I think you misunderstand me a little.
When I'm looking at google images I actually expect that and don't mind it. But when I look for something unrelated and that comes up it can get interesting very fast.
I think it happed with text as well as images, which is what was so annoying. I was trying to rediscover cosplay pictures of Angel and Roger, whose host website I had forgotten. Maybe Google has gotten more strict on it's text results now? I guess your right, usually more of the crude stuff shows up in image searches than in text searches.
If your SafeSearch settings are OK, then the only thing I can think of is that maybe Google employed some sort of heuristic to your search, and based on past results of that heuristic, it came up with that suggestion for "Japanese funk".

Unless funk music is considered romantic in Japan? Yeah, right....

Maybe pr0n sites included "funk" in their webpage code, confusing search engines. (Which apparently works, because I've spotted some of these traps within past Google results before I could make the mistake of navigating to the sites.)
BTW a good way to avoid the pr0n's when googling the Big O is to just type Big O and what you want related to that. Hell of a lot less pr0n shows up. Only sex sites put "the" in front of Big O. For example typing in Big O cosplay has little to no pr0n, except for some hentai scans and a couple gardivoir pics (pokemon, wtf), and mostly will have cosplayers and anime pics.
But if you put "the" in that search a whole lotta pr0n's come up.
Speaking of which I just found some cosplay pics I don't have. Gonna go save them. dododo.
"Big O" would still return alot of unfavorable results for me (some not pr0n, but still undesirable), even if combined with "Angel" or "Dorothy" (which, I'll admit is are popular girls names). Adding "cosplay" into the search would help, but only a little. (Perhaps the pr0n sites confused the search engines by inserting "cosplay" into their webpage code?)
I think I ended up just "wading" through it (as one would go through a murky swamp), to find the "Roger", Dorothy, and "Angel" costumes, which I had to admit were well done, and made it worth sorting through the "junk". The only annoying thing was how many "junk" images showed up in front of the good ones. Unfortunately, I didn't think to save the cosplay images, which would have not having to search again.
Oh well, at least I'm not like one friend's father, who planned a trip to Thailand, but mispelled "Bangkok" in his search...

No, I'm not kidding... According to my friend, "interesting" (used sarcastically, of course) wouldn't even begin to describe the results they got back. It was not good...