Radio 4's "Crossing Continents" to cover underage sex manga

Ian Wolf

Ian Wolf

Mushi-shi
AUKN Staff
BBC Radio 4's foreign affairs documentary series <em>Crossing Continents </em>is to broadcast an episode about manga featuring underage sex.

The episode, entitled "Should Comics Be Crimes?" features correspondent James Fletcher investigating the controversy around manga that depict paedophilia such as lolicon, interviewing people attacking and defending the publication of such works.

In June 2014, Japan became the last country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to ban the possession of images featuring real-life child abuse, but the law does not cover depictions in manga and other such fictional works. The argument is mainly between those people who want to outlaw such images entirely because they believe they promote child abuse, and are concerned about Japan's image with the upcoming 2020 Olympics; and those who are opposed to censorship and defend lolicon on the grounds the characters depicted are fictional and thus are not actually harmed.

A feature article on the BBC News website by Fletcher presents a look at what can be expected in the programme, including interviewers with people who regularly consume lolicon and child protection campaigners.&nbsp;

<em>Crossing Continents: Should Comics Be Crimes?</em> goes out on BBC Radio 4 at 11am tomorrow (8th January 2015), will be available on the BBC iPlayer for 30 days afterwards, and will be downloadable as a podcast from the BBC website.

<strong>Synopsis</strong>

<em>In Japan, manga and anime are huge cultural industries. These comics and cartoons are read and watched by young and old, men and women, geeks and office workers. Their fans stretch around the world and their cultural appeal has been used by the government to market 'Cool Japan'.</em>

<em>Manga and anime can be about almost anything, and some can be confronting - especially those featuring young children in sexually explicit scenarios. The UK, Canada and Australia have all banned these sorts of virtual images, placing them in the same legal category as real images of child abuse.</em>

<em>Earlier this year, Japan became the last OECD country to outlaw the possession of real child abuse images, but they decided not to ban manga and anime. To many outsiders and some Japanese, this seems baffling - another example of 'weird Japan', and a sign the country still has a long way to go to taking child protection seriously.</em>

<em>James Fletcher travels to Tokyo to find out why the Japanese decided not to ban. Is this manga just fodder for paedophiles, and is Japan dragging its feet on protecting children? Or is Japan resisting moral panic and standing up for freedom of thought and expression?</em>

Episode homepage
 
Re: Radio 4's

Will definitely listen - Radio 4 have done some good pieces on Japan in the past, and in my eyes it's always good to see mainstream coverage of anime/manga, even if it's negative. I am pretty sick of the endless 'oh it's all porn and underage girls' angle though - as it just continues to subscribe to stereotypes.

Yes, it's a thorny issue - but articles like this never explore it in enough depth - so a casual reader will just go away enraged over it.
 
Re: Radio 4's

When I checked my social media channels shortly after waking up, I found a link in my inbox for the BBC News article. At least it opens up by saying only "some" manga material is in this oh-so-popular category?

I did admittedly laugh at this bit:
"I like young-girl sexual creations, Lolicon is just one hobby of my many hobbies," he says.

I ask what his wife, standing nearby, thinks of his "hobby".

"She probably thinks no problem," he replies. "Because she loves young boys sexually interacting with each other."
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That Junior Idol thing though, does sound messed up.

Although maybe people might stop thinking of Japan as "Weird Japan" and think of it as "Cool Japan" if places didn't always focus on one aspect of its popular culture? I see far more articles on the mainstream sites about things like this, as opposed to more positive things and that's no doubt going to influence the public perspective here.
 
Re: Radio 4's

I thought the article sucked. They've actually revised it since I read it last night; it previously had the lady towards the end being quoted as saying "But she tells me she hasn't given up hope of a ban on manga and anime." which is much more troubling than the amended version. They've also cropped the picture from the doujin event differently now (I can't decide whether it looks more or less raunchy this way).

On the whole, the writer makes the usual sweeping assumptions about Japan being full of weirdos and expresses surprise that someone he's talking to about lewd material at a male-orientated doujin event is quite candid about his hobby. He has some good points to make - real kids doing gravure is definitely messed up - but in the end he conflates them with too many different issues and tars everyone with the same brush.

R
 
Re: Radio 4's

Didn't really need to go any further than the tabloid tier headline to know exactly what sort of article this would be.

Why isn't this banned!? I dunno, maybe because there's never been an unbiased factual study which has been able to demonstrate that fictional content is harmful to normally functioning human beings and Japan's government isn't in the habit of banning things just because a handful of moral crusaders object?

So would he stand up for the right of creators to draw manga featuring young children and taboos like rape and incest?
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Obviously, they should be shot. That's clearly what reasonable people do when others draw things they don't like as demonstrated today.
 
Re: Radio 4's

animefreak17 said:
I just hope they don't give any negative feed back on anime and manga altogether
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I'm sure it'll start out balanced like the article, mentioning that Manga and Anime cover diverse topics, and then by the end the listener will be round to Waterstones torching the Manga section because it's evil.
 
Re: Radio 4's

Rosencrantz said:
animefreak17 said:
I just hope they don't give any negative feed back on anime and manga altogether
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I'm sure it'll start out balanced like the article, mentioning that Manga and Anime cover diverse topics, and then by the end the listener will be round to Waterstones torching the Manga section because it's evil.
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I mean come on 16 year olds can have sex in this country.

In the world there's loads of kids who have sex young
 
Re: Radio 4's

I'm listening to the radio show now. It's basically a repetition of the print article so far. One thing that the article didn't mention though, is the admission that the "kawaii" culture can make it difficult to determine whether someone actually is underage. They also did mention that there is no evidence to establish whether or not such images do lead to offending.

