Censorship of Japanese pop culture: What's OK?
Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri

The sentencing of 39-year-old American Christopher Handley on obscenity charges in Iowa last month and an upcoming vote on a "virtual porn" bill in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly's General Affairs Committee have sent shivers of anxiety through fans of Japanese popular culture worldwide.

Forget the recent pesky U.S.-Japan dustups over the relocation of a U.S. Marine Corps base in Okinawa Prefecture and the Toyota recall debacle. Suddenly, both postwar allies are converging on the same page in their desire to delimit the expressive sexuality in manga and anime.

In U.S. courts, Handley pleaded guilty in May of last year to possessing manga featuring "drawings of children being sexually abused," and was sentenced on Feb. 11 to six months in prison--though his lawyer has recently noted that Handley's submissive plea will likely win him a few months in a halfway house, with no actual prison time.

In Japan late last month, a proposal was submitted to amend metropolitan Tokyo's youth welfare ordinance on child pornography to include sexually provocative "visual depictions" of characters who sound or appear to be 18 years old or younger. The vote could potentially set the bill for confirmation on March 30, and authorize enforcement as early as Oct. 1.

Opposition from manga creators quickly materialized. Ashita no Joe mangaka Tetsuya Chiba was among artists and writers who held a press conference to protest this move toward censorship, releasing a statement whose many signatories reportedly included such manga-world notables as Fujiko Fujio A, Moto Hagio and Rumiko Takahashi.

I have often argued that Japanese popular culture--manga and anime in particular--is attractive in part because it feels freer, less fettered by focus groups and financial reports. Taboos about violence, sexuality or racial imagery can be directly confronted in forms that have for decades flown under the proverbial radar. Japanese pop culture is cheap to make and distribute, and is marginal in character and by nature--more like anarchic punk music than corporate products such as Disney films.

Hence the inevitable paradox: What happens when Japanese popular culture becomes truly popular beyond the borders of a tiny archipelago in the North Pacific? Can the rest of the world embrace a creative product defined in part by its provincial nature, and usually intended for local audiences only?

Years ago, as a boy brought to Japan by my Japanese mother, I found a throwaway manga on a train seat. I flipped through it as my mother chatted with her friend. The erotic images were stirring, so much so that I put the phonebook-sized comic back where I found it, lest my mother and her friend catch me reading it.

Today, I find my youthful shame shameful. I wish I had been able to share the images with my mother to explore their meanings intelligently. I recall an office lady with her skirt hitched up and an adorably pillowish face.

At the same time, I recognize that images of childlike sexuality are potentially damaging. Even as I believe Handley, an American otaku who mail-ordered thousands of manga from Japan, only 12 of which were cited in U.S. courts as obscene, deserves more lenience, I do understand that not every child has discriminating adult guardians.

"Pedophiles frequently use realistic cartoon depictions to indoctrinate their child victims to persuade them that such [sexual] acts are okay," says Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice and a board member of Polaris Project Japan, an organization that combats human trafficking in Japan and the sexual exploitation of women and children. "When this stuff is legal, you're giving pedophiles a weapon."

But is it the fault of manga and anime artists that their work is being appropriated by criminals? Hollywood films regularly glamorize war--but are wars Hollywood's fault? And if manga and anime depictions of youthful sexuality are outlawed in Japan and the United States, will that really deter pedophiles?

I discussed this question with writers and artists in Japan and the United States, most of whom argued persuasively that works of the imagination, however they may fly in the face of social norms, need to be protected. As manga artist Yoshitoshi Abe recently wrote: "Humankind has been entrusted with power, but if we abuse that power to do away with things that we do not like, then we will give birth to a sterilized society."

It's hard for me to argue otherwise, as sympathetic as I am to concerns about child-abuse cases. If we can't commit our imaginations to paper--and now, to digital readers, which is where manga will be found soon--where else can we go?


Kelts is a Tokyo University lecturer who divides his time between Tokyo and New York. He is the author of "Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S." (http://www.japanamericabook.com).

(Mar. 19, 2010)

From "The Angry Otaku" blog:

The case of Christopher Handley has ended not unexpectedly, with results that put commercial artists, manga collectors, and everyone with an internet connection in the cross-hairs of a potential witch hunt perpetrated at the discretion of the self appointed people's puritan protectionist police on the front lines of what they like to call “the culture war” but what most of us who live here in reality call “you’re too old and can’t handle things in the outside world now go back inside, you’re missing ‘The Factor.’”

