So... if the story says I'm a senior, but I LOOK like I'm 10, and my story was written yesterday, am I 17 years, 10 years, or 1 day old? What about, I'm a CARTOON you morons!

So many of you are aware of the Christopher Handley decision by now, where apparently customs officials opened up a package from Japan addressed to Mr. Handley which contained manga depicting minors ‘engaged in sexually explicit acts and bestiality’. Last week our intrepid manga fan was handed down a six-month sentence for violating the US Protect Act, which which outlaws cartoons, drawings, sculptures or paintings depicting minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct, and which lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

The interesting is that the Protect Act is actually narrower in scope than the so-called Anti Hentai Bill authored by Rep. Nikki Teodoro of my very own district in Tarlac. (As if she weren’t irritating enough to begin with.) The Anti-Hentai Bill covers persons in possession of “any representation, whether visual, audio or written combination thereof, by electronic, mechanical, digital, optical, magnetic or any other means, of a child engaged or involved in real or simulated explicit sexual activity”, and appoints cybercafe owners as sort of a cyber-Gestapo, requiring them to police what their customers are surfing.

I’m sure the legal and moral implications of these things have been combed over by many other writers. Privacy concerns, what constitutes child pornography, and so on. I’m not interested in covering old ground, despite the fact that both laws are so broad they will get you in jail if you so much as draw a big stick figure riding a small stick figure.

What I am interested in is that the US and Philippines have higher crime rates and cases of pedophilia than the demonic Japanese culture that is churning out this filth despite this sort of official prudery, based on local ‘standards of obscenity’. So we know for sure that this isn’t an effective deterrent per se.

So what happened? The key is a difference of culture. The U.S. (and therefore by extension the Philippines) revolves around a belief system that punishes you for thinking wrongly. Even thinking about sinning is a sin. We are societies founded around the idea that the stories in a particular book are literal truth instead of allegorical fiction, and this is why we think playing violent video games will turn us into serial killers, despite the fact that the evidence does not reflect this assertion. But we’re not big on evidence as a society anyway.

On the other hand, Japan distinguishes from one’s private and public persona, one’s tatemae and honne. We read books and watch movies and tv shows with plots involving murders and rapes all the time. (CSI comes to mind, whatever the flavor.) Japan understands this. In fact the whole idea of being a salaryman during the week and then cosplaying as an anime character on the weekends is understood as simply exercising one’s free choice to do whatever the hell one wants to do over their free time, provided that during the rest of the time one pays one’s debt to society. The Japanese also understand the difference between the symbol and the symbolized.

We don’t. Or at least we like to pretend that we don’t. Actually each one of us goes through the day filled with thoughts of murdering the driver of the car in front of us, or messing around with a co-worker on the sly, or lifting the wallets of obnoxious, pushy, overweight businessmen. We just pretend we’re not like that, because the thought of committing a sin is a sin.

So we throw the people who make the mistake of getting caught thinking these thoughts into jail, and the rest of us publicly denounce them as monsters and fiends, and we turn a blind eye to our own growing corruption, which is reflected in the corruption of our entire society. So the moralists continue to pretend their shit doesn’t stink, telling us that every new trend comes from the devil. Every new thing is a threat to the orthodoxy, and a threat to the orthodoxy is a threat to people in power. So we persecute imaginary crimes, and we ignore real ones.

Meanwhile, Japan quietly advances into the future, leaving us cultural prudes behind, focusing on the real but frolicking in their imaginations, unburdened by our prudishness or self-righteousness or the thought that somewhere, imaginary crimes are being perpetrated on imaginary people.

It’s just a matter of culture.

1 person likes this post.

Unlike