Forum - View topicNEWS: Japanese Companies React to 'Rape Game' Ban's Fallout
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bleuster
 Posts: 455 Location: Orange County |
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See... damn, I knew stuff like this was going to happen.
I hate my life. |
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Anime World Order
 Posts: 390 Location: Florida |
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"To defend our culture"? "TO DEFEND OUR CULTURE"? What? I didn't realize that porno computer games were such a central aspect of Japanese society! Clearly us UNCULTURED foreigners simply can't comprehend Glorious Nippon's ancient and time-honored tradition of kiddy rape simulators! This whole "we are doing our part to preserve and defend Japanese pop culture" schtick being put forth by people who at the end of the day are predominantly pursuing Asian erotica strikes me as a case of denial. Sure the argument can be made, but it's terribly circuitous and I'd much rather people just come out and say they really like pervy figurines, games, artbooks, et al because they find them sexually arousing already. |
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Daimao Raki
 Posts: 593 Location: Dark Side of the Moon |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 24174 |
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Wow. I had no idea that student councils material was so pervy. *burns his Best Student Council volumes* And yes, I too, found the "defending Japanese culture" comment to be eye-roll inducing. |
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5594 |
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the main issue I have is that, while we're allowed to KILL people in video games, we can't do FAR less violent and not even illegal in real life things such as having a fetish for pregnancy of video game characters. makes me wonder where all the people who play these games are gonna turn to now to get off
i dont play these games so it doesnt effect me too much, but it's still a blow to freedom in japan |
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rti9
 Posts: 1241 |
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Maybe the guy who wrote that statement should get Darwin Award honorary mention since he is probably leading quite a few of those who will improve human genome by "preferring 2D girls".
LOL. Restricting the website to the Japanese. Yes, definite blow to freedom in Japan. /s |
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einhorn303
 Posts: 1180 |
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Erotica and sexuality art part of culture, from the days of Pagan rituals to Greek art. Even if your an exasperated puritan who wants to erase all sex from the world, you cannot erase this aspect of humanity from what is considered culture. Sadly, a lot of Americans are living up to minori's negative image of ethnocentric, censor-happy buffoons. At least they apologized to foreign fans. |
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v1cious
 Posts: 6230 Location: Houston, TX |
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i'm pretty sure he was referring to the ban. i really don't see this affecting anyone. sure jobs will be lost, but they will just continue to get their kicks through visual novels and doujin. |
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pparker
 Posts: 1185 Location: Florida |
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I won't get into a debate on this issue, but if anyone thinks this is just a funny and stupid little anecdote (which it arguably is), or is innocuous and has nothing to do with freedom of expression, they should read the link below and follow the included reference links to other articles and information (the full site is NSFW, but non-safe or unwanted content is disabled by default).
A very small but vocal group--outside Japan--ignoring all factual statistics such as the extremely low rate of actual sexual crime in Japan compared to the West, is seeking to ban virtually all pictorial content of a sexual nature created in Japan. The queen of Sweden even publicly attacked Japan's art industry, and Sweden has apparently the highest rate of sexual crime in Europe. The European Union is moving toward a ban of what would be a fair percentage of Japanese manga, games and anime, and that means removing access for adults, not children. It of course also means reduced revenues for some Japanese artists and producers. The problem is the same as with the convictions of manga buyers in the U.S. Who wants to stand up to defend the freedom of artists to produce--and adults to buy--porn? In current times, there are few, and the overwhelming media-driven mob mentality has probably progressed too far to stop at this point. I'm afraid the edge of the slippery slope is already out of sight. The over-arching issues and actions are a perfect example of pure politics over reason, and if you happen to enjoy anime and manga partly for the freedom of expression, including sexual expression even if humorous, then you are likely in for future disappointment. If the Japanese allow themselves to be bullied in this way, it's their own fault. But once you include the serious Chinese global attack on freedom of expression and speech, this planet is moving pretty rapidly in the wrong direction politically. http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2009/06/24/eroge-taliban-take-over-all-fetishes-banned-in-eroge/ |
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PetrifiedJello
Posts: 3782 |
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I guess Japanese must be really hard to learn, because even Japanese can't seem to understand their own language. The ban stemmed from law changes in Japan, not foreign countries. No matter. Their loss. I'm sure these websites will flourish now that it just alienated 90% of its fan base. 
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Goodpenguin
Posts: 457 Location: Hunt Valley, MD |
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This business with Japanese adult-PC games is just a time-honored (Japanese) cultural dance.
