A Belated Crackdown on Child Pornography in Japan

Although I mostly concentrate on economic and demographic issues in this blog, I’m still very interested in censorship and rights to free speech in this part of the world, and back in my first month of blogging wrote posts with titles like “Korean Booty and Democratization” that still get most of my hits I’m still quite proud of. In that post, I briefly mentioned some of the differences in pornography laws between Japan and Korea, and earlier this week this article on a crackdown against child pornography in Japan renewed my interest in the subject. After reading it, I realised that I’ve been guilty of lumping Japan and Korea together in my posts in recent months, and the article was a healthy reminder that the two societies are really very different.

(Photo by karanj)

To be more precise, in the case of specifically pornography laws it is the attitudes towards sexuality, and women and children’s rights that the laws represent that are different, and like me, I’d wager that most first-time travelers to Japan actually first learn of these without ever having spoken to a Japanese person: instead, they are all on full display on the train from Narita airport. With that in mind, rather than jumping straight into the post topic, let me introduce it by reenacting that train trip as it were:

(Photo by MakoDC)

The first thing to notice is the sheer volume of advertisements on Japanese subway systems, to my eye making them a colorful improvement on their drab, grey and plainer Korean counterparts. Not only that, but the ensuing lack of space forces Japanese advertisers to find ever more innovative and interesting ways to get commuters’ attention, which I’ve never seen in Korea:

(Photo by chrissam42)

(Photo by colodio)

(Photo by ethanbee)

These differences in advertising and arts culture will be the subject of my next post, inspired by a post on this great new Japanese arts blog I’ve just found on the top 10 ad-tricks in Tokyo’s train stations. Meanwhile, the next thing to notice is ads like these amongst them:

(Photo by Cedric Sam)

You’re not going to see equivalent ads in Korean or even American subways anytime soon, but regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I have no problems with soft-core pornographic DVDs being advertised where minors can see, provided the models aren’t nude and in provocative poses. I can understand why some people would have issues with them, but then I and every other straight guy in the world would be lying if he said he wasn’t also aroused by women’s lingerie advertisements sometimes (that’s half the idea of them after all), and it is hypocritical to allow those but prohibit technically virtually identical ads for pornography. I can also understand the embarrassment of parents on the subway having to explain to their 8-year old’s innocent queries as to why men (or hell, women too) would choose to buy things like that, but then virtually every parenting book in the world argues that the sooner you teach them about sex, the more responsible and mature they’ll be about it in the future. Besides which, it’s not like the absence of ads for pornography in Korean subways means that Korean children and teenagers aren’t as equally exposed to it by the media as their Japanese counterparts are, nor that Korea doesn’t have one of the biggest prostitution industries in the world.

But something I was shocked by, and which even I still have issues with, is behavior like this:

(Photo by jeremiah)

Yep, that’s your average salaryman nonchalantly looking at porn on the subway, seemingly unconcerned with the reactions of those next to him or even having his photo taken. And why should he be? That is perfectly normal and acceptable behavior in Japan, and I saw it for myself after, hell, a good hour and half or so of my first ever commute around Tokyo. I dare say that he might restrain himself if a ten year-old was sitting next to him, but to my mind it’s bad enough for a man to do so when surrounded by grown men, let alone women or children.

Now, I’ll be the first to man the barricades to defend my right to make, sell, posses, view and discuss, say…Black-on-Asian midget lesbian fisting porn (first thing that came to mind), but at best it would be damned inconsiderate and rude to subject my fellow commuters to this peccadillo of mine. After all, it’s not like they can exercise their democratic right to change the channel or choose not to buy the photobook, and even simply moving away may not always be an option (this is the Tokyo subway remember). Sure, in practice probably 99% of the guys brazen enough do this on the subway would be looking at relatively tame porn and/or hentai comics, and if they weren’t craning their necks to get a good look themselves, probably 99% of the male commuters next to them would have absolutely no problems with it either. But the first time I saw it, it was a guy in his 50s with a pointedly-looking-the-other-way 20-something female university student on his left, and a resigned-looking 80 year-old woman on his right. And, for all their flaws, a Korean man of any age would have given a crap about them, and would have restrained himself from pulling out even his copy of Maxim, let alone anything else.

But it gets much much worse:

(Photo by muffinonline)

On the surface, that’s just another ad for an innocuous soft-porn magazine (or is it a TV show?), but this one has an “U15″ section. Yes, models under 15. No, not nude, although it wasn’t until as late as 1999 that the Law on Punishing Acts related to Child Prostitution and Child Pornography and on Protecting Children made the production and sale of “artistic” photobooks of nude children illegal. But presumably as there are still so many in circulation, with those of child model Rika Nishimura notoriously being produced right up until the law went into effect, then Japan remains one of the only countries in the world where the possession of child pornography is still legal, the other being that last bastion of civil-rights…Russia.

