A slippery slope to kiddie porn
Secret filming at onsen, mad office parties and people paid to fix failing relationships "Japan has slowly been implementing legal measures against child pornography, but the ambience, culture and religion of the country makes people less uncomfortable about such issues compared with Western societies," said Maruta, who is also a lecturer in the international communications department at Okinawa University.
Maruta said "enjo kosai" (compensated dating) and "burusera" (sales of schoolgirls' used underwear) appear to have gone out of vogue, but there is still a huge market of men with fetishes and they are behind the recent outburst of semipornographic photo books and DVDs.
The industry, made up of many small, independent publishers and video companies, is in a legal gray zone as the law on child pornography is open to interpretation.
The Law Banning Child Prostitution and Pornography, enacted in 1999, defines child pornography as any image of a child under 18 years old "naked or partially naked, which is sexually stimulating."
The second article in the U.N.'s Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, which Japan signed in 2002, defines child pornography as "any representation, by whatever means, of real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes," and requires signatories to have laws banning such material.
However, Keiji Watanabe of the Publishers Ethics Committee of the Japan Magazine Publishers' Association said it is not easy to determine when an image crosses the line from art to child pornography.
Watanabe opposes the trend of raunchy photo books, saying that under no circumstance should a child be involved in explicit sexual products. His committee checks bookstores for inappropriate publications and has issued warnings to publishers of pornographic comic books.
It is "especially" vigilant on child pornography, Watanabe said, adding the panel warns shops and creators of such material.
However, the ethics committee has had problems finding the small, back-street publishers that are the main source of junior idol material. In addition, it does not have the legal authority to stop the sale of such material, Watanabe said.
"It's tricky for us — and police — to draw the line and have criteria" on what constitutes pornographic material, he said.
Police have seized books that show a preteen girl's nipple, but the junior idol material, while provocative, is not this revealing, he said.
Shinkosha Co., which published Asuka Izumi's photo books and other materials, declined comment on the issue when reached by telephone.
But regarding the media tagging as pornographic, junior idol Asuka Izumi and her mother, Kotomi, 37, who manages her daughter's activities, said they had no issues with how the photo books "sexually arouse" adult men.
"I don't have a problem with my daughter wearing a thong at her age," the mother, a former model, said, describing her daughter's body as having a "neutral, sexless beauty" that only a premature girl can possess.
She said she once found her daughter's work displayed in a hardcore porn shop in Tokyo's Kabukicho district, but it didn't bother her.
"I feel that anyone who buys Asuka's work has the right to do whatever they want to do with it," she said.
She said she is not taking commercial advantage of her daughter, but merely attempting to help the 14-year-old be successful in what she wants to do.
But she also revealed there are things that some industry people want to keep secret.
"The industry doesn't want me to talk about the details of what's going on behind closed doors," she said.
But she hinted that she has seen some mothers forcing their crying children to put on sexy swimsuits for the camera.
"Many in the industry feel that the junior idol boom was intended to be an underground trend," she said. "It was never meant to be accepted by the masses like it is now."
The Japan Times
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