Everything published on Hentai follows the process described below. It is written down because a reference site on a subject this poorly documented in English is only worth reading if the reader can see how the claims were arrived at, and because a documented process is the only thing that keeps standards stable when several people contribute.
Four principles
Accuracy comes before completeness. A page that covers eight points correctly is worth more than one that covers twelve with four of them wrong, and where the evidence does not support a clean answer we say the evidence is unclear instead of manufacturing one.
Independence comes before reach. The site carries nothing that pays it, so no page has an audience to please beyond the reader, and nobody outside the project sees a draft before it goes live.
Transparency comes before polish. Sources are named in the text, dates of revision are shown at the top of each page, and corrections are logged, not quietly patched.
Currency comes before volume. Legal pages describing statutes and court decisions go stale in a way that historical pages do not, and we would rather maintain a small set of accurate pages than accumulate a large set nobody revisits.
The publishing process
Selecting a topic
Topics are chosen where three things line up: readers are demonstrably searching for the answer, the answer exists in primary sources, and the English-language material currently available is either wrong or locked behind an aggregator. Subjects that fail the second test get dropped instead of being filled in with speculation. Subjects touching the exclusions listed in our about page are never commissioned at all.
Research and sourcing
Research starts at the primary document. For Japanese law that means the official translation of the Penal Code on japaneselawtranslation.go.jp and the text of relevant Supreme Court decisions; for United States law, the United States Code through Cornell's Legal Information Institute, opinions on supremecourt.gov, and Department of Justice guidance. For history and terminology it means academic work, including open-access papers such as Mark McLelland's history of the word, and contemporary trade documentation where it survives.
Secondary sources are used to find primary ones, never as the citation of record. When a claim exists only in secondary sources that cite each other in a circle, that is treated as a signal that the claim is folklore and it is either dropped or explicitly marked as unverified.
Drafting
Drafts are written by whoever did the research for that section, which keeps the person making the claim and the person who read the source as the same person. House style is plain declarative English: no hedging filler, no rhetorical questions, no padding to hit a word count. Japanese terms appear with the original script and a romanisation on first use, because transliteration alone loses distinctions that matter to the argument.
Fact-checking
Before publication a second person checks the draft against the sources. Statute numbers, case names, dates, monetary amounts and vote splits are verified individually against the primary document, not against the draft's own citation. Where a translated statute is quoted, the official translation is used and the translation status is noted, since Japanese government translations are explicitly unofficial for legal purposes.
Claims that cannot be verified are removed at this stage; softening them with a qualifier does not count. A sentence beginning with a phrase implying general belief is usually a sentence with no source behind it, and those get cut.
Publication and review
Pages carry the date of their last substantive revision at the top. Legal material is reviewed at least every six months and immediately when a relevant decision lands; a ruling on age-verification statutes, for example, triggers a review of every page that touches access requirements. Historical and terminological material is reviewed annually, since it moves slowly, and whenever a reader supplies a source that contradicts it. Which pages get revisited first depends partly on aggregate reading data, gathered under the terms in our privacy policy.
Editorial independence
There is no commercial layer to separate editorial from, because the site sells nothing: no advertising, no sponsored placements and no affiliate links, as our affiliate disclosure sets out. No outside party receives a preview of a page, a right of reply or a veto over what it says.
We do not accept paid placements, sponsored posts, guest articles with embedded links, or link insertions into existing pages, all of which are routine offers in this niche. Accurate material stays up when a company dislikes it. Where a page describes something unflattering about a commercial category we also link to, it stays. Randomised paid mechanics fall under the same rule, and the reader-facing version of that position is our responsible play page.
Corrections
Errors get fixed, not argued about. Reports go to [email protected], and the useful ones name the page, quote the passage and say what the correct position is. We check the claim against primary sources within forty-eight hours and reply either with the correction or with the source that supports the original wording.
Correspondence about a correction is kept for twelve months and then deleted, as described in our privacy policy. Substantive corrections are marked on the page with the date and a short description of what changed, so a reader who saw the earlier version can tell what moved. Typographical fixes are made silently. Pages are not deleted to make an error disappear; if a page is withdrawn, the reason is stated at its address.
What contributors must do
Contributors work from primary sources and cite them in the draft, including page or article numbers where the source is long. Anyone with a financial interest in a company or platform mentioned in a draft declares it before starting, and is reassigned if the conflict is material.
Generative tools may be used for translation assistance and for checking a draft's structure, never as the source of a factual claim, and every sentence that survives to publication has been verified by a person against a document. Drafts that read as if they were assembled from other websites are rejected, and the same applies to text that hits the word count by restating its own points. Questions about any of this can go through our contact page.