New survey shows frightning statics for hentai manga…
According to the the Yomiuri Shimbun, about 30 percent of pornographic comics for adults portray sexual acts involving children, according to a survey by the National Police Agency.
Because minors have little trouble buying such comics over the Internet, the NPA will ask comic publishers and related industries to take measures to help prevent such comics from being sold to them.
The agency took 100 samples from about 9,000 pornographic comics last month, and found 30 that included sexual acts with children. Five involved children of primary school age or younger.
Minors can buy these comics through Internet Web sites that do not verify the age of buyers. These comics also were available at convenience stores, and because they are covered in nontransparent wrapping, some children were not uncomfortable about being seen by store staffers when buying from the store staff or being seen by their family.
Subnote by Poster: I was going to attach an image to this article but after a brief search on google, I quickly realized how very easy it is to find images of the hentai manga in question… So I decided to leave it blank and without image.
Is there a large pedophile population in Japan?
December 29th, 2006 at 2:55 amIt is quite interesting how these issues pop up. I wonder who made the initial “discovery”, as it were, and who decided to investigate? It’s not a new thing, but I suppose it wasn’t asked about, and thusly wasn’t a problem. Very typical.
I’m going to watch this out of sheer morbid curiosity and I wonder if anything will really be resolved. One can hope.
Still, on the gripping hand (DORK ALERT), there is a difference between thinking and acting, so perhaps this is why it wasn’t a big deal. Very different way of thinking over there. Makes for interesting reading. The society makes for interesting reading, not the eromanga.
December 29th, 2006 at 5:34 amI would agree Kresh that to be honest I would rather that people read about high school girl fantasies in comics then try and live them out in real life.
The difference between thinking and acting is a huge one and there is no doubt there’s a good deal of money at stake.
I just wish Japanese society would stop ignoring this issue and start talking about it. Any sensible person will say its gross, its only a small handfull of people who like that sort of thing, its no big deal…
But thats just not the case… And I think its high time the issue was addressed on a major platform in Japanese society.
December 29th, 2006 at 6:11 amI am really wary of these sorts of reports. Firstly, I am not sure how much credence we should give to any report released by the National Police here. Secondly, the definition of children is often extended to anyone below the age of majority, 20 in Japan. The word “children” has become the emotional touchstone of this generation, and is used whenever somebody wants to whip up a frenzy of indignation over anything.
A sample of 100 is ridiculously small. Maybe the police didn’t have much of a budget for this survery, and could only afford 100 manga.
Worse is that foreign media love to pick up these stories to play up their favorite hentai Japan angle, providing people the world over with impressions like scubajim has above.
There are some scary pervs in Japan, but I have know of very few cases personally. Alernatively, in the bucolic splendor of British Columbia, where some of my family live, I have been shocked by the cases of child abuse and incest that I have heard about.
Japan has always been very open about sex, and portrayed it more honestly than Western countries. If Japanese want to change this, that’s fine. But I don’t care for Westerners bringing over their own attitudes and demanding Western approaches to the issue, especially when the Western approaches clearly haven’t worked in the West.
December 29th, 2006 at 11:35 amYes, it’s hard to figure what’s actually going on, since distributing child porn in Japan was made totally illegal in 1999 although there was some loophole regarding Web sites that they are now trying to plug. But the last I heard from a much bigger survey by Internet Watch Foundation (http://asia.news.yahoo.com/061024/kyodo/d8kv5he80.html) was that Japan had made great improvements with enforcement or whatever of the Web part recently. They found only 5% of kiddy porn sites hosted in Japan and 51% of them in USA with 20% in Russia and 7% in Spain. Harder to clean up the Web but if these manga are totally illegal, how come they are in stores and why don’t the cops arrest the publishers (and sellers for that matter?) Yes, I think the rest of the world has a funny idea about this stuff in Japan but doesn’t seem like it’s anywheres as bad as some reports suggest or ideas people may have about it.
December 29th, 2006 at 2:34 pmTranslation: “out of the 9,000 porn comics that were available, we selected 100 that had school uniforms on the cover, and found 25 that included at least one explicit picture of an obvious middle-school student, and 5 that included at least one explicit picture of an obvious grade-school student.”
Parsed that way, it’s surprising that they didn’t find a higher percentage.
-j
December 29th, 2006 at 9:54 pm