Japan's comics and cartoons - known as manga and anime - are a huge cultural industry and famous around the world. But some are shocking, featuring children in sexually explicit scenarios. Why has Japan decided against banning this material?
It's a Sunday afternoon in Tokyo and Sunshine Creation is in full swing. Thousands of manga fans, mostly men, crowd into an exhibition centre, poring over manga comic magazines laid out for sale on trestle tables snaking around the rooms.
Posters of elfin-faced, doe-eyed cartoon heroines, many of them scantily clad and impossibly proportioned, turn the cavernous space into a riot of colour.
"This area is mainly dealing with sexual creations," explains Hide, one of the event organisers.
We stop at one table where the covers on display feature two topless girls. To my eyes they look to be in their early or pre-teens, and the stories show them engaged in explicit sexual acts.
Several other stands are selling similar material. It would certainly be considered controversial, and possibly illegal, in the UK, Australia or Canada, but here it's no big deal.
A controversial subject, to be sure, where does "fantasy" end and the reality of child abuse begin?
One could argue, as Kanemitsu does further down in the article, that it is a matter of "free thought" but does one person's right to fantasy entitle them to spread and distribute that fantasy?
Is it alright for someone to fantasize about raping a child, even if that child is barely disguised as "non human" by adding a pair of cute elven ears? Beating a child and forcing them into child prostitution? Tying a child and forcing sex on them? By far, most of these manga and anime comics, web sites and games are sexually oriented and designed to stimulate the reader/player sexually. All involve characters that are clearly depicted as adolescent or per-pubescent and mostly scantily dressed and in sexual context, either consensually or subdued into it. All are "cute" looking, implying a "ruined innocence" tone to them. They say that sex begins in the mind, so is the act of viewing and becoming aroused by such images tantamount to having sex, or at least foreplay with these "fantasy children"?
Most UN countries have banned these images so why hasn't Japan? Is it because it is traditional or customary in Japan to lust after youth? Is it a feeling of inadequacy, as suggested in the article by one respondent, that makes (mainly) men want to feel power over a child because they are fed up with powerful women around them?
Should the law in Japan protect the rights of those who use this material for sexual gratification? If so, should the rest of the world even have any comment on the subject?

