Japan's Youth Ordinance Bill

[Dante]

The full Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly approved the government's revised bill to amend the Youth Healthy Development Ordinance on Wednesday afternoon.

 

The current ordinance already prevents the sale and renting of "harmful publications" — materials that are "sexually stimulating, encourages cruelty, and/or may compel suicide or criminal behavior" to people under the age of 18. Bill 156 would require the industry to also regulate "manga, anime, and other images (except for real-life photography)" that "unjustifiably glorify or exaggerate" certain sexual or pseudo sexual acts. Another section of the revised bill would allow the government to directly regulate the above images if the depicted acts are also "considered to be excessively disrupting of social order" such as rape.

 

The assembly also approved a non-binding supplemental resolution urging newly designated harmful publications to be carefully regulated, with the work's merits based on artistic, social, and other criteria to be taken into account in the evaluation process.

 

The voluntary self-regulation clauses will go into effect on April 1 of next year, and the restrictions on sales and renting will go into effect on July 1.

 

This law will force games/anime/manga that are in the mainstream media to be labeled as over-18 only and could lose alot of sales.

[ReZourceman]

I am sad to hear we may no longer be exposed to giant penis tentacle demons.

[heroicjanitor]

My main pasttime was looking at pre-teen looking girls flash their panties

 

Why have they banned it btw? What criteria are they judging it by?

 

if the depicted acts are also "considered to be excessively disrupting of social order"

 

At the risk of sounding like a sympathiser, it all sounds very subjective to me.

[EddieColeslaw]

I don't care much about the porn/tentacle rape/panties, but I'd be disappointed if they "directly regulated" guro manga

 

heroicjanitor, why wouldn't they ban under-18s i.e. children from looking at images which glorify "certain sexual or pseudo sexual acts"? Or maybe that's not exactly what you meant...maybe there's been trouble with gangs recently over there re:disrupting social order.

[Dante]

Why have they banned it btw? What criteria are they judging it by?

 

They have not banned it at all, they only made it suitable for over 18s.

 

Here is how it works:

 

1. This law does not porn because those are already at 18 and won't affect them.

 

2. This law affects all games/anime/manga targeted at the mainstream. Aka, things they want to actually sell as NOT-PORN. Now if you deal with any adult subjects such as homosexuality, rape, and have things the government may consider as immoral in your game/anime/manga, it will be put in the PORN-ONLY over 18 section and thus can't be sold to a mainstream audience.

 

3. The result is that mainstream companies like Sega, Namco, N1, magazines like Shounen Sunday, various Shoujo magazines, lots of anime studios will purposely avoid any content that involves any of those things because they are going to be afraid to overstep the boundry and have it be labeled as over-18 only and lose all possible sales. Plus the whole "get publically shamed" thing.

 

Thus the result is the dirty stuff in Japan stays the same, but the public entertainment area of Japan becomes neutered in dealing with difficult subjects. Lots of stories use events like rape or homosexuality for a story purpose, and now that will get them the equivalant of the old X rating in the US.

[Emasher]

I can understand why you might want to restrict actual porn to adults only (not that it stops anyone), but entertainment that just deals with sexual subjects without actually being porn being considered porn is ridiculous, especially when they're doing it for "Moral" (subjective) reasons rather than scientific reasons.

[heroicjanitor]

Yeah morals depend on the person, that's what I was getting at. How do they decide if the anime is "considered to be excessively disrupting of social order"? Do they go and ask the high-minded people who wanted the ban? Porn being restricted to adults is all well and good but if it's just people's opinion that they don't want teens to see an anime about a kid who gains power and destroys a city then it is wrong.

[Emasher]

I don't really know much about Japan, but in the west these decisions tend to be made by bigoted old/middle aged (usually) women who really have no idea at all about the content they're deciding to virtually censor and think that they're the only people in the world who have any morals because their opinion of what morals are is shared by the only people the allow themselves to be associated with. Its also usually religiously motivated. Again, I don't know if this is the case in Japan though.

[Dante]

Shintarō Ishihara is the person that made this bill and his views are;

 

It should also be noted that governor Ishihara, the man behind this bill, is a notorious right-wing extremist that has publicly offended koreans and chinese people, not to mention his insults on homosexual people (he thinks their DNA is damaged) and anime and manga fan (they, too, have DNA problems and are thus labeled as abnormal). He also openly preaches revisionist opinions regarding Japan's WW2 war crimes in Asia.

 

To add insult to injury, governor Ishihara is a novelist renowned for extremely debatable novels, ranging from rape&kill scenarios involving an handicapped girl, sexual humiliations, gang rape and so on. Some of his works have been adapted as films, and one of them has allegedly instigated copycats crimes for some time. Of course his works won't be affected by this bill since, as everyone know (except for those with damaged DNA, that is) animation and comics have terrible effects on children while movies and books can only do good

 

In 1990, Ishihara said in a Playboy interview that the Rape of Nanking was a fiction, claiming, "People say that the Japanese made a holocaust but that is not true. It is a story made up by the Chinese. It has tarnished the image of Japan, but it is a lie."

 

Ishihara said in a 2001 interview with women's magazine Shukan Josei that he believed "old women who live after they have lost their reproductive function are useless and are committing a sin," adding that he "couldn't say this as a politician."

 

In 2000, Ishihara, one of the eight judges for a literary prize, commented that homosexuality is abnormal.

 

Ishihara also said: "Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood. Africans — I don't mean African-Americans — who don't speak English are there doing who knows what. This is leading to new forms of crime such as car theft. We should be letting in people who are intelligent."

 

During an inauguration of a university building in 2004, Ishihara stated that French is unqualified as an international language because it is "a language in which nobody can count," referring to the counting system in French, which he believed to be based on units of twenty rather than ten (as is the case in Japanese and English).

Edited December 19, 2010 by Dante

[Jonnas]

Shintarō Ishihara is the person that made this bill and his views are;

 

This man's description is...comical. Does he seriously hold such an influential position?

[Mokong]

Am I the only one who saw the thread title and not being aware of this bill previously had a vision of Battle Royal becoming real?

[Ashley]

I don't really know much about Japan, but in the west these decisions tend to be made by bigoted old/middle aged (usually) women who really have no idea at all about the content they're deciding to virtually censor and think that they're the only people in the world who have any morals because their opinion of what morals are is shared by the only people the allow themselves to be associated with. Its also usually religiously motivated. Again, I don't know if this is the case in Japan though.

 

 

HAI!