Temporal Paralysis

Sometimes, I wonder: what does it take to enjoy hentai?

As we know, the recent Japanese eroge companies’ ban on foreign IPs accessing their websites as well as the heightened awareness of this shady side of the genre, (with no thanks to Sankaku Complex for being such a scat), brought up the issue of putting into mainstream consciousness the existence of hentai and eroge materials that are put up freely everywhere.

In this OP/ED, I would like to express my deepest thoughts on this matter, why I felt that the Japanese have the right to block foreigners from providing such materials, and what is my prediction for the near-future.

The Thing About “Koto” and “Mono”

I can understand that many people procure or enjoy hentai/eroge for the simple fact – probably oversimplified – that it provides the end-users plenty of enjoyment and pleasure. It’s as simple as that. Try convincing how being a fan of a sports team does not equate to participating in a group orgy.

Understandably, the thing about eroge and hentai – and due to the quirk nature of the Japanese’ concept of “you” – is that all of it are derived from depictions of fictional characters, where nobody gets hurt. It’s one of the hardcore arguments against proposition to clamp down on them. It’s hard to convince a world where the blurry lines between the “mental image I have of ‘you’” and the “real ‘you’” are subtly morphed into this one big ‘you.’

This is the Japanese (dis)advantage: the ability to remove a person into two concepts — one defined by the persona everybody acknowledges, and the other, more physical persona where everybody acknowledges this as an integral component to the existence of a person — means that it’s very easy to take out the character of an entity and turn it into something that’s completely different from the original. It allows the Japanese to criticize a person indirectly without explicitly directing their vitriol against the actual person. If one recalls the Japanese modules/self-help reference books, the concept of こと and もの applies greatly in this debate.

Applying this concept to the eroge/hentai scene, it means that people are free to conceptualize an otherwise innocent character and perverted them into something else. The actual character, though, remains intact.

(In other countries, these acts of derivative works are illegal, depending on which territory one is in. While “Fair Dealing/Use” argument is a much-vaulted legal immunity that is easily transmutable across a diverse range of interests, it can only cover much ground, dependent on whether the territory is an island banana republic or a deeply vaulted and honored institution.)

To extend this argument further, since in eroge/hentai – and to a large extent, the anime & manga series in which the former derives from – there are no physical link between a character and a real-life representation of it, the characters depicted in the eroge/hentai shows or games are not hurt in any way possible because even if they are depicted as “being hurt,” it is still primarily within the realm of the mind, and only the person who knew or have seen the character in such a state of hurt will have first-hand experience in it.

One could say that even if the character is canonically described as a minor – in which society will place a value on it to represent anything under the sun who is a minor –, if we follow the concept of “the mental image of ‘you’”, that derived mental image is detached from its original value (i.e. in this case, the “hentai-ed” minor is no longer a representation of minors now) and therefore no “hurt” can be done or inflicted.

The Value of Fictional Characters

In Western world, however, the concept of “a derived mental image detached of its original value” is totally alien. Regardless of whether so many derivative mental images has been created, if it still has a value derived from its original persona/avatar, whatever happens to that derivative persona (such as biting off its nose) will be reflected back to the original persona, hence to illustrate, if I subsequently decides to rape the derived character which is a minor in its original persona, that means I raped a minor, and that is a statuory offence, no questions asked.

This confusion of personas can be a bit overwhelming to readers, but to put it in simpler terms, this difference in psychological mindset between the Japanese and the West is why you often hear a lot of libel and defamation cases conversed in this non-Japanese side of the debate.

The Rights of The Japanese

Relatively speaking, however, the Japanese acknowledged this cultural discrepancy, and will try  to accommodate for foreigners. It’s just so happened that Equality Now – being non-Japanese – stumbled upon what they perceived as being in commitment to condone a statutory offense. Talk about reciprocation!

Putting aside conspiracy theories on cultural insubordination, the fact remains that people working in this adults-only industry are very niche, and rather having to put up with educating the people how their materials are not harming anything or anyone that is physically in existence in this reality, eroge companies simply blocked off access to foreigners. Whatever the foreigners can’t see (or comprehend due to the incoherent chicken scratches that is the Japanese writing system, as how they envision the Japanese language to be), it means nothing evil is done there.

It does put the whole “enlightening the masses” on a backpedal, though.

My Thoughts on Eroge/Hentai

Risking looking like a Devil’s advocate, I do empathise both parties’ reasons for pursuing their agendas: Equality Now fears that the fascination with the prepubescent body is equal to child pornography (the difference is that in child pornography, an actual child is actually being made to have sex, instead of a professional artist drawing on a piece of paper); for the eroge companies, they fear the loss of economic opportunities. (To a larger extent, they can also play the “nationalism” card and rally more mainstream Japanese to believe that the foreigners are pursuing Japan to whichever relevant UN body a la Matthew Perry style.)

Actually, my initial thought was to write a short chronicle in me playing a very classic eroge “that is not related to the Torah.”  It also does not help that a contact I know in IRC sent me 4 files featuring a segment in an ero-doujin where the girls are treated in a multifunctional display of horrid fetishism and insertions I can never fathom. Suffice to say, however, even if I had to stare at them just to get aroused by it, I’m all too jaded and unemotional to be excited about it. Coupled with the fact that it befuddles me why would girls go through all that pain just to get high, means that I can never appreciate the allure of dudes acquiring a lot of 2D porn materials for their “enjoyment” purposes.

(No, I don’t even touch 3D porn, either. And no, I’m straight.)

Unfortunately, I have recently become too unmotivated to follow up on any anime or manga series that’s currently on distribution online at the moment. If given my thoughts on the eroge scene, I would say, “it will still be out there; just that I won’t be doing the searching.”

For the rest of the eroge afficiandos, they have always been the hardcore ones; nothing will stop them from getting through the restrictions. And so the restrictions will continue indefinitely until people have either back off from this debate and forget about it, or one side capitulates. As Sun Zi once quipped, “There is no instance of a country having benefited from a prolonged warfare.”

Tags: equality now, eroge, hentai, hentai debate

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 2:08 am and is filed under Anime, OP/ED, WTF?!, all and sundry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.