The Tokyo Metropolitan government is putting forth a motion to ban any amime or manga that contain sexual depiction of charaters that appear to be younger than 18 years old. This controversial move has resulted in a group of famous mangaka coming together and submitting a petition to oppose the proposal and voice their concerns.
The mangakas that showed up at the Tokyo Government Office today included Mazinger Z creator Go Nagai (永井 豪), Ashita no Joe creator Tetsuya Chiba (千葉 徹彌) and Shojo mangaka Machiko Satonaka (里中満智子).
Their peition also feature many famous mangaka such as Inuyasha’s mangaka Rumiko Takahashi (高橋 留美子), Doraemon’s mangaka Fujiko Fujio A (藤子不二雄), and Golgo 13′s mangaka Takao Saitou (斎藤隆夫). You can see the entire list (in Japanese) here, and also on ANN (in English). Basically the petition contains many greats mangaka, which is definitely a good representation of the manga industry and should not be ignored.
Tetsuya Chiba also gave a speech at the morning meeting of Democratic Party of Japan legislators at the Tokyo government, where he spoke out against the loss of Japan popular culture due to the restrictions imposed by regulations. He urged legislators to vote according to the feelings of manga readers.
It would be interesting to see how the Japanese government will vote on 19 March 2010 on this proposed legislative amendment.
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Hope all goes well.If this ban goes through, what will anime and manga become! =(
Japan needs to get rid of their obsession with underage girls ASAP. That’s not “culture”.
There is a huge problem with that line of thoughts, how do anyone defines the “age” of a fictional character? it’s like in the real world, as younger a girl looks the more she sells, in anime goes the same way, younger depictions of girls attract more people. It would be way better to ban it from hentai than ban it from anime
AAw. Bounch of pedophiles filing a petition.
How silly.
They best make murdering a loli life imprisonment if you have lolicon manga. [something to compromise]
I, for one, support these mangakas. It’s pretty silly to enforce such a ban since no one is actually getting abused, harassed or sexually exploited (we ARE talking about drawings here). If such a ban were to be enforced, then they should also make a similar law that bans the killing of virtual characters in a game!
I too, support these mangaka. A very large chunk of anime and manga are centered on teenagers and kids. This ban will block things even if the content is just sexually provocative. It doesn’t necessarily have to be explict.
Laying down this ban onto Japan will create huge set backs for the anime industry. Even Japanese officials have recognized the anime industry as one of their most iconic industries. Putting such huge limitations is surely something The Tokyo Government Office will regret..
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