Manga Mania

[DownLoLarry]

In Tokyo, a Crackdown on Sexual Images of Minors

By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — In a manga comic book that is well known here, “My Wife Is an Elementary School Student,” a 24-year-old teacher marries a 12-year-old girl as part of a top-secret social experiment.

There is no depiction of actual sex. But the teacher’s steamy fantasies fill the comic’s pages in graphic detail, including a little naked girl with sexually suggestive props.

Meanwhile, in a widely available new DVD, a real-life Japanese model poses in a tiny white bikini. She makes popcorn in a maid’s costume. She plays with a beach ball while being hosed down with water.

The model, Akari Iinuma, is 13 years old.

Japan, which has long been relatively tolerant of the open sale and consumption of sexually oriented material, lately has developed a brisk trade in works that in many other countries might be considered child pornography. But now some public officials want to place tighter restrictions on the provocative depictions of young girls — referred to as “junior idols”— that are prevalent in magazines, DVDs and Web videos.

One particularly big target is manga comic books that depict pubescent girls in sexual acts. It a lucrative segment of the $5.5 billion industry for manga, illustrated books drawn in a characteristic Japanese comic-book style.

A newly revised ordinance by Tokyo’s metropolitan government, which restricts the sale of such material, has prompted a national debate between its publishers and critics inside and outside Japan, who say the fare exploits children and may even encourage pedophilia. Other local and regional governments, including the Osaka Prefecture, are considering similar restrictions.

“These are for abnormal people, for perverts,” said Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, angrily throwing two comic books to the floor during an interview. Mr. Ishihara spearheaded the ordinance changes, which take effect in July.

While the revised law applies to an area containing only about a tenth of Japan’s population, Tokyo is the nation’s media capital and a de facto arbiter of the country’s pop culture boundaries. “There’s no other country in the world that lets such crude works exist,” Mr. Ishihara said.

To protest the ordinance, 10 of this country’s biggest publishers have said they will boycott the Tokyo International Anime Fair next month, Japan’s premier event for manga and animated films.

The new law specifically bars only the sale to minors of the restricted comics and videos. But industry executives say it will essentially end publication of the material by discouraging risk-averse publishers and booksellers from handling it at all.

“There are no victims in manga — we should be free to write what we want,” said Yasumasa Shimizu, vice president at Japan’s largest publishing company, Kodansha, which is participating in the boycott. “Creativity in Japanese manga thrives on an ‘anything goes’ mentality.”

Manga taps into a history of erotica that dates at least as far back as the ukiyo-e prints of 17th- to 19th-century Japan, including Hokusai’s famous portrayal of a fisherwoman and octopi in a salacious encounter. But it was as recently as the 1980s that comic magazines like Lemon People introduced a wider audience to sexual manga featuring young girls.

“There is a culture, an industry that worships youth and innocence,” said Mariko Katsuki, who published a book last year chronicling adults who are attracted to small children. “Much of the attraction is nonsexual, but sometimes it becomes a dangerous obsession.”

The new Tokyo law, which applies to anyone under 18, bans the sale of comics and other works — including novels, DVDs and video games — that depict sexual or violent acts that would violate Japan’s national penal code, as well as sex involving anyone under age 18. The ordinance also requires guardians to prevent children younger than 13 from posing for magazines or videos that depict them in sexually suggestive ways.

Legal experts say that Japan’s laws against child pornography are lax by international standards. Japan has banned the production or distribution of any sexually explicit, nude images of minors since 1999, when Parliament passed a law in response to international criticism of the wide availability of such works in the country. But even now, unlike the United States and most European countries, Japan does not ban the possession of child pornography.

In recent cases in the United States and Sweden, authorities have made arrests over manga books imported from Japan depicting sexual abuse of children. An American manga collector, Christopher Handley, pleaded guilty in 2009 to violating the 2003 Protect Act, which outlawed cartoons or drawings that depict minors in sexually explicit ways.

Japan’s 1999 law has also helped stamp out a formerly popular genre of photo books depicting nude under-age girls. One of the genre’s best-selling books, published in 1991, featured nude photos of the actress Rie Miyazawa, who was not yet 18 at the time of the photo shoot.

But in the last five or six years, books and videos have emerged that sidestep the law by featuring girls, some as young as age 6, posing in swimsuits that stop short of full nudity. These models, who are paid about 200,000 yen ($2,400) a shoot, often dream of careers in acting or music, industry insiders say.

Junior idol photo books and DVDs are widely available on Web sites like Amazon’s site in Japan and in specialized bookstores. At least eight magazines are devoted to such photos, including Sho-Bo, which features girls of elementary school age.

“I loved the white bikini,” Ms. Iinuma, the 13-year-old model, told the adult male fans who turned out at the Sofmap electronics store in Tokyo for an event to promote the release of her second DVD, “Developing Now.” It is a plotless 70 minutes of Ms. Iinuma in various costumes and poses.

At the gathering, Ms. Iinuma performed a short dance, spoke about the video shoot, then posed as men approached her to snap photos, while her mother looked on from the back of the room.

Hiromasa Nakai, a spokesman for the Japan Committee for Unicef, said the abundance of child pornography in Japan made it even easier for those who would normally not be considered as having clinical pedophilia, a psychiatric disorder characterized by a sexual obsession with young children, to develop a sexual interest in children.

“To a degree, it has become socially accepted to lust over young girls in Japan,” Mr. Nakai said. “Condoning these works has meant more people have access to them and develop an interest in young girls.”

There have been earlier moves to regulate pedophilic material in Japan, especially after the murders of four little girls in 1988-89 by a man police described as a pedophile. The case spurred local governments across Japan to adopt ordinances setting some limits to sales of pedophilic works, including a loose ratings system for explicit manga books imposed by the publishers themselves, and also set the stage for the 1999 anti-child pornography law.

Already the Tokyo government checks for “unwholesome” manga publications and can order publishers to label them as for adults only. But supporters of more regulation say those efforts have been sporadic.

“We believe that when the rights of adults or businesses violate children’s rights, children must come first,” said Tamae Shintani, head of Tokyo’s parent-teacher association for elementary schools. “But we also respect free speech, so the least we can ask is people keep their fetishes under wraps.”

The industry’s defenders say comparing manga to pedophilia involving real children is absurd. “Depicting a crime and committing one are two different things; it’s like convicting a mystery writer for murder,” said Takashi Yamaguchi, a Tokyo lawyer and manga expert.

Mr. Yamaguchi and others also contend that the Tokyo government pushed through the new regulations without ample debate. Some also worry that stronger regulations will harm an industry whose fortunes have already fallen in recent years; sales of comic magazines, in particular, have dropped by a third over the last decade, to $24.3 million in 2008.

The manga artist Takeshi Nogami, whose best-known work features high school girls riding military tanks, says he senses a disdain among policy makers toward manga itself. “They think reading manga makes you dumb,” he said.

In late December at the Comic Market, a self-published comic book fair that is held twice a year in Tokyo and attended by more than 500,000 people, manga titles depicting adults having sex with minors were on open display. And they were readily available to fans like Koki Yoshida, age 17.

“I don’t even think about how old these girls are,” Mr. Yoshida said. “It’s a completely imaginary world, separate from real life.”