Tokyo court rules that realistic computer graphics violate child porn law
Be warned. Be careful what you have in your drawer or on your phone, hard drive or cloud.
While the government was pressured by mangaka and animators to exclude comic book and drawn images from the new pornography laws passed in 2014, it seems the courts do not agree.
The Tokyo District Court has found an artist “guilty of violating the child pornography law by creating and selling realistic computer graphic images of a naked girl,” reports the Asahi Shimbun.
The court on March 15 sentenced Akashi Takahashi, a 55-year-old computer graphic designer from Gifu city, to a one-year prison term, suspended for three years, and fined him 300,000 yen ($2,650).
The trial highlighted a gray area in Japan’s obscenity laws. The current law banning child pornography only targets works depicting actual people.
Takahashi’s defense argued that the defendant was innocent because his CG images were based on pictures in a photo book published in the 1980s, not an actual underage girl.
But Presiding Judge Takahiro Mikami ruled that three of Takahashi’s CG images violated the law because they were so realistic that they could be used to identify the girl in the photo book.
Japan has been facing increased international pressure over its ambiguous attitudes towards pornography — censoring genitalia in AV and arresting the likes of “vagina artist” Megumi Igarashi, while nonetheless producing the second highest amount of porn per-capita in the world, with magazines widely available in convenience stores. A whole subclass of softcore porn and glamor mags featuring “junior idols”, not to mention the vast volume of extreme and fetish anime and manga (professional and amateur) that is produced in the country (often mislabelled overseas as “hentai”).
In 2015, a UN special rapporteur publicly criticised Japan for allowing “abusive images of children”.
“Such obscene images can violate the child pornography law and thus fall into the scope of criminal punishment when even ordinary people recognize that the depictions of the face, bust, genitalia and other key bodily features faithfully describe those of an actual child,” the ruling said.
Takahashi in 2013 became the first person arrested over CG images suspected of violating the Law Banning Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, according to Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department.
Prosecutors, whose indictment listed 34 of Takahashi’s images, demanded a two-year prison term and a fine of 1 million yen.
The court said it was impossible to declare that 31 of the images were based on an actual girl.
But the ruling concluded that “the maliciousness (of the three images) was not reduced from that of the original photos because the defendant attempted to recreate the original photography as much as possible.”
Takahashi, meanwhile, says his intent was not to create child pornography and plans to appeal.
The court only ruled against three of his drawings, allowing them effectively to challenge the definition of law without defying it.
It may lead to more debate among Japanese politicians about updating and tightening the legislation further to cover CG images. Surely anime, manga, eroge and doujin will be next?
Where does it leave a hit game like Natsu no Himegoto?