The guilty plea in this case is very much the worst possible outcome for members of the public, much worse than if he had been found guilty by a jury. Oh sure, the sentence is reduced and he isn’t facing the same severity as he would have if he had been convicted which is a real possibility since from what I hear he had some stuff nasty enough to make the admins over at Encyclopedia Dramatica look like members of the Bristol Pailin abstinence movement. With an uppity District Attorney waving federal charges and threatening the worst if he has to show grandma on the jury those nasty pictures and how poor little Chris’s ass has no chance of coming out of this unscathed, to expect a real fight was probably too optimistic looking back. So he may have received the best legal advice for his own individual case, but in reality it was the worst decision that could have been made. Because a guilty verdict has something that goes with it which a guilty plea does not: a chance to appeal. Appellate courts are great arenas for this kind of thing to be sorted out when it comes to legal vaguery being taken too far, and are now something that Handley will not have access to unless he can prove he was unduly influenced into taking a plea. My entire education in legal matters comes from watching every season of Law & Order 5 times and reading Fark way too much, and even I can tell that this guilty plea legitimizes a law which has “unconstitutional” written all over it. In the past, obscenity legislation of this type was used to criminalize possession of novels, and would always depend on the interpreting the meaning of “obscene” which means different things to different people, and therefore has no place in legal regulations of any kind. I don’t know what leverage they had on this Handley guy, but his guilty plea is really going to screw the next poor sucker they decide to make an example of (I am thinking a police raid on a furry convention).

So now we have a person, being treated like a criminal engaging in a criminal act with a criminal instrument, only it’s not really that, and somewhere someone is abusing an actual child, not a drawing of one. I am sure the police originally thought that they were going to find actual child pornography that this guy had, and when they didn’t, they decided to go for it and punish this guy anyway because cops aren’t about to use up their time and miss out on the reward of putting someone in jail, you can’t expect them to really be capable of proper behavior in legal matters. The blame for this most recent erosion of constitutional rights has got to land 50/50 on the idiots who actually wrote it, and Handley himself for selling out on a very important duty to set a legal precedent. When what is legal or not comes down to a matter of opinion, even if that opinion is a popular one and generally accepted, it is still opinion (I’m not taking about what is legally considered “expert” opinion). Since assessing the age of a cartoon character is both subjective, and technically impossible it can not be the basis for enforcement of a law. How old is Bart Simpson? He was in 4th grade in 1987… so was I, yet I can buy beer and he can’t. You know why? Because he’s not real he’s an abstract concept, a fictional character. If I draw him getting shot, I won’t be booked for murder, and although the equivalent of this case’s imagery is unpleasant to think about, criminal proceedings for “abusing Bart Simpson” are just as ludicrous as a murder charge.

For further reading on some of the specifics of the case, Matt Thorn has compiled a linked list to not only some of the actual court documents in the case, but other opinions more informed than my own. Which you can find here.*

(*Recommended reading - contains too many links for me to post here. But, as Matt says: "The chilling bottom line is that an American may very well go to prison for acquiring and looking at drawings of characters who do not actually exist.")

And, for the other side of the coin:
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/in ... edirect=no

Raging so hard right now ...

For the past 10+yrs I've watched
as the country I love grew more & more conservative,
usually as a result of outside pressures.

Many of the things that made Japan uniquely different from the West
(just think: "vending machines" for example) are slowly but surely disappearing.

Last year it was a video game.
Niche websites are 404ing almost as fast as you can say "Fuckin' Saved!"
Now this.

What's next?
Art?
Books?
(But wait ... doesn't manga technically qualify on BOTH these counts?)

And this from a country with a First Amendment.

Fuck your Mickey Mouse.

alice,
can you answer me something?
has male to female vaginal penetration on porno movies in japan always been obscured,
or is that little circle that blocks/ pixelizes it semi new?

the reason i ask this, and ....
sorry if i am so forward.
ever since i can remember, you cannot show a mans penis penetrating a womans vagina on film in japan,
but you can show 600 men ejaculating on a womans face?

Anyway ...

FUN FACT:
Did you know?
Donald Duck comics were once banned in Finland
because he doesn't wear any pants?

This occurred after WWII if I'm remembering my history correctly. Don't remember why, but it would encompass all of Japanese pornography. Completely forget their logic behind this one, but Japan has some really weird laws and social constructs concerning sex, so much so, that there are dozens of novels written on the topic.

WTF is that? A sybian controller?

Must ... keep ... thread ... on ... topic ...

Good shit Alice.

There has been many a problem of late with cartoons. Danish depictions of Muhammad, drawings of boobies from Japan. It all creeps very close to thought policing if you ask me. These are two dimensional drawings. I have a horribly hard time imagining what harm they can really cause other than to ruffle the feathers of people who don't like the ideas from another person's noggin produced on paper.

" works of the imagination, however they may fly in the face of social norms, need to be protected." I remember at some point in the mid 90's the US supreme court ruled in favor of free speech in these instances, it is sad to say but I can take a guess as to whom's tenure as prez fudged this one in the poop hole, sad that such logical choices could be undone, maybe if manga was more about fucking male interns and lying to god and country about it things would be peachy

More info and context from keen observer Roland Kelts in The Comics Journal :

http://www.tcj.com/history/26720/

ANNIHILATE EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS !!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOuumGX-6uc

Maybe things will auto-regulate themselves if they put this guy in charge.

