Gadget Tsuushin (getnews.jp) has made some tongue-in-cheek predictions about what will happen now that the Tokyo Metropolitan legislation restricting sales of certain targeted manga and anime has been passed.

・漫画の電子書籍化が進む。
・裏アニメ、漫画が出回る。
・秋本治（『こち亀』の作者）が皮肉漫画を描く（本人が「両さんがæ®é€šã®ç”Ÿæ´»ã‚’送ることになる」とçºè¨€ï¼‰ã€‚
・上記に続きほかの作者も皮肉漫画を描く。
・ゲーム業界の“CERO”の様な物がアニメ、漫画にも設けられる。何故かそれを審査ãã‚‹ã®ãŒå®˜åƒšå¤©ä¸‹ã‚Šã€‚
・反対デモ運動が行われる。
・角川、集英社などが埼玉、千葉でアニメイãƒãƒ³ãƒˆã‚’開催ãã‚‹ã€‚
・ここぞとばかりに韓流コミック、アニメをゴリ押しãã‚‹å‹•ããŒå‡ºã¦ãã‚‹ã€‚
・石原慎太郎の小説が同人で漫画化。
・アニメ、コミックだけでなく一般ゲーム、アダルトゲームにまで影響が出る
・何故か小説には影響でない。
・法の抜け穴として『ロジャー・ラビット』のような実å†ã¨ã‚¢ãƒ‹ãƒ¡ã®åˆæˆä½œå“ãŒå¤šæ•°ä½œã‚‰ã‚Œã‚‹ã€‚
・出版社とçºè¡Œè€…の住所が都内じゃなくなってる。
・ネットのアニメや漫画も規制される。

Translated:

• Digitization of manga
• Distribution of underground manga and anime
• Osamu Akimoto (author of Kochikame) will write an ironic manga instead (one where according to him, “Ryou-san, the main character in Kochikame, leads an ordinary life”)
• Other manga artist will follow suit
• A new entity similar to CERO for video games will be set up for anime and manga, and for some reason it will provide amakudari jobs for retired officials
• Protest demonstrations will take place
• Kadokawa, Shueisha and the other companies will host anime events in Saitama or Chiba (prefectures near Tokyo)
• Korean comics and animation will gain in popularity
• There will be doujin adaptations of (Tokyo Governor) Shintarou Ishihara’s novels (which are said to be quite raunchy)
• The law will affect not only anime and comics but also regular and 18+ video games
• For some reason, novels are not affected
• In order to circumvent the law, there will be new hybrid productions that combine live photography with anime, similar to the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• Publishers and distributors will move their offices out of Tokyo
• Online anime and manga will also be restricted

You can read the original article on getnews.jp.

Personally I am most amused by the Roger Rabbit suggestion. It may just be crazy enough to work.

Today, 15 Dec 10, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly passed Bill 156 into law. As previously discussed, this law gives the Tokyo government additional powers to restrict the sales of manga, anime and video games based on two additional criteria: glorified or exaggerated depictions of illegal or incestuous sex acts.

According to Kadokawa’s head honcho, Shinichirou Inoue, there are unconfirmed reports that during the debate of the bill, a certain assemblyman said, “Isn’t there any way we can criminalize homosexuality?” If true, this suggests that the law, despite its expanded powers, will indeed be ineffective against yuri and yaoi titles due to the fact that homosexuality has never been criminalized in Japan.

It appears that Tokyo Anime Fair is doomed as the various companies led by Kadokawa are pledging to continue their resistance despite the setback.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is set to pass new legislation restricting the sales of manga depicting certain sexual acts to minors under eighteen.

Contrary to what certain easily-excitable individuals may proclaim, this is not a ban and this is not the end of the anime. But it will certainly pose a huge problem to the industry.

Background

The proposed law has been working its way around the bureaucracy for months and started off as an anti-lolicon bill. A detailed guideline to classifying paedophilic content in manga was drafted by the person in charge, but this proposal was shot down for being too vague.

In the guideline, the author attempted to justify why certain scenes of nudity featuring minors (such as Doraemon‘s Shizuka Minamoto who loves to take baths) will fall outside the definition of child porn, but this was deemed to be too arbitrary by the committee who probably possessed enough mental capacity in their old age to realize that enforcing age restrictions against drawn cartoon characters is insane. The bill failed to muster enough support.

