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80% of Japanese asked whether they support Tokyo’s manga ban report that they oppose it, and a further 81% consider it an attack on freedom of expression.

The survey, published by right-wing rag Sankei, asked 6,399 people (4,305 men and 2094 women) for their opinions on Tokyo’s Ishihara-led attack on manga.

When asked “do you agree that extreme depictions of sex should be restricted by the ordinance?”, 80% opposed the law.

Furthermore, 81% agreed when asked “do you think this law constitutes a restriction on freedom of expression?”

Some of the majority opinions from survey respondents:
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“If writing manga which depicts illegal activity is against the law now, then it is not fair to apply the law without also banning all historical and yakuza manga. This is the worst law possible, sure to ruin Japan’s great manga culture. Manga should be free, it mustn’t be censored”

“The Tokyo government didn’t adequately discuss this with the publishing industry, yet passed a ban anyway – isn’t that strange? Also, I am not at all convinced by the Tokyo governor’s prejudiced statements.”

“There is no scientific basis for the notion that if you read sexually explicit manga it’ll turn you into a sex criminal, and there is a major issue with passing a ban with no basis in scientific fact.”

“This is only going to push young people’s access to sexual material underground, and that is sure to have an adverse effect on their healthy development.”

SOURCE

Japanese gamers apparently face arrest if they lend their games to friends – police recently executed a search warrant based on the unauthorised lending of 5 games, charging the lender with copyright infringement.

Police raided a Kobe hotel after discovering they had freely provided Wii and PS3 consoles and games to guests, confiscating games and consoles as evidence.

The hotel, “Swing,” is accused of lending the games to at least 5 customers during 2010. In an unusual application of copyright law, police are charging the hotel with copyright violation, specifically the “screening” the games to guests without permission from the copyright holder.

Police are also investigating whether they were secretly operating a love hotel, another very serious crime.

Commercial game rental itself is illegal in Japan, but as freely lending a game to another party may constitute “unauthorised display,” gamers are also wondering if they face arrest for merely lending games to each other.

In particular, this rather draconian interpretation of the law suggests that virtually the entirety of Japan’s manga cafe industry is in fact illegal, as they likely do not seek permission from every copyright holder of the products they lend to customers on their premises.

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Tokyo manga fans are disgusted to witness their beloved manga already being dumped into the porno corner en masse in order to comply with Ishihara’s twisted manga ban.

Some explanation may be required – in Japan, convenience stores usually sell adult (porn) magazines in an out-of-the-way corner, with the shelves marked off with a “成人向け雑誌” separator and minors prohibited from browsing the shelves or buying anything therein.

Similar arrangements exist in other shops for DVDs, eroge and so on, often with curtained off areas of the shop or otherwise. However, many outlets will not stock anything which needs to be separated into an 18+ section at all.

An example of what the average convenience store 18+ corner looked like until recently (the content of the rags in question should be obvious):

An example of what they have begun to look like in Tokyo thanks to the looming Tokyo manga ban:

Titles now branded adult-only include such notoriously obscene manga publications as Manga Home, Morning, Evening, etc…

2ch is disgusted at the discovery:
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“I stopped off in a Tokyo convenience store on my way to work in Yokohama:

Tokyo is like another universe now, with the manga ban everything is going to be annihilated.

In the Yokohama convenience stores near where I work and those near my home, Young Jump is stocked alongside the travel magazines and stuff. The adult corner just has ero-manga stuff like Kairakuten and idol magazines.

When I saw the shelves in Tokyo it was like I was sucked into some weird parallel world…

Anyway, manga’s going to disappear now, isn’t it? They’ll never make any money like this.”

“What!? Why the hell is Manga Home in the adult section? It has no sex or violence at all… it’s just an innocnent little 4koma manga magazine. This can’t be serious…”

“It’s serious, you can’t just play with their shelves in the middle of the day.”

“I’ve only been to Akiba, but there was a 7-11 there that was like this.”

“The pro-censorship crowd have forced all manga not intended for all ages to be sold as 18+. Even Jump is in danger at this rate…”

“I heard publishers tried to create a 15+ category but Tokyo refused to allow it. I suppose it was true.”

“Well, games are really heavily censored thanks to CERO [the Japanese "voluntary" game rating system], and this ban still targets them in spite of that. Even if manga had ratings, they’d still be banned.”

“For a moment I felt total despair, but then I seethed with rage. Titles like Manga Home and Manga Club have no ero at all – it’s infuriating for them to be forced into the adult corner with all the porn.

Is this the world the censorship crowd wanted? If so we have to destroy that warped illusion.”

“Raika Days has an elementary school girl protagonist so it was placed in the 18+ section.”

“The censorship criteria are totally ambiguous so they just dumped all the manga with a higher age demographic into the adult section.”

“All manga and everything else now has to be labelled as 18+… I want to cry, this is a tragedy.”

“So now ‘adult only’ is not for ero, but for anything not aimed at little children.”
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This all seems to completely discredit those still insisting the impact will be minor – any anime, manga or games which find themselves stuck shelved with porn and unable to be sold to or even looked at by under 18s can expect to see their sales plummet, forcing publishers and mangaka to either go out of business or produce only children’s titles which they can slip past Ishihara’s inquisition.

SOURCE

Tokyo’s manga ban has been signed into law after passing a final vote, and is set to come into effect in 2011, with Tokyo governor Ishihara crowing that “Japan still has some common sense left after all!”

The ban already passed a committee vote, and as expected also passed a final vote on the 15th – the law stipulates that “voluntary restraints” must begun in April of 2011, with the full force of the ban to come in July.

