What’s the hottest trend in Japanese blogging? According to this article in the Daily Mainichi passing on information from the Asahi Geino, it’s Erogs, a Japanese-coined word that is a contraction of “erotic blogs”. Blogging itself got its biggest boost in Japan in June 2002 with the release of the Moveable Type 2.2 blogging software, and free blogging services have mushroomed since last summer. This also ignited an erotic blog explosion. A quick glance around the web (conducted with the proper scientific detachment, of course) indicates that most of them are by women.

The operator of Erog review site explains the participation of women in the phenomenon:

Eroggers, the name given to the mostly female participants who post saucy pictures onto their erogs, are the hottest current new trend on the (Japanese) Internet. While a lot of them may simply want somebody else to look at them in an erotic situation, in my humble opinion, I’d say there are a lot of eroggers who want people to look at them as ‘real women.”

I took a quick look over at the review site, called Nikkan Erog. No, I am not going to show you photos from the site because you have to be 18 to enter. The text is all Japanese, but then a picture’s worth a thousand words, isn’t it? He’s got critiques, ratings, hit counts, and sample photos for such blogs as Pafu Pafu, Beauties and Bikes, Short Pants, The Married Woman’s Philandering Club, Vitamin A, The Wife Next Door, Garter Belt (yes, they still wear them), and Etchi, which can mean the sex act itself, sexual, or sexy, depending on the context.

If your wrist doesn’t get tired from all that clicking, you can try Erog Search, a Japanese search engine devoted to Erogs. This site is organized by category. For example, they break it down by Girl’s Blogs (their term), S&M Blogs, Fuzoku Blogs (the commercial sector), Fellatio Blogs, Blogs for Meeting People, AV (audio and video) Actress Blogs, Mania Blogs (for people with certain obsessions, such as photos of girls showing their underwear), and Unique Blogs. In the last category, there are blogs for chatting about personal experiences, gay blogs, and encounters with the unknown.

As always, the names the Japanese come up with are often more interesting than the content: Sweet Vanilla, Pianissimo, Brain Killing Love, and Secretary Um’s Secret Diary. There’s the live chat blog named after a proverb that translates, Overlooking things that are close at hand (literally, the darkness under the oil lamp).

Then, there’s Pink Pants, What I Did In The Past, Strawberry Jam, Jello, Big Sister Little Sister Three Room Apartment, Women’s Erotic Erotic Physical Examination Reports, Scorpion (yikes!), Sometimes Like a Harlot…

I’m sure you get the drift.

Incidentally, the story also reports that the biggest service provider for eroggers is Livedoor, presided over by Takafumi Horie, the man who tried and failed to buy or create a Japan League baseball team, and who settled for part of the Fuji TV network after using old-fashioned American M&A tactics to make a run at the company. Horie so fascinated the country (or the news media, anyway) during his business maneuvers that TV stations gave him the red carpet treatment accorded only to the biggest names—they filmed him walking down the hall of his apartment building, getting in his car in the parking garage, and driving away while the pesky and persistent reporters kept asking him dumb questions that he usually ignored.

After wandering through that blog maze and seeing Livedoor as the provider for most of them, I’m not surprised he has enough scratch to buy a television network.