Months later, it was resurrected and rewritten to target depiction or glorification of sex acts that are illegal (e.g. rape) or immoral (e.g. incest which is not illegal in Japan), a criterion which was deemed to be much more enforceable and objective. This has the unfortunate side effect of making the law even more draconian than its original intention.

Yesterday, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly’s General Affairs Committee approved the bill by a large majority after a last-minute compromise between the conservative LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) proponents led by Tokyo Governor Shintarou Ishihara (who famously cracked down on Kabukichou) and the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan, the less conservative national ruling party) assemblymen. The compromise requested by the DPJ was to include a clause giving exceptions to works that demonstrates “artistic merits”.

The LDP, DPJ and Komeito voted for the bill and only the Seikatsusha Network Mirai and the Japanese Communist Party (i.e. pretty fringe oppositions) voted against it over technical disagreements rather than principled ones. Having passed the General Affairs Committee, the bill is expected to be passed by the main assembly tomorrow, 15 Dec 10, despite uncharacteristically intense protests from the industry.

Her name is Reon Kadena

Tokyo Anime Fair

Due to Governor Ishihara’s uncompromising attitude against the anime and manga industry, he is perceived by some to be carrying out a personal vendetta by pushing for this bill.

In protest of this, ten major publishing companies led by Kadokawa, including Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, have withdrawn their participation from the upcoming Tokyo Anime Fair taking place in March next year. Collectively, they own the rights to a large portion of the popular current titles. Unless this boycott is called off, Tokyo Anime Fair 2011 will likely be cancelled or at least totally lame and pointless.

When asked for his opinions regarding the boycott by a reporter, Governor Isihhara (who is technically the chairperson of the TAF organising committee but seems to be totally disinterested in it) responded angrily and effectively told the companies to fuck off and do whatever they want.

And late last night, Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who is not involved in this prefecture-level legislation, included a short postscript in his blog post describing this as an issue concerning the “Japan Brand”. He covered his base by saying that protecting the youth is important, but goes on to emphasise that promoting anime is also important as part of Japan’s soft power. He appeals for the parties involved to ensure that it will be possible for Tokyo Anime Fair to continue to thrive in Tokyo. This is interpreted by some as a warning to Ishihara not to push the issue too far.

Saaya Irie

The Law

Information on the proposed ordinance itself is scant online because Japan as a nation is terrified of the Internet and refuses to post any useful information online. If someone can find the full Japanese text of the bill, please link me. (UPDATE: Refer to the bottom of the entry for the relevant text extracted from the actual bill.)

But from what I have gleamed from Japanese new sources, the proposed law seeks to restrict sales of anime and manga titles depicting or glorifying sex acts that are illegal or immoral. The two examples given by all the newspapers were rape and incest, but presumably this is not an exhaustive list.

It is interesting that the law specifically targets anime and manga instead of generic creative works. This lends credit to the suggestions of certain conservative agenda at work. Or perhaps otaku were simply deemed to be harmless weaklings who would not be able to resist, giving an easy brownie point for the moral crusaders.

Please also note that this is a Tokyo Metropolis bill being passed by the Tokyo Metropolitan (i.e. prefecture) government and not the Japanese national government situated in Tokyo, so if passed it will affect only the Tokyo area.

Effective Ban

This ordinance does not ban anything. Hardcore pornographic manga will still be legal as they have always been, because they already comply with the proposed 18+ restrictions.

However, there are many manga titles targeted at working adults that will be affected by the proposed law. Off the top of my head, I imagine titles such as Kiss x Sis, Gantz, Berserk and various yuri/yaoi titles will be faced with a dilemma.

The problem is that being classified as “18+” is a commercial kiss of death similar to the AO games rating in the US. Book stores will either not stock the books or place them in a corner designated for pornography. This will be a huge distribution, retail and advertising disadvantage for titles that are not porn but contain select scenes that fall under the new law.

Yes, hardcore ero-manga has its lucrative niche in the market. But if Berserk has to be sold next to actual porn in a hidden corner of the shop, then how can it hope to attract the attention of its intended audience: adults looking for edgy seinen manga? In the long run, this results in a chilling effect on the creative freedom in storytelling, since publishers will be unwilling to fund such works given the risk of being branded 18+ by the Tokyo government.

There are existing retail ordinance regulating the sales of porn and 18+ materials. I am not familiar with the exact intricacies, but I suspect that restricted advertising and physical isolation are probably among the guidelines.

