JHV was established in May 1984 to take advantage of the explosion of videocassette recorders in Japan at that time. Following the introduction of commercial VCR Beta recorders in 1975, VCR production in Japan went from one million units in 1978 to 44 million by 1985 fueled largely by the number of movies available on VHS. By November 1984, the company had expanded enough to move to new headquarters in the fashionable Harajuku district of Tokyo. The company originally used the Penguin label for its videos but in April 1986, JHV founded Alice Japan as a label for their adult videos. The company subsequently expanded into softcore movies, anime productions, computer games and, in 1996, the satellite broadcasting business. In February 2000, JHV acquired a building in the Jinbocho area of Tokyo and transferred its headquarters there. A further move brought the Production Center to their own building in Tokyo's Nakano City in March 2005 which also became the company headquarters in April 2007. For the 2007 fiscal year, the corporation had sales of 2.25 billion yen and a capital of 27 million yen. The company employed 34 people and had its headquarters in the JHV Building in Nakano, Tokyo.
Products
The company is involved in the production and distribution of film, video products, music and TV programs.
Film and video
JHV has produced and/or distributed a number of theatrical movies, including several in the science fiction or horror genre and often with erotic overtones. Some notable film productions include the 1989 cult horror movie directed by Shinya Tsukamoto and the Yakuzazombie flic Junk: Shiryô-gari from 2000. Also in the horror genre were Evil Dead Trap or Shiryo no wana directed by Toshiharu Ikeda and featuring AV actress Hitomi Kobayashi which was released in 1988 and the sequel Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki from 1992. Evil Dead Trap was later released by JHV on DVD. JHV also produced the first three live-action videos of the manga based superheroine series Kekko Kamen, the 1991 Kekko Kamen, Kekko Kamen 2 from 1992, and Kekko Kamen 3, released in 1993. More recent productions were the 2004 drama The Hunter and the Hunted which won awards at the 2005 Yokohama Film Festival for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best New Director and the 2004 comedy eiko. JHV's Cinemadict Collection is a series of remastered worldwide classic movies with Japanese subtitles released on DVD. The collection includes the hard-to-find Alfred Hitchcocksilent filmDownhill. In the area of erotica, JHV makes softcore V-Cinema videos under the V Muvii label or the SEN Planning label. Some popular series are the soft S&M Escape Confinement, Keep Masked and Pink Curtain. The company also produces "gravure" non-nude modeling videos, some using the label Girls' Record.
Anime
The company has long had an interest in anime products. On April 25, 1987, the dark adult-oriented science fiction horror filmWicked City was released in theatres by JHV and later on DVD. They also produced the anime movie A Wind Named Amnesia which debuted in theatres in Japan in December 1990 and as a video in 1993. A different type of project produced by JHV was the comic Nekojiru Gekijou, a series of 27 shorts broadcast on TV Asahi in 1999. In addition, JHV had a role in the production of the following Original Video Animations:
Eien no Aseria: Spirit of Eternity Sword'' 2005-2006
Computer games
Graduation is the title of a simulation genre computer game first released by JHV in June 1992. Two years later in 1994, a sequel Graduation 2: Neo Generation appeared. The game, the object of which is to get five young girls with various problems to graduate high school, has since had several incarnations and been ported to a number of systems including the Sony PlayStation 2.
