were produced with extremely low budget in a rather short period, and most of the players (especially actresses) had limited experiences of acting), which naturally affected its quality. Thus, many of them were merely poor-looking program pictures containing nudity and sexual content. However, some directors selected unique material and succeeded to describe vivid characters and unusual human emotion in spite of such severe conditions. Thus, in the Top_10_Movies lists of 1970s, "roman-porno" movies are found occasionally.

In 1971, Toho hived off its production section and re-organized it into subsidiary production companies. It was the first step of Toho's transformation into a movie distribution/exhibition company. Through 1970s and 1980s, the number of productions by the subsidiary production companies would gradually decrease.

In this period, the number of productions distributed by the major companies had reduced to less than 200. Among them, approx. 40 to 70 were "roman-porno" movies by Nikkatsu.
In addition, the number of pink movies (i.e., soft core porn movies produced by production companies other than Nikkatsu) was approx. 140 to 180.
That is, the total number of porn movies was larger than that of non-porn movies in this period.