Tokyo Manga Massacre Begins

Tokyo manga fans are disgusted to witness their beloved manga already being dumped into the porno corner en masse in order to comply with Ishihara’s twisted manga ban.

Some explanation may be required – in Japan, convenience stores usually sell adult (porn) magazines in an out-of-the-way corner, with the shelves marked off with a “成人向け雑誌” separator and minors prohibited from browsing the shelves or buying anything therein.

Similar arrangements exist in other shops for DVDs, eroge and so on, often with curtained off areas of the shop or otherwise. However, many outlets will not stock anything which needs to be separated into an 18+ section at all.

An example of what the average convenience store 18+ corner looked like until recently (the content of the rags in question should be obvious):

An example of what they have begun to look like in Tokyo thanks to the looming Tokyo manga ban:

Titles now branded adult-only include such notoriously obscene manga publications as Manga Home, Morning, Evening, etc…

2ch is disgusted at the discovery:

“I stopped off in a Tokyo convenience store on my way to work in Yokohama:

Tokyo is like another universe now, with the manga ban everything is going to be annihilated.

In the Yokohama convenience stores near where I work and those near my home, Young Jump is stocked alongside the travel magazines and stuff. The adult corner just has ero-manga stuff like Kairakuten and idol magazines.

When I saw the shelves in Tokyo it was like I was sucked into some weird parallel world…

Anyway, manga’s going to disappear now, isn’t it? They’ll never make any money like this.”

“What!? Why the hell is Manga Home in the adult section? It has no sex or violence at all… it’s just an innocnent little 4koma manga magazine. This can’t be serious…”

“It’s serious, you can’t just play with their shelves in the middle of the day.”

“I’ve only been to Akiba, but there was a 7-11 there that was like this.”

“The pro-censorship crowd have forced all manga not intended for all ages to be sold as 18+. Even Jump is in danger at this rate…”

“I heard publishers tried to  create a 15+ category but Tokyo refused to allow it. I suppose it was true.”

“Well, games are really heavily censored thanks to CERO [the Japanese “voluntary” game rating system], and this ban still targets them in spite of that. Even if manga had ratings, they’d still be banned.”

“For a moment I felt total despair, but then I seethed with rage. Titles like Manga Home and Manga Club have no ero at all – it’s infuriating for them to be forced into the adult corner with all the porn.

Is this the world the censorship crowd wanted? If so we have to destroy that warped illusion.”

“Raika Days has an elementary school girl protagonist so it was placed in the 18+ section.”

“The censorship criteria are totally ambiguous so they just dumped all the manga with a higher age demographic into the adult section.”

“All manga and everything else now has to be labelled as 18+… I want to cry, this is a tragedy.”

“So now ‘adult only’ is not for ero, but for anything not aimed at little children.”

This all seems to completely discredit those still insisting the impact will be minor – any anime, manga or games which find themselves stuck shelved with porn and unable to be sold to or even looked at by under 18s can expect to see their sales plummet, forcing publishers and mangaka to either go out of business or produce only children’s titles which they can slip past Ishihara’s inquisition.