Additionally, there are online speculations about whether titles like Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai and Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt will be affected, but my feeling is that it won’t be that drastic, so don’t get your panties in a bunch just yet. Yosuga no Sora on the other hand…

Aki Hoshino

Opinion — Doujinshi

The enforcement of the law will presumably entail government bureaucrats spending all day reading manga and watching anime in order to decide which titles should be 18+ restricted.

This brings into question how doujinshi, being non-commercial and unfunded in nature, will be treated by the system. If right holders must submit their works for approval for an administrative fee, then this barrier of entry may effectively prevent doujinshi from being sold in retail stores in Tokyo.

This also makes me wonder about Comiket. From my experience, Comiket tries to group works of similar nature together (i.e. smut with smut) but this is not enforced strictly and in general the individual stalls lack any indication of whether their products are 18+ in nature (at least the ones where this is not immediately obvious).

I presume that Comiket has long been in violation of some kind of Tokyo ordinance governing sales of porn and the government was just sort of turning a blind eye on it. I was actually under 18 during my first trip to Comiket and there was no age limit of any kind being enforced. If the Tokyo government chooses to tighten its enforcement, I wonder what will happen.

Certainly, it will be extremely costly and difficult for the organising committee to implement any effective screening for doujinshi sold during Comiket, especially since many of them are finalized literally days before the event. At the same time, enforcing an age limit for half a million visitors will not be any less insane.

I wonder if there exist any venues outside of Tokyo with infrastructure capable of hosting Comiket should it come to that.

Saaya Irie

Opinion — Age Limit

I am a free speech guy. In general where possible, I prefer unrestrained expression and have argued this before. However, I agree that age restrictions can be necessary and effective. In this case, the problem does not lie so much with the intention the law, but rather in the implementation.

As adults, I think we can all agree that we want a level of entertainment that exists between teenage-oriented shounen titles and hardcore pornography. The problem with a 18+ or nothing rating system is that it makes it difficult to market such a product. Market it as 18+ and be relegated to obscurity or market it as all ages and get blamed when children buy it.

This problem is not new and the industry has always tried to side-step it through its own system of genre classifications. But there is no uniform guideline that informs consumers if a seinen title is unsuitable for the youth. This problem has long been solved by movies and video games, so it puzzles me why it continues to be a problem here despite being often brought up.

I suspect that this has something to do with the industry not wishing to spend more money on working out a age classification system. But I think it’s also because such age restrictions were never deemed necessary for novels and you can easily find explicit pornographic novels prominently displayed in any major Japanese book stores with no restrictions on them.

So, I think a more comprehensive gradient of age classifications will help to alleviate some of the political pressure being exerted on the industry. You can argue that children still get to play violent video games, but the point is for the industry to demonstrate that it has done its part.

Branding your own product 18+ is commercial suicide. But if a sensible classification system exists that allows adult-oriented entertainment to thrive while differentiating them from both shounen and porn titles, content owners may be more willing to classify their works properly, reducing the need for a clumsy bureaucracy to step in.

Yukie Kawamura

Opinion — Enforcement

I think one interesting food-for-thought for me personally is the enforcement process.

Manga is just drawn pictures. How do you prove that illegal or immoral acts are being portrayed or glorified? I’m sure it will be clear cut in many situations, but I can think of a lot of potential loopholes.

For example, you can prove incest in real-life through DNA test, but how will you do that in manga? What if the characters involved turn out to be not related by blood? What if they are not depicted as siblings at all, but the girl just likes to call the guy “onii-san”?

The other example used, rape, is similarly mind-boggling. How can fictional characters give consent? What constitutes manga rape? I can see plenty of room for contention if someone chooses to dispute a specific ruling.

Furthermore, are non-explicit yuri and yaoi manga “glorifying” immoral sexual behaviours? And, for that matter, will homosexuality be considered immoral? There are a lot of unanswered questions over which I cannot opine without a copy of the original legislative text. (Refer to UPDATE below for further information.)

Conclusion

This law will not be the end of manga and anime because Bleach, Naruto and One Piece will survive like how cockroaches will survive the nuclear holocaust. But it will probably make manga and anime a lot duller than they have to be, in the absence of a more sensible content classification guideline.