As you can imagine from the post title, given that there has been a recent crackdown then this new law may appear to have been ineffective, but things are much more complicated than that. Actually, the law has worked, but producers of photobooks have (literally) stretched their interpretation of it to limits that authorities now longer find acceptable. But in so doing, they are merely following a long tradition, and it would be remiss of me not to place the law in the context of pornography in Japan before discussing the crackdown further.

The Wikipedia article on this subject is interesting but rather lengthy, so I shall highlight only three things from it:

• First, despite the lack of cameras then, the Japanese pornography industry has a long and flourishing history from as far back as the Edo Period of 1603-1868, and it was only because governments of the Meiji Period of 1868-1912 feared prudish Western opinions that it became to be curtailed. Further restrictions were placed on it by increasingly militaristic governments in the early twentieth century, culminating in its complete prohibition in World War Two. It wouldn’t be until the 1950s and ’60s that things returned to the more liberal days of a century earlier.
• Second, it was during the Meiji Period(!) that the present prohibition against all representations of genitalia was enacted. Showing the pubic region and pubic hair was illegal until 1991 too (and still is in Korea), but is now perfectly acceptable. In practice, this means a lot of nudes from a distance, but as soon as the model is close enough for heinous things like labia, the anus, the penis, or testicles to be visible, then they must either be covered with a hand and/or pixellated or misted out.
• Thirdly, and most importantly, virtually anything is acceptable provided that at least a nod towards these restrictions is made. Yes, while it’s easy enough to find non-censored hardcore Japanese porn on the internet, and only a little harder to find the same in Japanese pornography shops provided you have a good relationship with the proprietor (or so my Japanese-speaking friend tells me), abiding by those restrictions does lead to some rather strange (and frustrating) results (needless to say, NSFW).

(Photo by ArkanGL)

And when I say virtually anything, I mean virtually anything. For me, hentai comics display the hypocrisy of Japanese laws at their finest, as drawings of things ranging from coprophilia to pedophilia and rape are permissible provided that black rectangles or pixels cover where genitalia would be. Yes indeed, drawings of men in trenchcoats approaching young girls, receiving oral sex for money are perfectly okay, provided the penis is a little blurry. Two points:

1. Despite the revulsion some of the subjects arouse in me, again, I’d (albeit more reluctantly this time) still man the barricades to defend people’s right to draw and look at drawings of anything they damn well like. But today’s post is not about hentai, although as you can imagine many Japanese people do have issues with the subjects permitted: if you’re interested you can read about recent censorship developments in this area here.
2. Yes, that some people are into this does make Japan a bit of a sick place. But overall, I consider Japanese attitudes towards sexuality much healthier than in many Western countries. Consider this sentiment from from page 118 of this edition of the 1992 Michael Crichton novel Rising Sun:

“Remember, Japan has never accepted Freud or Christianity. They’ve never been guilty of embarrassed about sex. No problem with homosexuality, no problem with kinky sex. Just matter-of-fact. Some people like it a certain way, so some people do it that way, what the hell. The Japanese can’t understand why we get so worked up about a straight-forward bodily function. They think we’re a little screwed up on the subject of sex. And they have a point.”

It’s a cliche to say so, but put all thoughts of the forgettable Sean Connery and Wesly Snipes movie out of your head, for the book is simply brilliant. It’s a little dated, being written largely before Japan’s “Lost Decade” when it looked like it was going to take over the world, but it is still an indispensable guide to Japanese and even Korean modes of thought. And considering what you’ve just read about Japan, is it an exaggeration to say Westerners are screwed up on the subject of sex? Well…no. Consider these examples for starters:

• In Australia, it is illegal to sell hardcore pornography in all states but that of the Australian Capital Territory (the small sliver of land around Canberra), and the Northern Territory, so depopulated that it is not technically a state and so is directly administered by the federal government from ACT. If you’re unfortunate not to live in either, then you have to have videos and magazines mailed to you from there. No wonder upgrading Australia’s broadband links was such a crucial election issue.
• In the US, selling dildos or vibrators in the states of Alabama, Georgia and Texas (amongst others), can, and has, resulted in a year of incarceration and/or a $10,000 fine. And don’t get me started on the teenagers who pledge that they’ll abstain from sex until marraige. Feeling that they don’t need sex education, when their hormones inconveniently work their magic on them too, they end up having higher rates of STDs and teenage pregnancy than non-abstainers.
• And in England, the age of consent is 16, but anal sex is illegal until 18. Far from being some vestige of prudish Victorian sensibilities, this was reaffirmed as recently as November 2000.  And as David Aaronovitch pointed out afterwards in his column entitled “In defence of the metropolitan elite” in The Independent newspaper, the reasoning behind this was beyond caricature. In my mind, this column was such a classic that it’s worth giving out the relevant section of it in full:

