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VOL.17: Pop, Porn and Politics: Who decides? by Roland Kelts
The sentencing of 39-year old American manga collector Christopher Handley in the US state of Iowa in February on obscenity charges, and a proposed bill in Japan later that month targeting "virtual porn" issued by the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly's General Affairs Committee sent shivers of anxiety through fans of Japanese popular culture worldwide. In US courts, Handley pleaded guilty in May of last year to possessing manga featuring "drawings of children being sexually abused," and he was sentenced this February 11 to six months in prison - though his lawyer noted that Handley's guilty plea (the lesser evil) would likely win him a few months in a halfway house, with no actual prison time or sex-offender scars on his record. 
Just weeks later in Japan, a legislative proposal was submitted to amend Metropolitan Tokyo's youth welfare law on child pornography to
include sexually provocative, "visual depictions" of characters who sound or appear to be 18 years old or younger. A preliminary vote was
scheduled for mid-March, with confirmation expected on March 30, and authorized enforcement as early as October 1.But something happened on the way to the Assembly hall. On the Monday (March 15) of the proposed preliminary vote, a group of manga creators, artists and writers gathered for a televised press conference to formally lodge their opposition to the legislation, which they did via a written statement they delivered directly to the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly. The assembled protesters amounted to a virtual who's who of manga luminaries, including Ashita no Joe creator Tetsuya Chiba, Doraemon's Fujiko Fujio A, shojo manga pioneer Moto Hagio, and InuYasha's Rumiko Takahashi - all of whom are recognized as veteran masters of their art. Protests in Japan are rare enough in comparatively conservative, discreet Japan, where the deru kugi wa utareru ('the nail that sticks up gets hammered down') mentality still holds sway. But a protest featuring such a wide array of the most revered names in the history of manga and anime deserved and garnered considerable attention. Debate and preliminary votes on the bill, slated to take place that Friday, were postponed indefinitely. Delayed, but hardly canceled. On April 23, as Tokyo-based translator Dan Kanemitsu reports, Tokyo Metropolitan Government legislator Reiko Matsushita held a public meeting in Kichijoji, West Tokyo, together with lawyer Takashi Yamaguchi of Tokyo-based Link Law Office Kito and Partners. Matsushita's staff noted that most such meetings attract an average of 30 attendees. This one, according to Kanemitsu, drew 130, several of whom stood throughout. The meeting lasted over two hours, during which Matsushita emphasized the intense pressure coming from older members of her own party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), and of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party to pass the legislation without amendment next month. She urged opponents of the bill to be vigilant and vocal, and to make clear that the legislation at hand is sloppy, ill-conceived and dangerous, potentially opening the floodgates of censorship and repression. In a sadly ironic footnote: controversial Tokyo Metropolitan Governor Shintaro Ishihara, whose own debut novel, Season of the Sun, and numerous subsequent books in the 1950s challenged Japan's status quo with depictions of youths engaged in promiscuous sexuality, brawling and gambling, drawing calls for censorship, reportedly supports this bill. I have often argued that Japanese popular culture - manga and anime in particular - is attractive in part because it feels free, less fettered by Hollywood-style 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, marginal in character and by nature - more like punk music than pop culture. "My impression of the proposed bill is that it is probably partly a reaction to recent foreign criticism of Japan, and the fear that unless something is done Japan may be branded one of the child porn capitals of the developed world," says Dreamland Japan author and manga authority Frederik L. Schodt. And yet as Jake Adelstein, board member of Polaris Project Japan, an organization that combats human trafficking in Japan and the sexual exploitation of women and children, explained to me: Japan still has no laws on the books incriminating the possession of child porn. What a shame it would be if a reactionary, poorly conceived piece of legislation meant to appease political anxieties were to pass, curtailing the creativity of Japan's leading artists and writers without alleviating the suffering of the very real children exploited by the porn industry. ** By Roland Kelts, Author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US, Lecturer at The University of Tokyo and Contributing Editor of A Public Space | ||
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