It was in the 1990's. There was this website called "Breast Of Asia." I think it was Canadian. They would have images of women like Miki Sawaguchi
There were others, but I can't remember them at this moment. I would tediously download the images one at a time. Back then, that's what you had to do. I saved them to 3.5 floppy disks. There were images of women and also of movie covers. Some of it Gravure, but some more explicit than that. That's how I found out about JAV. It's not as if I never thought of Asian porn, but this was the mid to late 90s, so it wasn't something that you could find easily, like you do today.
That's when I was introduced to the "Schoolgirl" outifit theme. I live in a large American city and there's schoolgirls and stuff, but I never had the idea of having sex with a schoolgirl on a crowded bus or subway.
The Western porn I saw at the time wasn't even close to that. Women like Nina Hartley, Christy Canyon, Ashlyn Gere, Hypatia Lee etc... would get the shit fucked out of them for no apparent rhyme or reason. They weren't much on outfits and story lines.
After "Breast Of Asia", I discovered newsgroups and had access to more images, but downloading video wasn't in the realm of possibility. I started with a 1200k modem, then 2400, then 14.4 then 28.8 and eventually 56k. When I got to 14.4k and 28.8k, then I could download some video, but the file sizes couldn't be that big.
There was a website, I don't remember the name, but they would have clips of JAV and that's where I started getting my stuff. They would have categories like "Bus/Train" or "Older Woman" or whatever.That's where I was introduced to "Chikan" as a term. I knew it as "groping" or "feeling someone up."
What this website did was take a JAV movie and split into maybe 10 or more parts and you had to download all the parts and use software to join them all together to have a complete film. But you could view each part separately. So sometimes I would download one scene and that was it. Early on, I had dozens of 10 minute or 15 minute clips on my hard drive and I burned them to cd. I didn't even have a dvd burner at the time.
When file sharing and faster download speeds came about, then the floodgates opened. Those movie covers I had saved from the "Breast Of Asia" website, now I could actually find these movies.
And eventually as time went on, I would associate certain studios with a certain type of movie. Dandy, Natural High etc... usually has a theme of sex in public, among other things. And along the way, some actresses became my favorites. As I said once before, in my opinion, pound for pound, Reiko Nakamori has one of the best bodies I've ever seen. Not just JAV, but in all of porn!