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Tokyo: “Manga Fans Lead Deadend Lives – Find a Real Girl!”

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Any doubts that the Tokyo government’s efforts to ban manga, anime and games from showing any sex (whilst leaving novels and film completely alone) represent nothing less than an expression of contempt for and an assault on Japan’s anime, manga and game industries have been dispelled in a series of astonishingly hostile remarks by the crazed geriatrics who run the city.

Tokyo’s 78-year-old governor Shintarō Ishihara is already notorious for making xenophobic remarks and for being a key backer of Tokyo’s ongoing efforts to destroy the anime, manga and game industries, but his latest remarks add a healthy dose of homophobia to the mix:

There are even homosexuals on TV now, as if there is nothing wrong with it. Japan is too unregulated. I come with a sense of duty.

Rich talk coming from a man whose own novels lovingly describe schoolgirl gang-rape and murder, and a definite sign that fujoshi can expect their favourite works to be banned along with everything else.

In other remarks he reveals yet more signs of delusion – “Even overseas where they are sexually open, children are a no-go.”

That Japan is not sexually open is probably news to Japanese and non-Japanese alike, and the fact that rates of child sex abuse are vastly higher overseas than in Japan rather undermines his position.

Actor and comedian Hiroiki Ariyoshi cheekily tweets back that “The only reason Ishihara is blaming manga all the time now is because he is angry that he can’t it up any more – give it up already.”

The madness does not stop there – his deputy, vice governor Naoki Inose, a 64-year-old writer, recently made an astonishing tweet in which he called manga readers a pack of losers:

I get the impression that many manga lovers lead dead-end lives. Go talk to a living woman!

You don’t know what they’ll say from moment to moment, so they are far more interesting and lovely.

He has apparently come to the conclusion that people only read manga because they have no girlfriends.

The far-reaching redraft of the law these politicians are struggling to justify has also been subject to harsh criticism.

Lawyers say it is worded such that it could be used to censor any work of fiction which contains a depiction of a crime, censoring works for showing “virtual crimes” and allowing the Tokyo government to arbitrarily ban any work which contains unlawful death or violence (practically all anime, manga and games with any action content).

All this whilst Japan has some of the lowest crime rates in the world – virtually the only explanation for such a law being presented is that the proponents are senile or mad, and bear a seething hatred for Japan’s contemporary visual culture.

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