The Nikkatsu studio is the Japanese film industry's oldest — it will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2012. In the 1950s and early 1960s it was also a box-office leader, turning out hit after hit with Japan's biggest postwar star, Yujiro Ishihara. By the 1970s, however, Nikkatsu and the rest of the industry were struggling, as audiences deserted theaters for television.

In 1971, the studio was staring bankruptcy in the face, but instead of calling its lawyers, it decided to switch the bulk of its production to softcore porn. Churned out by the hundreds by indie production companies, "eroductions" — the then-current Japanese-English term for adult films — were drawing fans by offering them something they couldn't get on the small screen.

Over the next 18 years, until 1988 when adult videos basically finished the genre off, the studio released 1,133 so-called Nikkatsu Roman Porno (a contraction of "romantic pornographique") films. These softcore features were made with bigger budgets and more studio resources than the adult industry norm. Also, directors were given wide latitude to tell stories and develop characters, as long as they fulfilled the minimum requirement of a bed scene every 10 minutes or so. In the 1970s Nikkatsu Roman Porno films were regularly ranked in critics' top-10 lists, while launching the careers of many young directors who went on to mainstream success, including Yojiro Takita, director of the Oscar-winning "Okuribito" ("Departures," 2008).