So..... I know this is going to kick off a flamewar (I apologize in advance, dang) but I have a serious question. It looks like the "controversy" was links to a site that included anime child porn (or what some people would call that, regardless of your personal interpretation). I've been to Japan and wandered around some manga stores, and.... what they have on some shelves is, like, really, viscerally, incredibly, d…
> in Japan, that kind of stuff seems, if not totally normal, at least acceptable enough to be included in stores along with other regular manga.
This part gets me puzzled often. It seems the problem is child part than porn part, and as a Japanese I don't see that much child content(obviously ignoring defenses like "500-year-old loli" or "blurring makes it not porn"), especially in the low ranges that attract offenders I read about on news. What seems to be the case to me, is that Western gut feeling massively under-report ages for Japanese and/or anime faces, or has a threshold point for adults set decades too high.
With a hypothetical that such guessing error exists, Q2 leads to another question: "Assuming there are some visual representations that are universally immoral across societies, should certain groups of people who visually appear immoral by certain cultural norms, be regulated by which standards and why" - it sounds extreme(it is), but I have seen this "visually immoral" class of people and drawings on the internet, and that is kind of a legitimate human rights issue that a class by appearance exists; it's no different from debating whether to tolerate blacks and their pictures.