Exactly. Even if this survey were to be done in North America, the number of people who support regulation would still be exaggerated, especially since this is such a touchy issue. The amount of response bias is just too great to take the results seriously.

You don’t do surveys in Japan, because the Japanese will give you the answers you want to hear.

This survey is not reliable.

I won’t comment based on the recent 子供の時間 show, but before we get starting on the “paranoia” drive, the basis for the regulation is to stop propagation of child-like pornography (whether what that means). I think on one hand, most people do attain some level of differentiation between reality and art, so calling for a regulation is baseless. On the other hand, this kind of stuff touches on many aspects of human societal behaviour and patterns, and there is a potential for child-like pornography to extend beyond art, into reality.

I would go on the “art imitates life imitates art… etc.” debate, but I don’t wish to engage on doing so, therefore the best way to deal with the proposal is to treat it as it is: a proposal. We will talk only when the Japanese government starts doing something about it.

But honestly such laws are most surely to fail because you simply have no way to determine the artistic criteria for “children”, especially under a certain age. For example, the 2 pictures posted above, are they children or simply chibi-fied version of an adult? What about characters that like Sasame that look undeniably children but is actually more than 200 years old? Not even human to begin with?

At the end, regulation is impossible. Government won’t be able to do much.