Touhou Project Bans Ero-Doujinshi, Sales to Foreigners

The latest guidelines on what the Touhou Project “officially” considers acceptable includes a ban on the creation of ero-doujinshi, anime, sexy dakimakura, works which are “inappropriate” and even an explicit admonition not to sell Touhou products to foreigners.

The new guidelines, which in summary “restrict” creation of works featuring highly sexual content and provide even more draconian limitations on how Touhou-related works can be distributed and sold – no doubt with an eye to preventing any more Touhou anime, killing off any non danmaku games and stopping foreign barbarians from getting anything else banned:

These are the 2011 revisions to the Touhou Project guidelines.

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Additionally, we will basically not permit the commercial circulation of doujin works.

[…]

Permission must be sought for the commercial sale of Touhou-related goods.

[…]

Also, please refrain from producing any commercial goods of a sexual nature (erotic dakimakura, etc.).

Restrictions on derivative works.

Please ensure you restrain yourself from producing any of the following:

Any work mainly constituting animation and produced on a non-volunteer basis, excluding 3D animation.

Selling Xbox 360 indie games.

Selling anything by way of AppStore or Android Marketplace (companies please enquire).

Anything not distributed in the same manner as the original works (general doujin sales channels [i.e. Reitaisai and Akihabara doujin shops]) – for example, selling downloads aimed at overseas buyers.

Anything else which is overly sexual, defamatory towards people, groups or races, or would generally be considered as socially unacceptable.

With this, the rather bizarre copyright situation surrounding Touhou seems to have become even more murky.

Despite the vast majority of the creative work in the Touhou universe being produced independently of the original creators, they nonetheless still try to control derivative works whilst desperately trying to prevent “commercialisation” for reasons nobody seems to understand.

Simultaneously, they attempt to squeeze royalties out of creators for the use of characters whose popularity is almost entirely based on derivative works – ethically and legally speaking, somewhat precarious behaviour at best.

Now it seems they are intent on taking a leaf out of Ishihara’s book by banning material not to their tastes, whilst clamping down on any games or anime which look likely to eclipse the (rather limited) popularity of the original games, attitudes unlikely to endear them to the wider Touhou community to say the least.