Given the number of manga titles being produced on a regular basis and the amount of bureaucracy that will probably be required to assess them using these highly subjective criteria, this law will inevitably add an invisible tax to an industry that is not exactly in its best days.

The most likely outcome is that future titles deemed to be pushing the vague lines drawn by the law will be canned by the publishers because of the undetermined risks involved. There will be a huge financial incentive for companies to self censor and err on the safe side. This will most probably achieve the conservatives’ intended effect of reining in the industry’s growing dependency on sexual titillation, but one wonders at what cost.

As the Papa Bear puts it, this fucking thing sucks.

P.S. I think my favourite comment on this whole situation comes from Diemeow23 in Sankaku Complex’s blog comments:

If this does get implemented then I’m glad I saw anime and manga at its most shining brilliance however perverted the light was

Update

I was linked to the legislative text in question (so Japan does do some things right :P). The relevant portion of the text that defines works targeted by the law:

第八条第一項第二号の東京都規則で定める基準　漫画、アニメーションその他の画像（実å†ã‚’é¤ãã€‚）で、刑罰法規に触れる性交若しくは性交類似行為又は婚姻を禁止されている近親者間における性交若しくは性交類似行為を、不当に賛美し又は誇張ãã‚‹ã‚ˆã†ã«ã€æå†ã—又は表現ãã‚‹ã“とにより、青少年の性に関ãã‚‹å¥å…¨ãªåˆ¤æ–­èƒ½åŠ›ã®å½¢æˆã‚’妨げ、青少年の健全な成長を阻害ãã‚‹ãŠãã‚ŒãŒã‚るもの

The criterion as defined by Rule 2, Paragraph 1, Article 8 of the Tokyo Metropolitan Law: Comics, animation and other images (excluding photographs) that improperly glorify or exaggerate, through their depiction or presentation of, acts of sexual intercourse that violate penal laws or sexual conducts or acts of sexual intercourse between close relatives who are legally prohibited from marriage, and as a result may be harmful to the wholesome development of young people and impede their ability to form healthy impressions about sex.

It appears that the law is not as far-reaching as suggested by initial reports. Since homosexuality is perfectly legal in Japan, this means that yuri and yaoi are safe for now. It’s funny how they have to propose a roundabout definition of incest since it is not actually an illegal act in Japan.

This explains why news outlets reported the law as targeting illegal and immoral sex acts — incest is technically not illegal. But it also means that other forms of “immoral” sex acts are not actually covered by the law so long as they are legal in themselves by the standards of the penal code. But it’s still amusing to have to judge the legality of actions committed by fictional drawings.

So, all in all, this issue seems to be worthy of protest and improvement but it is nowhere close to an end-game scenario for the industry, since most ecchi fanservice and softcore porn depicted in anime and manga are neither illegal (especially since the age of consent in Tokyo is 13, well below the age of most anime characters) nor incestuous.

A long time ago, I stumbled upon the Golden Boy OVA series on Nico Nico Douga and thought it was an odd and unique piece of work. It left a bit of an impression but I didn’t think much more of it. Recently, I had the chance to read the 10-volume manga series that it is based on. It blew my mind in a way that words alone fail to describe.

Golden Boy starts off as a sexually-charged gag manga full of raunchy toilet humour much like the OVA, which was made based on six of the chapters contained in the first book. The interesting thing is that, up to the third volume, the degree of sexuality portrayed is actually much more explicit in the OVA than in the manga (at least until the third volume, after which the manga overtakes it by leaps and bounds).

The basic storytelling template is as follows: Kintarou Oe, a boy genius who dropped out of Toudai after obtaining full credits in order to go on a journey of self discovery, arrives at a new town and takes up a new part-time job in order to learn a new skill. There, he meets a hot girl who is usually instantly turned off by his unrestrained perverted nature and thinks that he is just a good-for-nothing freeter. In the end, he surprises everyone by not only picking up the skill in record time, but doing it better than anyone else. He also usually ends up changing the girl’s life positively. But by the time anyone realizes what he has done, he leaves town on his bicycle and heads for his next lesson in life.

This story structure is repeated many times in the first two volumes and appears to be the original concept before the manga. However, by the third volume, things start to change. The episodic storytelling format is eventually replaced by a long continuous story as we learn more about Kintarou.

The most obvious shift happens when he encounters a cult bent on world domination who uses S&M sexual techniques to brainwash and mind control people. This quickly grows into long discussions about the state of modern society and its use of violence as a tool of conflict resolution, the role of the education system in producing unthinking slaves for the system and the role of sex in achieving inner and outer peace.

