At the end of May, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party of Japan and its allies the Komeito and the Japan Restoration Party introduced, yet again, a bill to amend the national Child Pornography Law, citing the need for a further crackdown on the exploitation of children, and for aligning Japan with “global standards” of regulation. In reality, however, the bill, which is essentially a carbon copy of a previous one submitted in 2009, and which had been scrapped due to the LDP's historic electoral defeat that year, does nothing to further its stated goals. Its main provisions include a ban on “simple possession” of so-called child pornography, and a call for a three-year “inquiry” into the detrimental effects of sexual representations of minors in fiction (anime, manga and games), at the end of which the law would be expanded to include those other materials. Now you be thinking that this isn't so bad, for reasons such as: “What's wrong with banning possession of child porn? My country does it too! That stuff shouldn't exist! It gets made because there are criminal perverts who buy it! And by the way, if you defend it, you're a filthy pedophile, go kill yourself!” “So the anime ban isn't really a ban, just an inquiry. I see nothing wrong with that. They won't ban the stuff if they don't come up with a serious argument that it harms real children.” Both of those viewpoints are based on assumptions that are severely at odds with reality. This post is about the first point; in particular, I would like to explain why, even though it is in fact true that many countries have a ban on the simple possession of what they call “child pornography”, adding such a ban to the Japanese child porn law would very much not align it with “global standards”. I might discuss the second point in a later short note. read more
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