Minori: “We’re Banning You For Your Own Good!”

The recent decision by Japanese eroge studio Minori to close off its site to the outside world under the pretense of “defending our culture” has been clarified with a fuller explanation, which can be read below:

The original notice of barbarian exclusion:

minori official website.
This website cannot be browsed excluding Japan.

Some foreigners seem to be having an antipathy against EROGE.
Therefore, We prohibited the access from foreign countries, to defend our culture.
Sorry for you of the fan that lives in a foreign country.

minori Inc.

To which has been added some carping about how Japanese couldn’t possibly oppose their own politicians, and need foreigners to do it for them:

Why minori blocking foreign accesses?

We are little perplexing now because we received a lot of response about this issue from foreign people.

Now we will tell you the short detail about the reason why blocking you to this website, because of we, all Japanese EROGE makers were facing at the problem, the crisis of “Freedom of speech”.

Currently, The bill that allows to limiting the content (It is censorship. Isn’t it?) to all EROGEs is being discussed in the Diet because intellectuals and politicians said “Japanese EROGE were being problem and troubled with the foreign country. Therefore we should make EROGE hidden away from foreign country, and also its content should be limited and censored”.

Okay, now we trusted the word what they said at once. So we blocked you to make stay away from the trouble.

…Do you like that?

If not, please tell your idea directly to Japanese government and politicians.
(For example, you can write the letter to the administration of Japan directly from here.)
(If you can comprehend Japanese…There is information of the politicians in Japan.)

Otherwise, you just can talk your idea about this issue at your blog or other media to inform the existance of this problem to the public. It would be very helpful for us.

If you do so, we might be able to recover the “Freedom of speech” and the barricade lying in between us would be taken away.

Please help us.

We hope this separation would be only for short moment.

Sincerely.

Of course, it is rather naïve to think that Japanese politicians, particularly the ardently feminist ones, are doing anything but seizing upon convenient foreign outcry in order to use it as a rhetorical appeal, so as to push their own agenda of censorship, and even more naïve to think that they will take any notice of non-voting foreigners when even their own constituents fail to oppose them.

If foreigners have such power over Japan, it seems strange endless foreign histrionics about the evils of whaling have failed to get it banned…

It also seems improbable that the Japanese mass media will be interested in “foreign anime fan outcry over Japanese censorship,” when it can instead manufacture the sensational outcry against “rape games in our shops!”

The reaction against the move internationally has been less than positive, but predictably the online reaction in Japan has been delightedly xenophobic: we hear almost unanimously that “This can’t be helped”, “Damn foreigners are attacking our culture!”, “They are all just dirty pirates anyway!”, and “All eroge makers should ban foreigners!”

Many joyously call for “eroge sakoku”, sakoku, “closed country”, being the term for the long centuries of isolation the nation endured due to Shogunate paranoia about foreign influences.

Any suggestion that responsibility for these outrageous restrictions on freedom of expression lie with wicked foreigners is of course facile scapegoating, as any reference to the following three facts will attest:

•The mass media reports condemning eroge all originated in Japan, with the overseas reaction barely registering.

•The politicians calling for bans are all Japanese, and come from all three major parties.

•The eroge industry body, the EOCS, made no protest whatsoever and then censored a vast variety of material which was never even mentioned by domestic or international media.

It seems many Japanese being subjected to this oppressive ban would rather blame foreigners than actually make any effort to oppose the ban themselves, a position which it is hard to be sympathetic to.