Korea Busts 60 for Ero-Manga Scanlation

South Korean police say they are investigating 60 people for distributing and translating ero-manga, quoting the ringleader as saying he did it because “all women hate me.”

According to Inchon cyber-crime investigators, the 19-year-old founder of a site concerned with distributing Korean language translations of over 1,500 “obscene” Japanese manga via torrent recruited the assistance of some 36 editors and translators.

Most of the distributors are said to be university students, and police also apparently identified a further 23 students who merely downloaded or shared the material.

Police are keen to paint the suspects as sad misanthropes who did it out of an unwholesome inability to attract 3D women, quoting one as saying “I was unpopular with girls in school, so I developed a sense of inferiority and the belief that ‘all women hate me’.”

The police say as many as 40-50 vile perverts may have downloaded the materials they distributed, and say they intend to widen their investigations further in the hopes of catching them.

They also report that unlike the wholesome obscenity seen in pornographic movies, “compared to the obscenity seen in movies that of manga knows no bounds, and a lot of the material depicted exceedingly perverted sexual activity,” including such unbelievable deviance as young men engaged in sexual activity.

Unlike the relatively liberal if reliably corrupt censorship regime in Japan, South Korea strives to protect its people both from the evils of sex via censorship of pornography and undesirable sites, and from specifically Japanese corruption as well with a variety of restrictions on Japanese media, evidently making ero-manga a rather easy target – not least with vilifying all things Japanese already being something of a national obsession.