It's a shame though that James Fletcher basically came into this debate with a pre-established opinion that he won't stop repeating (and generalising that apparently all of us British people would go "eww" towards it). He does also mention BL manga as if it's all exclusively shotacon (as a straight guy I don't read BL, but even I know it isn't all shotacons).

Also, I'm not sure I'd ever approach any border agency staff and say "This is my porn collection".
 
Re: Radio 4's

It's so annoying that the only way the actual crime in the article (underaged gravure) relates to manga is that it's physically located in the same country and on sale in the same capital city. That's like saying we should ban cake shops because there's gun crime in London too, and it's possible some gangsters sometimes eat cakes.

But no, British people can't possibly be perverts themselves. It's all the influence of these wicked foreign countries and their twisted cultural exports.

I would be happy to take Mr. Fletcher around a BL convention with zero shotacon (since I can't stand it) if he'd like a tour.

R
 
Re: Radio 4's

I do have to say, one thing I'm not liking is how despite the rational arguments put forward to James Fletcher, it's like he doesn't even address them and just continues to inject his own opinion.

Rui said:
It's so annoying that the only way the actual crime in the article (underaged gravure) relates to manga is that it's physically located in the same country and on sale in the same capital city. That's like saying we should ban cake shops because there's gun crime in London too, and it's possible some gangsters sometimes eat cakes.

R
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I do wonder why we don't see as much of a fuss about the underaged gravure than we do about manga, or is it simply a case that as the gravure doesn't make its way to the west as often as manga, that we don't hear about it?
 
Re: Radio 4's

There will always be those who will bash something they don't like even if it's good or don't understand the full comprehension of the otaku culture
 
Re: Radio 4's

Now that the segment has concluded, I wouldn't say that it was as much of a "bashing" as we initially thought it would be. Some very reasonable arguments were put forward by some of the people interviewed, such as the "reality vs fiction" divide and the lack of evidence to support the notion that prepubescent or assumed prepubescent material encourages criminal acts.

My only issue would be that although they were given air-time, James Fletcher didn't really appear to acknowledge any of the arguments and instead kept to his narrative. If he wanted to leave things as a blank slate for the audience to make up their minds, that would have been great, but at times it did feel like he was out to shame people who thought differently.
 
Re: Radio 4's

Some parts of the documentary were sensationalist. In the first minute the person Fletcher interviewed mentioned "manga for Neo-Nazis", and the bit about yaoi and mentioning underage characters annoyed me to. I did like what most of the interviewees had to say mind, and it was interested into hear from artist est em (which of her yaoi was banned in Canada?) - but I was angry at the novelist LiLy using the word "kinky" as an insult and using the "speaking as a mother" argument.

The Junior Idol DVDs they mentioned at the end did make me feel uncomfortable and I did they they should be censored, but I'm I thinking that because I believe it to be true, or because I'm caught up in Fletcher's viewpoint?
 
Re: Radio 4's

The whole perceived age thing is a really difficult issue in general when imaginary carticatures are being used. When Mr. Fletcher describes two topless preteens in the article, he admits that it's his own interpretation of their ages. And then you have situations where genuinely adult characters are given skinny, androgynous bodies (many people like that in their real-life adult women), which I think should be fine, and on the other side you have girls who act like they're little kids despite having fully mature bodies (which completely turns me off, even though plenty of non-manga-fans love girls who act like that in the real world, too). The lead picture in the article shows characters who are all impossibly well-endowed in a BBFC-pleasing way despite having school uniforms on and I imagine they'd be considered acceptably mature here and in their country of origin, making them a weird choice for an article with such a baiting headline.

Going back to the infamous Code Geass obscenity edit, it says a lot about the sexist (and arguably racist) undercurrents in our own country when someone's physical age is judged solely based on their visible sexual characteristics instead of the context. Breast size is easily the dumbest way to judge maturity, but overlooking cultural elements like Japan's unique quirks in what they can and can't depict to avoid falling foul of decency laws is another pitfall for the uninformed.

(I'm not saying this sokubaikai event didn't have any actual lolicon manga - it almost certainly did - but there are still obscenity laws and restrictions at doujin events and he makes it sound like every circle there was peddling child pornography, which is absolute nonsense.)

I don't understand why any parents let their very young children appear in sleazy gravure videos in the first place. It's a completely separate issue to manga in every conceivable way.

Ian Wolf said:
it was interested into hear from artist est em (which of her yaoi was banned in Canada?)
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While I'm afraid I don't know the answer to this (doesn't est em usually focus on quite mature-looking, rugged characters?) one of my BL mangaka friends has complained to me before about how strict the censorship in the US is for some content. She described it as blatant homophobia and was genuinely shocked she couldn't get some things published which wouldn't raise an eyebrow back home in the Japanese industry. It definitely wasn't shotacon in her case.

R
 
Re: Radio 4's

Rui said:
Ian Wolf said:
it was interested into hear from artist est em (which of her yaoi was banned in Canada?)
Click to expand...

While I'm afraid I don't know the answer to this (doesn't est em usually focus on quite mature-looking, rugged characters?) one of my BL mangaka friends has complained to me before about how strict the censorship in the US is for some content. She described it as blatant homophobia and was genuinely shocked she couldn't get some things published which wouldn't raise an eyebrow back home in the Japanese industry. It definitely wasn't shotacon in her case.
Click to expand...

I know that "Bond of Dreams, Bond of Love" was banned in Canada, but that was by Yaga Sakuragi.
 
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