Zenra

Zenra is a premium Japanese porn site that sets itself apart from the crown by offering subtitles with each and every movie on the site. Though it has existed as a porn site since 2002, it has changed many times over the years, and only began to focus on this unique niche with its reformulation in around 2013.

What sets Zenra apart from every other website that hosts Japanese adult videos is that each and every scene on the site comes with exclusive and professionally translated subtitles. Before Zenra existed, not being able to understand the dialog of Japanese porn was just something that non-Japanese-speaking viewers had to expect and accept. But, now that Zenra has grown to its current catalog of over one thousand subtitled full movies, there is an alternative—making Zenra an incredibly unique and worthwhile relative newcomer in the genre.

A Moment of Zen

The default view while browsing through Zenra provides you with a surprisingly easy to use interface that gives a nice tease of each scene alongside fairly comprehensive information. The focus of each page are the large pieces of box art for each movie, but you’ll also see a translated title, some tags, and a release date on each scene. Scrolling over the thumbnails will not, unfortunately, give you any sort of preview, but this isn’t much of an issue because each video comes with a short trailer.

The catalog of videos on Zenra is uniformly excellent and isn’t especially large, so scrolling through its library chronologically works better than it does on most porn sites. But, if you’re visiting the site in search of something in particular, they also offer many ways for you to do just that.

The list of categories isn’t massive, but is incredibly useful due to having been fine-tuned to describe Japanese adult videos, rather than co-opting a generic list of porn categories that wouldn’t apply to this niche. So instead of empty categories like ebony or Latina, you’ll find niches specific to Japanese porn, like schoolgirl and onsen porn.

Zenra also has a fantastic page dedicated to filtering through the site’s porn via studio. The style and quality of Japanese porn varies by studio more so than it does between most major western studios, so this feature is a very welcome addition. Many Japanese adult video fans often find themselves to like or dislike porn from specific studios, too, so being able to browse the catalog in this manner is even more useful than it might be on most sites.

Lists of the top-ranked movies from each month for the last year are also archived on Zenra. Using the most recent month as a jumping-off point can be a great way to check out the videos that the rest of the community is watching, while looking at past months is the perfect way to explore those videos that were loved months ago, but haven’t been as frequently viewed due to falling off the radar as the community tries to keep up with Zenra’s frantic upload schedule.

These options are rounded out by the ability to select a random video from the site’s catalog. This isn’t the best way to use the site, but it works better here than it does on most sites, premium or otherwise. A lot of work seems to have gone into selecting which videos make the cut to be hosted on Zenra, so if you’re not looking to put any effort into finding a scene or if you’re feeling incredibly lucky, you may enjoy this feature.

Once you do find a video, the playback page itself gives you a few additional options. The player itself is functional if lacking in advanced features, like control over video quality and playback speed, but the supporting information attached to each video more than makes up for this minor drawback. The basics are all there—you’ve got related videos, a list of tags, thumbnails that act as a preview of the scene, and a link to download the video. But Zenra further sets itself apart with its focus on detailed reviews of each scene. Rather than the one or two lines of basic information that can be safely skimmed over on nearly all other porn sites, Zenra prides itself on putting extra time and care into these narrative descriptions of its porn.

Zenra contains uncensored videos, as well as the mosaic-censored videos that make up a large portion of all porn produced in Japan. There is a fairly even split between the two styles on the site—but for those who can’t stand the censored stuff, each uncensored video is tagged as such, so avoiding the videos you’re not interested in won’t be difficult at all.

Though the catalog isn’t massive due to the amount of work that goes into subtitling each video, it is growing quite rapidly. A new video is uploaded almost every week, allowing visitors to the site to not only enjoy the back catalog, but to enjoy a relatively regular stream of new content, too.

Zenra is completely one hundred percent free of advertisements. You won’t find a pop-up, pop-under, or sidebar ad anywhere on the site, leading to an incredibly distraction-free experience. This holds true both for the desktop site and the mobile site, which also contains all of the above features and works perfectly well.

Only Pay For The Features You Need

Zenra offers two main tiers for their subscription options, allow for a flexibility that many sites should consider emulating. The cheapest month-to-month option allows you to stream the catalog from 2015 onwards, for thirty dollars per month. This plan has no contracts and involves no commitment beyond the current month, allowing you to enjoy the catalog as much as you’d like before canceling at any given time.

The other option is the download and streaming plan, which allows you to stream the same films, but also download up to ten gigabytes per day, from any movies that aren’t licensed exclusively to Zenra. Most of their content (aside from the subtitles) is not exclusive, so this plan will allow you to download most of the movies on Zenra. The month-to-month plan with download privileges starts at about forty dollars per month, but drops down to around thirty if you join for three months at a time. Again, all of these plans can be canceled quickly and easily at any time prior to renewal.

Downloads of these exclusive videos are restricted to members who are either on ninety-day download plans, or who have been on a month-to-month download plan for at least three months. In any case, these don’t make up a large enough portion of the catalog for most members to worry about.

There is no short-term trial option for either membership with Zenra. Normally, this is a negative, but Zenra goes in a totally different direction to cure what otherwise might be a mark against the site. Every single day, Zenra offers a rotating clip from their catalog, averaging about five minutes long, for you to watch unrestricted. You’re also allowed to view shorter one- to two-minute trailers of several hundred videos, and even supercuts that show three parts of each scene at once to allow you to quickly and easily check out what goes on in each video. Together, these allow you to explore the catalog, and most importantly, get a feel for the quality of subtitles, completely free and without any need to pay for a trial or commit to Zenra for a long period of time.

A Unique Niche

Zenra has achieved what it set out to do admirably. The subtitles that are the sites’ focus are well-written and add a lot to the videos, making Zenra at the very least worth considering. Zenra comes through in the areas that matter to any porn site, too: the videos are great and the site works well perfectly.

That being said, the site isn’t perfect. The catalog could be bigger, although that should get better with time. The biggest problem is the fact that the membership is fairly expensive—the price of Zenra is about average for a month-to-month membership, but many other premium porn sites offer discounts as high as fifty to seventy-five percent off over the long term, while Zenra only offers smaller savings.

That being said, what Zenra does is so unique and well done that it’s by no means a bad deal. If you’re not a fan of Japanese adult videos, or if the fact that they’re almost never subtitled bothers you, Zenra may only be worth a month or so of your time, but if you’re a JAV fan that’s been dying to know what’s being said in videos, it should quickly become one of your favorite sites.