Japanese pornography laws

In , artist Igarashi Megumi — who works under the pseudonym Rokudenashiko, and uses her vagina in works of art — was arrested twice by the Tokyo Police for violating the country's obscenity law. The case of Rokudenashiko is distinctive for the following reasons. Firstly, it was the first time that the police applied the obscenity law to a case involving 3-D data. Their charge was that Rokudenashiko had scanned her vagina and emailed a URL containing the scanned data to donors who had provided money for the art project, with the idea of letting them use the data to replicate her vagina on a 3-D printer.

Testicles tied up in twine. Sometimes violent, sometimes serene, the homosexual erotic photography of Robert Mapplethorpe is anything but easy. But is it obscenity or art? On February 19th Japan's Supreme Court ruled that it is the latter, and that Takashi Asai of Uplink, the publisher, could legally sell a book of the artist's black-and-white portraits—mostly of flowers and stars, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger showing off in his swimming trunks in The decision may end up loosening stringent obscenity standards. Woodblock prints from the 17th century, called shunga , depict penises the size of battering-rams.

Pornography in Japan has unique characteristics that readily distinguish it from Western pornography. Starting with erotic stories and wood block prints from before the 20th century, Japanese pornography evolved into distinct subcategories. In addition to pornographic videos and magazines featuring live actors, there are now categories of pornographic manga within Japanese comics , pornographic computer games for both PC and game consoles , and pornographic anime animated depictions of sexual activity.

Censorship in Japan , although prohibited by the country's constitution , is effectively mandated through the Article of the Criminal Code of Japan with regards to pornography. While Article 21 of the Japanese Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and prohibits formal censorship , effective censorship of pornographic content does exist and is justified by the Article of the Criminal Code of Japan. Historically the law has been interpreted in different ways—recently it has been interpreted to mean that all pornography must be at least partly censored; however, there have been very few arrests based on this law. As publishing became more popular in the Edo Period , the Tokugawa shogunate began to turn to censorship.