That is a Olympia DV-9900DX Japanese DVD Mosaic Remover. Sounds like snake oil.

Here are some answers about these topics from Masami Akita, Merzbow.

I understand that you currently write for Japanese pornography magazines.

I started writing articles about S/M and fetishism. I’ve been very fascinated by surrealistic erotic literature as well as psychoanalysis. People like George Bataile, Andre Breton, Sigmund Freud, and Kraft Ebbing. I’m also interested in Nudism culture and nude photography from the 1920s.

What are the differences between Japanese and American pornography?

The definite difference is that there is no genitals or intercourse in Japanese porno because of our censorship laws. Of course, we have ratings as does the US. Though there are no S/M or scatological magazines in convenience stores, our society has a tendency to make concessions for politeness in respect to sexual violations. Most of Japan’s sexual trauma is high school girls.
High school girls are a very powerful sexual icon in our society. High school girls are also very powerful in regards to fashion and social behavior.

Mainstream Japanese culture also seems more accepting of bondage films and women having sex with an octopus. Why is this?

We have no deviant sex because we have no Christianity. That is, until the end of the Tokugawa era in the 1800s. We began to import Western scientific theory and our sexuality began to Westernize. We also imported Western sexuality without knowledge of Christianity. The reason for women having sex with an octopus is because of our censorship- her genitalia is covered. We have censorship of the genitals and no censorship of any sexual image without genitals. In the Japanese tradition, we have lots of strange sex images such as women with octopi. I think our present sexuality is influenced subliminally from the times before Tokugawa sexuality. It’s a kind of mental pleasure- a sense of humor in sexuality. Presently, Manga and Owarai entertainment is also the same reconstructed traditional culture. In this culture, sex is not a matter of politics or science as is AIDS., the Gay movement, and sexual harassment in Western culture. Japanese sexual culture is a world of the imagination.

What do you think is the difference between Japanese and American Pop culture?

I think that American Pop Culture has more variety. Japanese society is a television community. The most important thing for most people is doing the same things most other people do. No individuality exists in this society with music, fashion, and language. The Japanese government thinks Japan is one nation of one race. But that is a lie. This same theory applies to the Japanese media.

Okay, so censorship in Japan has always been one of those topics that I find pretty interesting. The nuances are very complex, and however you feel about it, you have to acknowledge it for being quite unusual and unique in its circumstances.


Warning, potential NSFW content follows.



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Sort of related to the above, I found this story worth noting:

Digital data of vagina obscene, but vagina-shaped art OK, Japanese court rules

I don't claim to know the artist at all, so I have no idea how much of this was publicity or stirring up for the sake of controversy just because/as an artistic exercise, but in any case, I think it once again points to the strange way the legal system interprets obscenity laws in Japan. Whether you agree with the decision or not, and how you feel about the portrayal of sex or the one-sided nature of its acceptance (I won't get into any Gamergate arguments here), I do think examining these issues is a worthwhile endeavor. I won't say that this is right or wrong, but it's fascinating how one medium is considered acceptable (figurines/plaster), whereas another is not (digital models). Is it the realism they are using as criteria, and if so, where do you draw the line? There are no easy answers, and I am not a lawyer, least of all knowledgeable on the intricacies of Japan's legal system. It does seem though, for this specific case, that the plaster 'reproductions' were not for sale (only on display) and that the digital scans were only gifts offered to people who helped her fundraising project. So it - by my interpretation - falls under the private classification for 'art' and is not being offered for sale/produced. In that sense, there are a lot more 'other' things out there that do fall into this latter category which I am surprised do not garner attention; but likely in those cases the rulings are more clearcut and kept quiet, so the general media does not follow them.

Megumi's artist statement is about demystifying female genitalia, and basically calling to attention the double standard in Japan of how you can have a parade with penis floats, but on the other hand showing the female anatomy is considered something obscene...
Here's her website/blog: https://6d745.com/
And because this is skullbrain here's one of her toys (Manko-chan), I had bought a year ago, when she first released them...You can still buy them from here, and they do ship internationally if you email them.

^ Thanks for the link !
I avoided genitalia themed sofubi so far but thought the idea behind this one was worth my support.
Also, a book from Koyama Press will be out by the end of the month to coincide Rokudenashiko’s presence at TCAF.
http://www.comicsbeat.com/review-japane ... er-memoir/

* Oh, can Alice come back ?

how much was shipping?

Around 7$ for me, so 6$ for you ; )
I took the glow one.

https://youtu.be/XYDb0slkovw

Her funny and strange mockery of the trial orderal, probably NSFW for most