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If you're traveling to Canada, a country whose customs officials are notorious for playing the role of morality police, you'd better leave your Japanese comics at home — whether they're in print or digital.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund announced today in a press release that it's forming a coalition to support the defense of an American citizen facing criminal charges for manga discovered on his laptop while crossing from the US into Canada. If convicted, he faces a minimum of one year in prison on charges of child pornography.
To quote from the CBLDF press release:
These charges come at a time when sexual material in manga is being challenged both in Japan and abroad. In 2007, Christopher Handley, a manga collector in Iowa, was charged under the PROTECT Act for possession of child pornography when custom officials intercepted and opened a package for Handley from Japan. Police later came to his house with a search warrant and charged him based on several "obscene" manga found in his collection. Despite a vigorous defense by the CBLDF and comic luminaries such as Neil Gaiman and manga expert Matt Thorn, Handley finally pled guilty in 2009 and was sentenced to six months of prison time.
In 2010, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government passed Bill 156,an expansion of a dusty 1964 law titled the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths, giving the Tokyo government far-reaching powers over minors' access to the Internet and mobile devices, and criminalizing the sale to minors of
Promoted by its sponsors with "protect the children" style rhetoric, the bill passed despite a petition against it signed by numerous manga artists and a threat by major manga publishers, including Shonen Jump publisher Shueisha, to boycott the 2011 Tokyo International Anime Fair (the boycott threat never materialized, as the fair was canceled due to the earthquake). The bill goes into full effect on July 1st, but already the Tokyo government has released the names of the first six manga targeted under the bill.
Pointedly, unlike America's PROTECT act, Tokyo's Bill 156 does not prevent the sale of graphic adult manga as long as they're labeled "18 and up"; thus, the bill would actually not criminalize the kind of hardcore manga Handley was convicted of possessing, but instead targets borderline titles such as teenage sex comedies, gritty manga involving taboo subjects such as prostitution and incest, and so on.
Efforts at manga regulation in the Japan and the US aren't unrelated; as Japanese pop culture writers including Frederik Schodt and Roland Kelts have pointed out, censors in Japan are invigorated by the efforts of their counterparts in America and Canada. Many of the sponsors of Bill 156 used arguments like "shame on us for permitting stuff that isn't permitted in the West."
As Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, a major sponsor of Bill 156 recently elected to a fourth term after the passage of the bill, said in a press conference in December 2010 (from the blog of manga translator and anti-Bill-156 advocate Dan Kanemitsu):
more here
everyone in the world is a pervert, that is a fact.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund announced today in a press release that it's forming a coalition to support the defense of an American citizen facing criminal charges for manga discovered on his laptop while crossing from the US into Canada. If convicted, he faces a minimum of one year in prison on charges of child pornography.
To quote from the CBLDF press release:
These charges come at a time when sexual material in manga is being challenged both in Japan and abroad. In 2007, Christopher Handley, a manga collector in Iowa, was charged under the PROTECT Act for possession of child pornography when custom officials intercepted and opened a package for Handley from Japan. Police later came to his house with a search warrant and charged him based on several "obscene" manga found in his collection. Despite a vigorous defense by the CBLDF and comic luminaries such as Neil Gaiman and manga expert Matt Thorn, Handley finally pled guilty in 2009 and was sentenced to six months of prison time.
In 2010, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government passed Bill 156,an expansion of a dusty 1964 law titled the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths, giving the Tokyo government far-reaching powers over minors' access to the Internet and mobile devices, and criminalizing the sale to minors of
Promoted by its sponsors with "protect the children" style rhetoric, the bill passed despite a petition against it signed by numerous manga artists and a threat by major manga publishers, including Shonen Jump publisher Shueisha, to boycott the 2011 Tokyo International Anime Fair (the boycott threat never materialized, as the fair was canceled due to the earthquake). The bill goes into full effect on July 1st, but already the Tokyo government has released the names of the first six manga targeted under the bill.
Pointedly, unlike America's PROTECT act, Tokyo's Bill 156 does not prevent the sale of graphic adult manga as long as they're labeled "18 and up"; thus, the bill would actually not criminalize the kind of hardcore manga Handley was convicted of possessing, but instead targets borderline titles such as teenage sex comedies, gritty manga involving taboo subjects such as prostitution and incest, and so on.
Efforts at manga regulation in the Japan and the US aren't unrelated; as Japanese pop culture writers including Frederik Schodt and Roland Kelts have pointed out, censors in Japan are invigorated by the efforts of their counterparts in America and Canada. Many of the sponsors of Bill 156 used arguments like "shame on us for permitting stuff that isn't permitted in the West."
As Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, a major sponsor of Bill 156 recently elected to a fourth term after the passage of the bill, said in a press conference in December 2010 (from the blog of manga translator and anti-Bill-156 advocate Dan Kanemitsu):
more here
everyone in the world is a pervert, that is a fact.