1. Overly-rigid mainstream conventions open up segmented, off-radar entertainment 'niches' 2. Being the nature of an off-radar 'niche', the boundaries of the material push ever outward in 'taboo' territory 3. Big-time reaction from public/media when it captures mainstream attention In terms of entertainment, the same go-round happened in blow-back to the popular exploitation-minded genre pictures of the 60s/70s. Japan's rigidly formal (generally speaking) public 'face' doesn't do a great job of incorporating 'pressure release' type's of entertainment. The effect of this is that you often get increasingly bizarre side niches. Every one really knows about them, but in Japan there's an attitude of 'speak no evil, hear no evil..' towards these veins. That is until an entertainment genre breaks one of the two cardinal rules: 1. Thou shall not embarrass the mainstream Japanese public 2. Thou shall triple-dog-dare not embarass the mainstream Japanese public in front of foreigners. Adult PC games put the ball through both goal-posts. I'm not an expert on 'eroge' games, but just casual observation will tell you they've picked up intensity in terms of fetish/taboo content in the last few years. I see a lot of ad's on Japanese sites especially centered around cheaper DLsite games (as opposed to CD/DVD store games from publishers like Discovery or Cross-net) that are well into the bounds of......questionable view-points toward women. I tend to think this is where the trouble came from (a game like 'Rapeplay' would come form this segment). Just traveling across one popular PC site I see one game whose ad-splash shows a girl being assaulted with her limbs being simultaneously amputated and her eye gouged out. That's a long, long, long way from 'Aisaiger' or 'Boin'. I know this is the internets, the anime internets at that, and the prevailing wisdom says that the commercial market system is a government scam, artists love to product content for free, copy-right is worse than Hitler, and its totally, completely normal and healthy for 35 year-old men to watch shows centered around 11 year-old girls; but folks, call me a stingy old-puritan, I'll say again there's a difference between 'liberal' and 'libertine'. The world will never be some breezy, ethereal intellectual salon, and all societies will have 'taboo' boundaries, especially with issues like sex and violence. It's really incumbent on the companies that provide 'niche' entertainment to essentially monitor their own output, and try to stay out of public ire. This happened in the US a few years back when big-name adult entertainment companies essentially ratted out small producers who were making rape/torture/??? films. In the realm of adult-PC games, if there's a visible segment of games devoted to the bloody dismemberment of women, Houston, we have a problem. I'm 99% sure material like extreme rape/violence play represent a relatively small segment of the larger adult-PC market, but it's not so small that I can't find some eye-popping (figuratively and literally) examples just through casual browsing. That means it's got a somewhat visible following. When you've got that type of entertainment in a visible slot, there's going to be problems. Adult-PC game-makers should have exercised a bit more control of the market, and of course when the pendulum swings too far one way it usually bounces back too far the other when trouble comes. Looking over the list of 'banned' scenarios, unless adult-PC companies plan on making titles like 'Salaryman Hiro and bi-annual contraceptive-aided quickie with his wife', I'm not sure what there really going to be putting out. But again, that's really a situation they put themselves into. There's a good chance that the 'ban' is really just a time-buying gambit to let the public heat die down, but in the big picture it's another case of Japan's eclectic 'cultural persona' creating odd cycles of extremism and blow-back. |
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sunflowerseed
 Posts: 106 Location: South Texas |
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This is becoming dispelled I believe as a statement written as: "In Japan it has been the normal behavior for so long that when the sex crimes occur they are not reported because they happen so often and are a natural way of life in Japan." That being said the type of behaviors being banned in the Eroge games carries on the behavior and allows it to proliferate their society so those who wish to continue praying on underage children can justify and continue as they wish, this behavior. If every girl reported how often they were messed around with inappropriately by someone they know the police boxes in Japan would probably be empty. So in saying that I believe, in MY OPINION, that to be a deliberate false police statistic released by Japan. |
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TatsuGero23
 Posts: 1277 Location: Sniper Island, USA (It's in your heart!) |
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Going with what einhorn303, I get a weird impression that some of you are generalizing the concept of culture too much. Seeing it as only one thing rather then something multifaceted. Is it a part of culture that adversely bothers other people? Yeah but its still a part of their culture and a part of ours. Just like all the other things in our world. In any case, meh. It doesn't bother me. Porn gets old after a while anyways. |
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gatotsu911
Posts: 457 Location: US of East Coast |
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I'm no proponent of "rape games" (or any sort of violent hentai for that matter), but it's the principle of the thing that bothers me here. Honestly, I kind of understand what this one company is doing here. I mean, the fact that this controversy was stirred up by a bunch of activists FROM AMERICA, even though the game was never officially available outside Japan, really bothers me. I can understand why the Japanese would be pissed that a bunch of pissy activists from a completely different country were coming in and pressuring their government to change their censorship laws. I'd be pissed too. It's none of America's business. While this company's response may be a little overly broad and not terribly effectual, I can completely understand why they did it.
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Goodpenguin
Posts: 457 Location: Hunt Valley, MD |
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The bulk of the current issue came from domestic media attention, foreign interest was a visible, but small part of the story. I'm not sure how this got twisted into another round of 'Everybody's cool but America!!". Contrary to internet belief, anime-styled fetishes are *not* mainstream Japanese fun-for-the-family material. The Japanese mainstream tolerates 'otaku'-dom, until it publicly embarrasses them. Though to be fair to 'otaku'-dom, some of the media reports from outlets like TBS are off-base to suggest things like rape/torture are an anime outlier. That type of material was all over 60s/70s cinema, in pretty extreme ways. Casual racism/bigotry in blaming problems on foreigners is a part of mainstream Japan however. |
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