All the major parties supported the ban – the ruling DPJ (leftist) insisted on a “prudent application” rider but otherwise did nothing to oppose the law as they did with the previous bill.

The LDP (right-wing) proposed and supported the original and current version of the bill. Their usual coalition partners, the Koumeito (the political arm of a Buddhist cult), also supported the bill, leaving only small parties to the left of the DPJ to oppose it.

Once again the motives of the DPJ can only be guessed at – they have repeatedly blocked national bans on possession of child pornography (already illegal to distribute) on civil liberties grounds, opposed the previously rejected version of the bill because it was worded as a ban on “virtual child pornography,” and actually insisted the just passed Tokyo law remove a “duty not to possess [real] child pornography” clause.

However, when the current bill’s wording was changed to ban depictions “promoting illegal or immoral sexual activity” (effectively a vastly more far-reaching ban than previously) rather than “[virtual] sexual activity involving minors” (this version of the ban was clearly targeting loli manga) as in the current version, their previous opposition all but evaporated.

That the law explicitly excludes photographic material can probably be interpreted both as a specific attack on “otaku” culture and an effort to avoid antagonising Japan’s mass media, who obviously would not support any restrictions on themselves but are only too happy to support them on other industries.

The 10 publishers who have boycotted the Tokyo Anime Fair are angry at the treatment meted out to the industry by Ishihara and his cronies:

“The earlier bill was defeated with heavy opposition, and we are indignant that the bill should be resubmitted in so short a time.”

Kadokawa’s CEO has vowed opposition will continue, although just what publishers can do about it is not clear, particularly in light of their evident ineptitude in handling politicians.

Ishihara for his part is crowing over the industry’s defeat:

“It makes sense for this to have passed – Japan still has some common sense left after all!”

In interviews he merely laughed at the industry boycott:

“If they’re outraged about this then they shouldn’t come. They’ll come the next year, for sure.”

Veteran shoujo mangaka Machiko Satonaka speaks of complete betrayal at the hands of the politicians:

“There were representatives who promised us ‘we won’t resubmit the bill without consulting manga and anime producers,’ but they submitted it anyway, so I feel we were tricked. There are many issues with the ordinance, in particular the ‘improperly promote or glorify [sexual activity]‘ passage, and there is no way we can accept this.

In particular, I worry about the future for young mangaka – I hope they will persevere without the industry falling into decline.”

source:sankaku complex

Tokyo’s ban on anime, manga and games featuring “virtual crimes” or which are “likely to interfere with the healthy development of youth” has passed after the DPJ agreed to support it.

The DPJ’s only addition to the critical portion of the law was a short rider which requests “prudent application of the law in light of any artistic, social, scientific or satirical merits the work might express” – it does not however add any legal obligation to consider these, or establish any clear or indepdently enforced criteria for judging whether a work can be declared “harmful” or not.

Even more bizarrely, the final draft actually removed a passage that imposed “a duty not to possess [photographic] child pornography” on Tokyo residents, whilst leaving the section banning erotic manga and anime (and explicitly excluding photographic materials) all but unchanged – that the bill is intended exclusively as an “anti-otaku” law seems to be beyond doubt.

It is very difficult to objectively assess the scope of the law – along with vague and subjective terms like “interfere with the healthy development of youth,” the law also includes “etc.” on the end of most of its examples, leaving it quite unclear, for example, whether the “improper glorification of illegal sexual activity, etc.” applies to only virtual sex crimes, or all crimes in general – presumably the interpretation adopted will be whichever is convenient to censors.

Similarly, the ban’s mention of “rape and other sexual acts which violate societal norms” seems inevitably to point to a ban on depictions of homosexuality, considering who was behind the law.

The generally expected form the law will take is that of a “amakudari” (a pervasive system of sinecures for retired bureaucrats) body which will inspect all anime, manga and games, with only those titles receiving approval as “healthy” able to be sold regularly in Tokyo shops – the rest will be relegated to the “adult corner.”

The most immediate and direct effect of the law will almost certainly be to see ecchi manga such as To Love-Ru, bishoujo titles such as Champion Red and most BL manga, as well as any seinen manga with especially mature themes, banned from general sales – presumably most will then be cancelled due to a lack of suitable magazine or tankobon distribution channels, with a few perhaps being resurrected as 18+ ero-manga.

As has already been seen, publishers will also likely be purging future anime, manga and games of any content liable to fall foul of the law, and removing older titles from distribution.

The law probably also spells the end of most late night anime in Tokyo (and by extension, everywhere else), which it would appear to ban under its distribution clause; given the vague wording of the current season alone it seems Ore no Imouto, Panty & Stocking, Yosuga, Sora no Otoshimono, Milky Holmes and others would all fall foul of its various stipulations.

There is also some doubt as to whether Comiket will be able to be held under the new regulations – if not, its cancellation or removal to another prefecture seems likely, although a lack of sufficiently large spaces may severely complicate this.

The law comes into effect in July of 2011, so with magazine, tankobon, anime and game release schedules being what they are, it seems likely its effects will be felt much sooner; in a genuinely democratic state there might be scope to overturn it before then, but from what has been seen so far it seems unlikely publishers have the guts or savvy to do anything about it.

source:sankaku complex

I don’t know if you guys have heard of this one. It’s ridiculously funny. Eventually, a 28-year old Korean guy marries his pillow which depicted the image of Fate Testarossa. In case you don’t know, Fate Testarossa is the character in anime Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha.

And we have both Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s for you guys if you want to set yourself to fall in love with the same anime girl and eventually….got married or something. Don’t forget to invite us!

What do you think guys, is he up to some overly done self-promotion, or he’s got some issues, or we just got punk’d?