Canned Dogs

The Supreme Court of Japan has dismissed adult manga publisher Shoubunkan’s appeal and has ruled that according to what is generally accepted in society, the manga in question violates the law regarding obscenity in pictures, and that the fine of 1.5 million yen stays.

This case had started in 2002 when a parent caught his highschool kid reading adult comics and sent a letter to LDP diet member Hirasawa Katsuei asking him to do something about it. The accused, Shoubunkan chairman Motonori Kishi, was originally given an unusually harsh sentence of 1 year in prison and 3 years suspension by the district court in January 2004.

However, they made an appeal immediately, and in June 2005, the high court lowered the sentence to a fine of 1.5 million yen, reason being that the sentence was too harsh and that obscenity in drawn pictures should not be treated the same as real photos.

They appealed again and on 14th June 2007, and the Supreme court ruled that the manga does break the law regarding obscene images, and that the right for freedom of expression does not apply in this case.

One of the reasons for highlighting the manga as obscene was that the censorship was too lacking. However, readers that have read the manga have commented that the censorship in the comic was ample and not too different from the normal standards of censorship in adult manga at the time when it was published.

They should just get rid of this censorship thing already. Japanese can get uncensored porn from foreign sites on the internet anyway.

Also, this post got way too long and boring.

If you can read Japanese and wish to know more about the case, visit this site. The questioning of some of the witnesses can get pretty amusing when they talk about hardcore shota doujinshi and stuff.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 11:56 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.