…On Monday the Conservative peer Baroness Young introduced an amendment to the Sexual Offences Bill; yesterday I spent a spellbinding couple of hours reading the Hansard transcript of the ensuing debate. As the Labour peer Lord Davies of Coity explained, Lady Young’s provisions accepted that “normal intercourse is legally permissible at 16 years of age for men and women, and it provides that anal intercourse in respect of both men and women will be legally permissible at 18 years of age”.

Unfortunately, he was not interrupted. Had he been, he might have had to explain exactly what made buggery OK at 18 but impermissible by statute at 17. Nevertheless, Lady Young’s position, described as a wrecking amendment, led to the fall of the Bill for the equalisation of the gay age of consent, by 205 votes to 144.

Diversion or not, Lady Young herself adhered to the point. “By keeping the age of buggery at 18,” she declared, “we protect young 16-year-olds from anal sex, the most dangerous of sexual practices.” At that point (and much to his credit, though not, alas, recorded by Hansard) The Independent’s own sketch-writer, Simon Carr, was heard from the press gallery to utter the words “Not in my experience, it isn’t.”

I would pay to attend a debate between Carr and Young on the relative merits and perils of different forms of sexual activity. As I would to purchase The Lady Young Guide to Proper Sex (or, what every young person ought to know), in which she considers the prospects of choking during oral sex or warns how petting inevitably leads on to the hard stuff. Each act could get a danger-rating from the baroness.

The book would be worth reading, for Lady Young is ingenious. She was not anti-gay at all, not her (that must have been a different Lady Young). And what she worried about was not boys, but young women being taken from behind. “Girls,” she pointed out, “are half the population, [and] are directly affected by [the Bill] when the minimum age for buggery goes down to 16. One must accept that the Bill is a gay rights measure which will have a profound effect on girls.”

So, Lady Young’s argument is that if heterosexual buggery at 16 (which few – I imagine – know is illegal) were legalised, then girls the length and breadth of the land would be far more liable to be buggered. As Baroness Seccombe put it: “This is a very important matter that could have disastrous effects on the lives of young girls aged between 16 and 18.”

I will not bore you with the revelation that there is no law against heterosexual sodomy in Scotland, nor with the lack of evidence that there is rampant buggery in the glens and that frustrated southern sodomites now head north to get their kicks. But I am left trying to explain to myself how an amendment of such stunning stupidity could gain a majority of the upper house of Parliament.

And he concludes by saying:

…strangely, I seek to impose few of my own lifestyle choices on others. I may want abortion to be available to my family, should they require it, but I don’t demand that everyone be forced to have an abortion. Just as I might think it was right to allow adults to decide how to manipulate the sexual organs of themselves and their partners, so I am happy for Lady Young to find her pleasure as she sees fit. It’s her buggering everyone else around I object to.

Sounds like Michael Crichton was right to me.

But while later than Western countries, Japan has “slowly been implementing legal measures against child pornography, [although] the ambiance, culture and religion of the country makes people less uncomfortable about such issues compared with Western societies,” said Koji Maruta, the author of “Enko-shojo To Loli-con Otoko” (”Girls Who Sell Sex and Men with Lolita Complex”). There is the 1999 law already mentioned, which defines child pornography as any image of a child under 18 years old “naked or partially naked, which is sexually stimulating,” and there is also the second article in the U.N.’s Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, which Japan signed in 2002, which defines child pornography as “any representation, by whatever means, of real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes,” and requires signatories to have laws banning such material.

So what exactly is being cracked down on? Let me hand you over to this article of May last year from the Japan Times:

Photos of preteen girls in thongs now big business

Asuka Izumi [in the photo] was modeling for a DVD in July 2005 when the director asked her to put on a string bikini. She was just 12 years old.

She agreed to pose in the sexy bathing suit and now, nearly two years later, that DVD is credited with starting the popularity of “T-back junior idols.”

Izumi, now 14, went on to pose in thong bikinis in four photo books and several DVDs. She looks back on that first time in a revealing bikini and said she had no reason not to do it.

“It wasn’t a big deal. The director asked me to do it, and I did it because I wanted to,” Izumi, who is still in junior high school but has appeared before the camera as a child model since she was 1 1/2 years old, said during a recent interview with The Japan Times.

From pornographic animation to raunchy dolls, Japan leads the world in eccentric products and media that sometime push the boundaries of what people consider to be decent — or even legal.

