Criminalized manga

The BBC has an article about a Japanese court ruling which asserts that the manga Honey Room was obscene.

The judge's standard for this ruling was that "bodies were drawn in a lifelike manner with little attention to concealment (of genitalia), making for sexually explicit expression and deeming the book pornographic matter". Hell, that description could easily be applied to any of the manga I've read. (Well, except for the Batman manga.)

I wonder what's going on here - has Japan singled out Honey Room arbitrarily in an isolated incident, or is this representative of a larger cultural shift looming on the horizon?

Posted by Dan on January 14, 2004 at 07:58 AM | TrackBack