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Tennessee School Districts Remove Multiple Manga Series from Libraries

In the past two months, two school districts in Tennessee have listed the books, including manga series, that they have removed from school libraries. Other school districts in Tennessee are considering how to comply with a new state law this year to limit books in school libraries.

The Rutherford County Schools removed over 150 titles from its school libraries on November 11 after board member Frances Rosales flagged them a day earlier. The first eight volumes of Yūsei Matsui's Assassination Classroom manga and volume 1 of Atsushi Ōkubo's Fire Force are among the titles under review.

Another board member, Caleb Tidwell, said that the titles were sexually explicit under school board policy and state obscenity laws. During a September board meeting, one of Tidwell's supporters for banning the books said that they contained "pornographic material."

The removal follows an earlier list of banned books from Tidwell in February, which contained 35 books not part of the district's curriculum, but available in the libraries. The district has 60 days to review the books before deciding to return them to libraries or permanently ban them.

Another school district in Tennessee, Wilson County Schools, listed on October 24 about 400 titles that it has removed from school libraries. The list includes the following titles:

• Gege Akutami's Jujutsu Kaisen
• Gōshō Aoyama's Case Closed
• Hirohiko Araki's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
• Kafka Asagiri and Sango Harukawa's Bungo Stray Dogs
• Buronson and Tetsuo Hara's Fist of the North Star
• Paul Duffield's The Tempest Manga Shakespeare
• Kōhei Horikoshi's My Hero Academia: Vigilantes (volumes 1 and 3)
• Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight
• Hitoshi Iwaaki's Parasyte (volumes 1-8)
• Akihisa Ikeda's Rosario + Vampire
• Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan (all volumes and subseries)
• Sui Ishida's Tokyo Ghoul
• Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu's The Promised Neverland
• Kazue Katō's Blue Exorcist
• Ryohgo Narita's Durarara!! (volume 2)
• Nio Nakatani Bloom Into You
• Atsushi Ōkubo's Soul Eater
• Katsuhiro Ōtomo's Akira
• Nakaba Suzuki's The Seven Deadly Sins
• Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha
• Yana Toboso's Black Butler
• Yoshihiro Togashi's Hunter X Hunter
• Yuu Watase's Alice 19th
• Oh! great's Air Gear

Rosales told Chalkbeat, a news organization dedicated to education in America, that she used Wilson County's list of removed books as well as the Book Looks website to compile the list of books to remove in Rutherford County Schools. (School districts in other states removed books such as Assassination Classroom partly on the basis of reviews on Book Looks last year.)

The Tennessee state legislature made changes to the Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022 on July 1 to expand the definition of obscenity.

Any material "containing nudity or describes or depicts sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence or sadomasochistic abuse" are now prohibited with the amended act. Material which appeals to the "prurient interest" should also be under consideration for age appropriateness.

Chalkbeat and the Clarksville Now website reported that the Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools district sent Wilson County Schools' list of removed books as a "resource" to its schools to review and consider for removal there.

Recent Manga Removals and Bans in the U.S.

Richmond County Schools in North Carolina removed all copies of Unico: Awakening sold at Scholastic Book Fairs in the district in late November, pending a review. The move followed a complaint from a mother of a first-grade student at Mineral Springs Elementary over a depiction of gun violence and animal abuse, specifically when a man attacks a cat.

Horry County Schools in South Carolina moved to remove Yūsei Matsui's Assassination Classroom manga from its school libraries on November 15, after the mother of a ninth grader at Socastee High School complained to the district regarding the manga's content. According to the district's policy, the District Reconsideration Committee's decision "and if applicable, the local board's review" cannot be challenged for five years.

Gifford Middle School in eastern Florida removed the Assassination Classroom manga from its library in March 2023 after receiving complaints from groups. The Elmbrook School District in southeastern Wisconsin similarly removed the manga from its electronic library that month after a complaint by a parent. The series faced challenges in other states as well.

The Brevard Public Schools Board in Florida banned the first volume of Shō Harusono's Sasaki and Miyano boys-love manga from the district's school libraries during a board meeting on August 27 earlier this year. A person in the district challenged the book's inclusion in the schools' libraries on the grounds that "sexual orientation should not be encouraged, suggested, or implanted" in the youth. The complaint also included concerns children would be "exposed to age-inappropriate, obscene, explicit content" and that there was "no value in making homosexual books available at school." The book is rated for T for Teens.

Utah banned 13 non-manga books from all public schools in the state in August, under a new law that bans books in all of Utah's 41 school districts if at least three districts boards ban them for pornographic or indecent material. According to the Associated Press, Tennessee, Idaho, and South Carolina have similar laws and regulations that allow books to be banned in school libraries statewide.

Sources: WSMV (Stacey Cameron), (link 2, Kassidy Brown), Chalkbeat (Marta W. Aldrich), Clarksville Now (Jordan Renfro)