At this point, I suppose you just went “WTF?”

Consider where I cut off the image. Hint: nopan

Yes, the real meat, at least from the author’s perspective, behind Golden Boy is not its expert depiction of the female anatomy or its thorough examination of the different genres of sexual fantasies. It is instead a soapbox for the author to voice his anti-establishment and leftist ideologies in manga form. As a result, Golden Boy’s dialogues can get somewhat wordier than in most other manga, and disagreements between characters frequently descend into discourses on history, politics and society.

The main messages constantly repeated in Golden Boy are:

• The Japanese education system destroys a person’s inert ability to learn and brainwashes him into a conforming slave
• Sex is both a tool of political control and social liberation
• Modern society is built on egoistic violence against other people, against the natural environment, against tradition and culture, against human nature. Examples used include:
  • Destroying the environment to build golf courses and a fictional Japan-hosted Olympics (waste of tax money collected forcefully by the government)
  • World War II (he brings up Rape of Nanjing and Unit 731), Vietnam War, Russo-Japanese War
  • Indoctrination of the people to accept rule by elites through a hierarchical education and corporate system
• The Japanese political system is a continuation of the pre-war status quo and the same old flaws are concealed by material wealth
• Material possession and social status are hollow and meaningless
• Avocation of free love — that true love is not possessive and love does not tie you to your partner
• Avocation of life-long self-motivated learning over systematically-imposed rote learning (i.e. street smart over book smart)

The meaning of life in manga form

It is interesting because a lot of these messages coincide with the leftist and anarchist student movements in post-war Japan. The author, Tatsuya Egawa, was born in 1961 and taught college mathematics for a few months before switching to drawing manga, so it’s easy to see where the political outlook expressed in Golden Boy comes from. He was probably disillusioned by own education experience and subsequently influenced by the leftist anti-government anti-consumerism sentiments that were prevalent in Japanese universities during the height of the Cold War.

In sooth, Tatsuya Egawa is not at all a good story-teller. He frequently dedicates so much time in writing his tirades against modern society that the story becomes incoherent or neglected. His matter-of-fact rants are also rife with factual errors, probably copied and pasted directly from Communist propaganda pamphlets, so they should be taken with a grain of salt — they are interesting to read but far from gospel. Still, it is very eye-opening to see how Egawa, a Baby Boomer, perceives Japanese society at the end of its roaring bubble economy.

Beyond the political and social messages, Golden Boy also goes into great lengthy discussions about the human psyche — how we derive our own self worth, how we distinguish ourselves from others as individuals, how we seek to dominate or be dominated, etc. The author’s arguments in this areas make for some interesting food for thought, but are probably standard fare for college-level psychology.

It’s okay because they are (still) wearing clothes

For those who dare to venture into the unknown, be warned. While Golden Boy is not actually considered M-18, this must be placed in context of Japan’s traditionally liberal view regarding sexuality. Let’s just say that it has everything up to the extreme threshold acceptable for a manga that is not explicitly smut, including fetishes, S&M and almost an entire volume dedicated to a single sex scene — the characters literally discuss the socio-political significance and symbolism of sex while doing it.

Golden Boy is really one of those only-in-Japan phenomenons that can never find a profitable niche outside of Japan, except perhaps in prose form. Beyond the first two volume and the OVA series, the series’ message is so foreign, explicit and politically-charged that it’s impossible to appreciate it outside of its intended context.

With the right mindset and conditions, one can find some meaningful ideas in the way Golden Boy pushes the envelopes of political correctness and sexuality. But that perfect cosmic alignment of the universe happens rarely, so it’s not something I can recommend to anyone even though I found it curiously enjoyable. It’s an odd piece of work that is difficult to appreciate, as evidenced by the slew of hate-filled negative reviews it receives online. Really a hit-or-miss thing.

If you are still interested, you can find scanslations (no idea how good they are since I read the raws) up to the start of Volume 8 on AnimeA and raws of all ten volumes on Crazy’s Manga.

It’s also quite amazing to hear that Tatsuya Egawa has apparently just recently started to serialize Golden Boy II in Business Jump, after ending the original run abruptly thirteen years ago. (Sadly, the ANN comment thread on this announcement is quite superficially negative because English speakers’ exposure to the series is limited to the OVA series.)

