in its broadest sense includes almost any Japanese theatrical film that includes nudity (hence 'pink') or deals with sexual content. This encompasses everything from dramas to action thrillers and exploitation film features. The Western equivalent of pink films would essentially be erotic thrillers, e.g. Fatal Attraction, Fifty Shades of Grey, Basic Instinct, 9½ Weeks , as well as the works of directors Russ Meyer and Andy Sidaris. Some writers use the term 'pink film' for Japanese sex movies produced and distributed by smaller independent studios such as OP Eiga, Shintōhō Eiga, Kokuei and Xces. In this narrower sense, Nikkatsu's Roman Porno series, Toei Company's Pinky Violence series and the Tokatsu films distributed by Shochiku would not be included as these studios have much larger distribution networks. Until the early 2000s, they were almost exclusively shot on 35mm film. Recently, filmmakers have increasingly used video (while retaining their emphasis on soft-core narrative). Many theaters swapped 35mm for video projectors and began relying on old videos to meet the demand of triple-feature showings. Pink films became wildly popular in the mid-1960s and dominated the Japanese domestic cinema through the mid-1980s. In the 1960s, the pink films were largely the product of small, independent studios. Around 1970, the major studio Nikkatsu started focusing almost exclusively on erotic content, but Toei, another major film production company, started producing a line of what came to be known as Pinky Violence films. With their access to higher production values and talent, some of these films became critical and popular successes. Though the appearance of the adult video led viewers to move away from pink film in the 1980s, films in this genre are still being produced. Description The "pink film", or "eroduction" (erotic production) as it was first called, is a cinematic genre without an exact equivalent in the West. Though called pornography, the terms "erotica", "soft porn" and "sexploitation" have been suggested as more appropriate, although none of these precisely matches the pink film genre. The Japanese film ethics board Eirin has long enforced a ban on the display of genitals and pubic hair. This restriction forced Japanese filmmakers to develop sometimes elaborate means of avoiding showing the "working parts", as American film historian Donald Richie puts it. He wrote: To work around this censorship, most Japanese directors positioned props—lamps, candles, bottles, etc.—at strategic locations to block the banned body parts. When this was not