Anime Pornography News

A quick e-mail from holiday. Earlier today I was in the local branch of Mondadori, Italy's biggest bookshop chain and publisher - think Waterstone's and Harper Collins combined - owned by Silvio Bunga Bunga Berlusconi. Among the special offers was a little volume called XXX Manga (A quick look on google.it reveals all, but be wary of looking at it in the UK, since it shows the front cover.)

This book, freely on sale in mainstream high street and online booksellers in Italy, presents a few erotic manga stories, with speech bubble in Italian translation. Since the artists follow the usual Japanese manga convention of showing characters with young-looking faces, I am pretty sure that it would fall foul of the Dangerous Cartoons Act. The same point was made about a painting of the ukiyo-e school which sold for a few hundred thousand bucks in New York, and showed a multitasking young mum looking after a toddler while engaged in vigorous sexual congress. The picture therefore showed sexual activity in the presence of a child and would fall foul of the DCA.

I wonder when politicians are going to realise what a hole they're digging with their kneejerk authoritarianism. In the recent urethral sounding/fisting case, they ended up throwing one of their own to the wolves. And even the best reactions to the disgraceful Pussy Riot persecution from British politicians - I have in mind Kerry McCarthy - have been somewhat muted by their realisation that similar actions could be classified as crime in other countries too. ( Of course, if it happened in Westminster Abbey we wouldn't have a political trial like Putin. Oh dearie me, no.

Japanese manga comics depicting children in sexual poses are not child pornography, Sweden's Supreme Court has ruled, overturning a high-profile conviction of a Swedish translator.

In a ruling issued on Friday, the court acquitted Simon Lundstrom, who had been found guilty of child pornography crimes by two lower courts before appealing his case to Sweden's highest court.

According to the Supreme Court's ruling, the drawings are pornographic and they do portray children. However, because the cartoons represent imaginary figures there is no way they could be mistaken for real children.

The criminalization of possession of the drawings would otherwise exceed what is necessary with regard to the purpose which has led to the restriction on freedom of expression and freedom of information, the court said in a statement.