I haven’t had a chance to read the first chapter of Golden Boy II yet, which I believe has already been published, but the promotion art looks quite evolved from his earlier works. I just wonder if the passage of time has served to temper Egawa’s fiery brand of political expression and if Golden Boy 2 will turn out to be a more mainstream ecchi gag comedy. Looking forward to finding out.

P.S. Having recently discovered the joy of RawScans, I have been downloading and consuming manga raws ravenously. I just finished reading Tokyo University Story, a 34-volume series by Tatsuya Egawa that was serialized the same time as Golden Boy. It contains the same general themes, but with a lot more focus on education and human relationship. It also has the most WTF ending ever in the history of human creativity.

ecchi nano wa ikenai to omoimasu

No? Nuts. Well, here’s something from the other extreme. While surfing Nico Douga two days ago, I chanced upon all six episodes of Golden Boy, that were uploaded under extremely nonsensical titles, and rediscovered the pubescent joys of blatant innuendoes and sexual stereotyping.

Blast from the past

Golden Boy is a short OVA series from the age when veliciraptors roamed, or in other words, the 90s, back when Jurassic Park first came out. It’s the insanely risqué and politically incorrect story of Kintarou Oe, a Toudai student who left school before his graduation in order to travel around the country and “study”.

All Toudai students have Newtype sense

In each episode, his travels take him to new places where he meets beautiful girls and terrorizes them with his lewd behaviour and his hilarious forthrightness. But there’s more to him than he first appears (a pervert acting without thinking on impulse) and the real fun of the show lies in the duality of his personality, which is revealed in the first episode and leaves you coming back for more.

Oh my god! Look at that…ancient CRT monitor. O_O

In a way, he’s like the precursor to Eikichi Onizuka from GTO, except way more racy. Onizuka may love pantsu as much as the next pervert, but he’s got nothing on Kintarou.

There are a total of six episodes of Golden Boy and each one features a different main girl. The formula is roughly the same: Boy meets girl. Boy is perverted. Hilarity ensues. There is little continuity in the story, save for the self-referential final episode.

This is a normal scene for a Japanese software company

At this point, before you go ahead and torrent legitimately purchase this show, it has to be made clear that this series is meant for a mature audience, the fact that I first watched it in middle school notwithstanding.

No, there’s no sex, despite the plot setting that sounds suspiciously like a B-grade porn flick, and indeed not much fappable material at all. What it does have is some nudity and a truckload of adult humour (or low grade humour, it’s the same thing really). This is the kind of animé that they talk about in PTA meetings while brandishing pitchforks and torches.

(That said, the source material of the show, a manga series by the same title, does venture somewhat deeper…)

It’s over 9000!

It’s incredible hard for me to describe why this show is great without spoiling the punchlines, so I’ll just not try. But imagine GTO, except 200% more NSFW.

And while toilet humour (literally) and sexual innuendos are the soup of the day and the series’ raison d’être, some episode endings do provide additional sentimental à la carte, clichéd as some of it may be, for those of you who need to crywank (à la Key fanboys). Either way, it’s excellent guilty pleasure for those who seek it.

What unseen horrors has she just walked into?

Good lord, I believe I just hacked together my own abominable culinary metaphor while simultaneously using an obscene amount of français. I’m a bloody genius.

So. Uh. Yeah. This show is pretty good, but don’t tell anyone that I recommended it! I have a reputation to protect.

Getting it

Interestingly, ADV actually dubbed and released this series before, so you should buy the original. Their license expired some time ago, but apparently Media Blaster picked it up last year, so a re-release is probably not too long off.

That said, not everyone can afford animé when corn prices are so high. If you understand Moonspeak and have an account at Nico Douga: 1 2 3 4 5 6

If not, there’s always That Which Must Not Be Named.

More screencaps

I swear this isn’t porn

No, really…

Why won’t you believe me? :(

C-C-C-Combo breaker (was never funny)

See, there’s nothing suggestive about a woman in tight leather riding a bike

Kimono is nice and prude

Oh fiddlesticks. I give up!

Vrooooom

And so this blog lives to die another day.

Anyway, I’m going to spend a little time today talking about the difference between hentai and ecchi and why Hentai, as we use it, is really an English word.

