UPDATE:
Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone. Let’s start with a… hmm… not so happy post (sorry).
If you are a real weeb/otaku/smelly person, you may have paid attention to the following news (reproduced in a few pop culture outlets, like ANN or Nichiban): a Australian politician, tired of fighting kangoroos and gigantic spiders, gathered her energy, time and infinite knowledge to fight a evil and clever enemy.
Mangas.
I can imagine your disappointment reaction, but if you didn’t know about this, now you do. In a TL;DR version, she asked (demanded? threatened?) a major Japanese book seller in Sydney to remove some titles that reproduces (big quotes) “child exploitation”. As you expected, dumb politicians are in everywhere, but Australia likes to take the leader role. The reaction of many readers and fans were as you may expect, flooding her Twitter post in which she celebrates the removal from the store the “immoral” material with criticism, irony and indignation. Days later, the bookstore responded in a Twitter thread about why they removed, saying the titles (may) come back when the classification board approves it (or bans it, they can do that).
So, let’s dive in the characters of this story and understand what really happened, and what may happen.
Who is the politician?
Her name is Connie Bonaros, a member of legislative council (a state upper chamber) of South Australia state. Her term started in 2018 and will last for 8 years (yes, bad news), and the party is called SA-BEST, a branch of the federal level party called Centre Alliance founded very recently, in 2017 — although I’m not a political expert, as more I read about this incident, its hard to detect if it is a far-conservative or far-left party. Scratching the party website I could find two news-like posts (here and here) about the same subject, and the first one writes in the title (big, big quotes ahead): “Explicit child pornography material being sold over the counter in Australian retail outlets […]”. And then the surprise (not for me, or for any sane person in this world): it is talking about “animated movies” and “comic books”. I won’t reproduce the text here, you can go there and check. The second one is about the bookstore case, as you will learn more below.
Who is the bookstore?
Surprisingly, it not a Californian retard one. It is Kinokuniya, a big Japanese bookstore chain with stores in 11 countries, specially in Asia. I couldn’t find any references in their website about the incident, but is not important. In Australia they have only one store, in Sydney.
What happened?
The real shitstorm started in July 19th, when Bonaros just posted a tweet congratulating Kunikuniya for removing from the shelves many Japanese manga titles, as you can see below (at the time of writing, it has almost a thousand of comments):
The link for the Adelaide Now news portal is under paywall, but they don’t need your click anyway. Bonoros is congratulating Kinokuniya because earlier this year she allegedly sent a letter to Keijiro Mori, a director/vice-president of the chain. Looks like Mori has bow down to the pressure from the politician and just banned some random titles from the store. His reply and her congratulation letter can be found at this Kotaku post (sorry for the source, I promise better one next time).
Yes, it could be pass unknowingly if she had not posted, and maybe just a few would realize books disappearing from the store. Fortunately, politicians are not the smartest things in the world and need to please their electorate, and now we are here spending energy to text about such stupidity.
Her dumb argumentation is just plain stupid, that is hard to write: materials like No Game No Life, Eromanga Sensei or Goblin Slayer are gateway to child abuse, because contains “wide-eyed depictions of children” (yes, wide-eye = children = crime) in sexual activities (I really don’t remember any explicit scene in No Game No Life, but I don’t know, maybe for her any anime-like drawing is sexually explicit); that such material are illegal in Australia; and moreover, such imagery is called hentai in which “paedophiles are known to use as a tool to groom children” (same reasoning as “abductors are known to use ropes as a tool to tie hands”). Basically, Bonoros and the party has used money, time and effort to combat… drawings. Yes, is absurd. Just a suggestion, maybe supporting measures to punish offenders against children would be more effective, but my opinion is nothing near such demigod entities.
But I didn’t write this text just for the rant. Kinokuniya Sydney has publicly responded in a long thread about the complains (let be sincere here, a lot of weebs has raged again Bonoros, but just a few went to Kinokuniya Twitter or others means to express their dissatisfaction; the chain is maybe more responsible about this shit than her, I don’t know). In a few words, the thread says that they have not gave in the pressure, but merely that they were made aware that some titles needed to undergo the Australian Classification Board for review. The thread start can be found here, but a specific tweet is cause for some worrying:
Yes, at least some of them may be refused classification. In Australia, this is equals censorship (big democracy, right?). It is not the first time the shit country has banned something, it even has its own article in Wikipedia contemplating refused classification games (freedom of expression that don’t reach highly controversial fiction is not freedom). So let’s step to the core of this post: the Australian law.
The fucked up system
Like almost every other country, Australia has an institution in charge of reviewing publication to classify in some age-rating categories. However the Australian Classification Board doesn’t review all materials. In their website there is a section about what they classify, and a paragraph states this way:
Some publications, called ‘submittable publications’ also need to be classified.
The definition of a submittable publication includes publications containing depictions or descriptions that are:
– likely to cause the publication to be Refused Classification (RC)
– likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult
– unsuitable for a minor to see or read
It is not like these are very blurry and subjective definitions, right? I still don’t fucking understand why if an adult may feel offended for something is a valid reason for the publication to be submitted to review. The idea isn’t bar children from access this material? If so, why such reason is relevant? Only a politician can make this kind of dumb rules.