This latest trend of preteen girls striking provocative poses in slinky bathing suits has some people questioning whether this is child pornography and if the parents are actually selling their children for sex.

The large number of shops with Junior Idol and U-15 (Under 15) signs in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, the country’s subculture capital, is just one indication of how quickly the new market has grown.

The controversial industry has been reluctant to reveal figures, but reports suggest that more than 3 million photo books were sold in the past year alone.

Junior idol DVDs and photo books are commonly sold right next to hard-core pornography, and two years since Izumi’s DVD, the models have grown even younger. Last month, 9-year-old Rei Asamizu appeared in “Melty Pudding,” a photo book that includes shots of the little girl lying on a bed wet in a thong bikini.

Although there is no full nudity, the scantily clad children are often pictured seductively blowing on the end of a flute or licking an ice cream cone.

Like in hentai, even string bikinis are at least a nod towards the restrictions against nudity, and so, as the article goes on to mention, (until recently) police had no legal authority to stop the sale of such material.

Despite some readers’ no-doubt impressions of me, I’m not exactly an avid follower of the u15 gravure model scene in Japan, and actually had no idea that girls Izumi’s age were now appearing in string bikinis, and in the blatantly pornographic poses that they were. Rather, I thought the recent crackdown was because of (previously) more notorious cases like those of Saaya Irie, all over the Japanese blogosphere in 2005, whose unusally well-developed breasts for her age made photobooks and DVDs of her in bikinis and maid outfits sell out very quickly, despite the fact that she was only…11 at the time. Those pictures were taken by photographer Garo Aida, and if you go to his homepage (not really SFW) you can get some idea of how ridiculous the situation has gotten in the 3 years since: if you thought pictures of 11 year-old girls in bikinis in 2005 were bad, now in 2008 they’re even younger, wearing clothes about as wide as my shoelaces, and in poses that leave little to the imagination.

Again seriously screwed up, but before you denigrate all Japanese men as pedophilic freaks, bear in mind that that paragon of Western civilization and virtue, Google, has no problems with youtube having plenty of videos of Saaya Irie available (although not Izumi yet). For more on her, and the issues her photos bring up, see here.

Meanwhile, I hope what I’ve written above shows how the situation in Japan is much more complicated than a post with a mere link to the following blogger’s post would suggest, and regardless of how ridiculous things became, the string bikinis do seem to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back (they’re about the same weight after all):

(Edit: the link below doesn’t seem to be working. But the original can still be read by going here and scrolling down to Jan 16)

Lolicon Lovers’ Luck Loses Out

Connoisseurs of lolicon beware! Weekly Playboy magazine reports Japanese authorities are finally starting to crack down on the highly lucrative teen and child exploitation gravure business.

Although Japan has started implementing similar child pornography laws as most of Western society, the lack of enforcement in recent years have seen an explosion of materials targeted directly to men who like them young. Photo compilations of popular idols ranging from their late teens to preteens to as low as eight years old fly off the shelves as they’re released to a teeming mass of fans hungry (horny?) for more photos of their favorite starlets. Reports suggest that over 3 million photo books sold from 2006 to 2007 alone (See Japan Times).

But this may soon be screeching to a halt. The police conducted a series of raids late last year on producers of a photo shoot DVD “starring” a schoolgirl that resulted in the maker of the DVD to be arrested for Child Pornography.

“The girl’s swimsuit was deliberately made to be see-through, it was so tight-fitting you could make out the shape of her genitalia and she’d been posed in such risqu? positions that the Metropolitan Police Department decided to arrest the maker for breaking the law banning child pornography even though the girl hadn’t actually exposed her bust or between her legs,” a reporter from a sports newspaper tells Weekly Playboy.

This marks the first time in Japan history that an individual was arrested for breaking the Child Pornography law without proliferating images that featured nudity. Following further review, the charge has been dropped to a violation of the Child Welfare Law the effects have been far reaching in the gravure business.

“Ever since the arrest, makers of products featuring teens in erotic poses have been in a state of panic. If material is judged to be overly obscene, people can be arrested for breaking the Child Pornography Law, even if the model is dressed in a swimsuit,” says an employee of a medium-sized DVD manufacturer producing material featuring models under 15 years old. “DVD shops and wholesalers are now on their guard and have stopped taking materials featuring models under 15, even if the product looks like being a surefire seller.”

So what does this mean for the 2D lolicon industry? At the moment, nothing. Much like pre-2006 American law, drawn pornography depicting “young” models does not necessarily entail that it is child pornography. Though there has been limited action against lolicon manga, in general that is not touched. Still, it provides a worrying note to those who like them 2D and young.

(Via Mainichi Daily News: Wai Wai)

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