There’s nothing NSFW. Really. Okay maybe there is a little…

In Japanese, ecchi is usually written in katakana as エッチ but the English letter “H” written in capital can be used interchangeably. Hentai on the other hand is nearly always written in kanji as 変態.

Among the English anime fandom, the general interpretation is that “Ecchi” refers to things that contain lewd or sexual behaviour that excludes sexual intercourse while “Hentai” refers to the inclusion of sex and the graphic depiction of it. Some also see it as “softcore vs. hardcore”. For example, a show like the Green Green TV series or even Love Hina would be considered to be “Ecchi” (by varying degrees), while shows like Cool Devices and Bible Black are classified as “Hentai”.

(Please, for the love of Haruhi, don’t google for those names)

The definition described above is restricted to English. Those are what “Ecchi” and “Hentai” mean in English (or rather the branch of English used by anime fans). Japanese has different uses for those two words.

In Japanese, 変態 (hentai) and エッチ (ecchi) are worlds apart. In general, pornographic materials are referred to as “ecchi” or “H”, although “ero” (supposedly more subtle than “ecchi“) seems to be preferred for certain things like games and manga nowadays. You don’t go into a Japanese video store asking for “Hentai anime”, instead you ask for “H-anime” (if you dare to ask for it at all that is).

Ecchi not only means lewd or dirty, it in fact refers to the act of sexual intercourse itself, something that is specifically excluded from its English definition. In fact, the sentence “ecchi shiyou ze” or “H shiyou ze” in Japanese would mean “Let’s have sex”. (Please don’t try to use it on strangers IRL kthx)

Therefore, in Japan, ALL porn videos (animated or not) are considered H-videos (or just AV) and there’s no such thing as “Hentai videos” or “Hentai anime”.

So where does hentai come in? Well… it doesn’t, actually. While dictionaries and historians generally agree that this usage of the letter “H”, subsequently “ecchi“, was derived from the word “hentai” some time in the last century, the two words are pretty much unrelated in modern Japanese.

Hentai, when used in a sexual context, means “pervert”. Not the “oh, you’re such a pervert! ;)” kind of pervert, but the kind of pervertness that gets you thrown into jail and admitted to mental institutions. Seriously, even an otaku buying lolicon porn in the middle of Akiba will stare at you hard if you ever try to ask for a “Hentai video”. It just conjures all sorts of weird and terrible images in the mind of a native Japanese. In fact, it’s probably more common to see 変態 (hentai) used for its scientific definition, which is “metamorphosis” (i.e. caterpillar to butterfly).

Ecchi on the other hand is a slang used to refer to porn, sex and anything related to sex in general.

In fact, most Japanese do not even know that “H” came from “Hentai”. They are THAT different. So please, for the love of Haruhi, do not refer to porn anime as “Hentai” when you are in Japan! You might just get into trouble with the police! I speak NOT from personal experience! Really!

That said, it’s perfectly legitimate to use “Hentai” as such in English. The English language has been assimilating words for its own evil purposes for hundreds of years. For example, the word “pork” came from the French word “porc” for pig, yet we use “pork” to refer specifically to pig meat. There’s nothing wrong with it as long as we don’t confuse it with the original language.

Feena is the win

Another example: The term 少女愛 (shoujo ai) does exist in Japanese, but it’s used more often as a synonym for lolicon (“feelings of love towards young girls”) than for Girls’ Love (“lesbianism”). I kid you not. The first page of results on google for 少女愛 gives you nothing but lolicon-related articles. In English, we use it only for the latter meaning.

And by the way, the word “rorikon” in Japanese is a synonym of 小児性愛 (“paedophile”). You often see it used in newspaper reports on child porn criminal cases. This is again different from the English usage of “lolicon”, where it is implied (and necessary) that the material in question is drawn and not real.

It’s interesting to see how English adapts foreign words to fulfil more specific purposes. 刀 (katana) really just means “sword”, but since we already have the word “sword” in English, we use “katana” to refer only to Japanese swords. Similarly, ロリコン (rorikon) is really just a synonym of “paedophile”, but since we already have the word “paedophile” in English, we use “lolicon” to refer to drawn girls and not real girls.

Interestingly, as a side effect of this, the Japanese and English wikipedia articles on lolicon are actually talking about completely different things, which is why the English version starts off with the emphasis “in the western world”.

Well, hope you enjoyed this little post. I talk too much.

H. Get it? Ahahaha. Okay fine it’s a lame joke.