Anyway, I have made in bold the first item. Let’s find what is considered to be likely to be refused (censored). The guidelines can be read in a 2008 document that contains the criteria for which classification a certain piece should receive, based on 1995 Classification Act amended many times, so it was a little bit hard to find the right text, but here we go:
Publications that:
(a) describe, depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that they should not be classified; or
(b) describe or depict in a way that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult, a person who is, or appears to be, a child under 18 (whether the person is engaged in sexual activity or not); or
(c) promote, incite or instruct in matters of crime or violence
Just pay attention at (b). A material can get RC, be in visual or textual form, if a reasonable adult (what the fuck is a reasonable adult?) feel offended (yes, snowflake adults) by the very description of someone that appears under 18, and even don’t need to be in a sexual context. And worse, very worse, this is not about only real world material (in which case we don’t need guidelines for explicit depiction of children, but the very old and well known jail time), but for fictional, non-real, nonexistent “people” — I find very difficult in such context to call “people” characters, but it is only me that separates reality from imagination. Fiction has no boundaries, so a monster is a person? A speaking highly intelligent evolved robot is a person? What about aliens? Stick characters can ask for the universal stick rights? Trying to apply legal definition into non-existent things is beyond my comprehension. The others points are equally outrageous, bringing morality and decency to censorship, concepts so malleable and changing that an appropriate rational justification is nowhere to be found. (Funny history: in 2009 they refused classification to the zombie killing game… Left 4 Dead. Reclassified later as R18, fortunately).
In the Kinokuniya thread, the company has said that fees are due when material are sent to classification, and such money may be prohibitively expensive. So, I checked the fee table of the board and got an ungrateful surprise:
Holy fuck! 420 Australian dollars (300 US dollars) for 76 pages book! A light novel or manga may have around 200 pages, so a 10-volumes series is around 4 fucking thousand US dollars! I know, a company like Kinokuniya may have some pockets to cover this robbery, but the small publishers, importers or stores? Do you think they will spend money to pass through the censorship board a material that may be refused classification? No way of paying the government for the right of being silenced (computer games can have a 860 USD fee, and movies may reach 5000 USD). And more, didn’t you like the board decision? No problem, you can ask a review for… 10 thousand AUD (7k USD)! Nice deal, kangaroos.
That means no Shiro anymore?
The answer is “who knows”. Is Shiro an offence to you? Nah (I bet you were clickedbaited in this post because of the cute Shiro header, right?). And let me be frank, I have no ideia about the contents of half of the banned titles, but it is not relevant. The problem is that isn’t you sitting in a chair inside the Australian classification board building looking at the pages of No Game No Life manga; is a man or a woman that may never had any superficial contact with Japanese media, being considered a reasonable adult, deciding what you, a another reasonable adult (I hope so), can or cannot read inside the great Commonwealth of Australia. Is the bookstore willing paying such classification? Do the company want to clash with politicians, and in last instance, the law? Big questions. Remember, is not just No Game No Life. A few others are banned also, and this is not exclusivity from Australia. Amazon US recently (no link, I’m lazy, just duckduck it) removed mangas and novels from its website, giving no reason to the local publishers (afraid of legal backslash?). Patreon and Paypal recurrently locks account of many artists, especially anime-style ones, blocking their money because they can, they are big, and no one wants to fight a very expensive legal battle, based in content posted outside their domains. Weird times we are living in, after the establishment of many democracies, civil rights, sexual liberation during the 20th century we are not so gradually returning to a very illiberal, negative, restricted and closed society. Years ago, I would say religion with its rhetoric of penitence (you are allowed no fun, no alcohol, no sex, etc) was overflowing this view into right wing politics and consequently, into laws. Well, the penitence rhetoric still stands, but now captured but the left wing politics, changing the law to please an authoritative view. Everything changes, still stays the same.
What can I do?
Sincerely, I think free expression defenders are not too many. Support for wide open freedom of expression (with more or less classic exceptions) is not well viewed. Nobody wants to hear/see unpleasant things, and worse, it is hard to publicly defend that your enemy has right to speak, because people will say you support your enemy speech. However, something must be done.
If you live in Australia, fill a complain to Kinokuniya Sydney. Even if they are obligated to submit those material to classification if they want to sell, or this incident was a lawyer trying to evading some lawsuit from government, is their choice to sell or not. They need to know it is worth to pass through the bureaucracy to sell it, so make sure to buy from them if, and only if, the material goes back. Give them money now means nothing was lost from their perspective with the ban.
Also, if you are an Australian, write, call, protest, to your representative. This kind of incident will keep happening as long the law is wrong. It is not simple as I am putting here, because dumb, stupid, retarded people will start to call you abhorrent names because you dared to support the right for fictional content to exist. I am not questioning the role of the classification system in our society — I think it is good, only if they have no power to censor (you may disagree, feel free). But for a dumb politician like Bonaros to call some comics child exploitation, child pornography, sexual abuse material, etc and asking for their removal is because they have power to do it. No law, no power. All the efforts spent in this shitstorm could be canalized to the abuse victims all over the country, people really being hurt. But Bonaros only achievement was to save 0 children after this act.
Next post, a game review (no politics), what you think?
