I'm not an expert on the matter but I half disagree with this. We still get lots of non JP porn related media sold here, including porn videos and games. They're criticized? of course, like any other media.
Depending on your country, you only have access to a really small curated subset of what is available to Japanese customers. When it comes to "Made in Japan", there's more adult content available in their local konbini down the street than on the official international market : what you can get in the West is mostly "smuggled" thanks to the Internet and lax Customs Laws enforcement or stands in the grey area.
Erotic materials and games featuring characters under —or appearing to be under— 18 years old are technically banned in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Austria, Norway, Sweden, etc... Playing or possessing them can (and actually is) prosecutable and lead to jail sentences. On top of that, rape porn is banned in most of the Commonwealth, which also substract a non-negligible subset of the Japanese production. That's pretty simple : you don't want to get caught with anything from
Play Club to the JAV from
Minimum or Dogma to half of the available doujinshi.
Actually, games like
Secrossphere,
Artificial Academy,
VR Kanojo or any pornographic material featuring high-school girls, as well as most of JK porn / hentai, are in the grey area and avoid bans thanks to subtle translation shenanigans ("let's say it's a special high-school without any minors in there : all characters intended to be 18+ even the 130cm tall one") and breast surgery. It even affects non-adult games : see
Xenoblade Chronicles X.
A single little push and all of that can be banned. It would only requires the West to understand understand that 99% of the uniform-wearing girls can't possibly be over eighteen, and they're all gone. A little push that only needs another overinflated scandal to serve as a pretext.
If Japan doesn't sell this stuff here it's probably because they don't see the costs worth (localization, distribution, english support...), as you said, they're a company aiming for profit.
It's not about money : actually, Japanese devs would welcome a bigger audience since their domestic market is shrinking. It's all about avoiding another shitstorm that could lead to even tighter censorship laws, both in Japan and internationally.
Do I really need to remind everyone about the "Rapelay Incident" and how it affected the industry back in the day ? Don't you know about
the smear campaign bordering on xenophobia and
the petitioning launched by Equality Now ?
This whole mess ended up with Sofurin/OECS banning the game and eroge companies starting their "Japan Only" policy with region locks and IP filtering on their websites. This is also the fucking reason why most of the professional games do not feature rape any more, but only "training" (read : the games rated by the OECS and made by companies, and not the ones made by doujin/circles).
It has a lasting impact on the industry, still making
developers uneasy about any contact with foreign players, more than five years after the whole debacle.
Because this shit
escalated to the United Nations, starting an everlasting war between Japan and the international institution under the false pretense of "discrimination against women". Since then, they've been repeatedly calling on Japan to enforce
bans on shota/loli, said to encourage real child abuse, as well as
bans on video games or cartoons involving sexual violence against women.
And, if it's REALLY because "OMG feminist" then they need to grown a thicker skin.
This is not about "OMG feminist" but "What the fuck is wrong with those people" ?
They don't want to deal with us because of our "Thought Police" made of scaremongering associations, institutions and mass-media ready to blow anything they can out of proportion to entertain their ideological agendas and our politicians ability to invent crimes that don't claim any victim simply to get themselves a bit of publicity.
You have to understand that Japanese people have a strong sense of shame : how do you believe they feel when the West points an accusative finger at them, telling them they spend their time enjoying material encouraging child abuse and violence towards women ? It is totally alien to them, because those "abused" characters are just drawings, not real people, and fantasies never hurt anyone. They feel like they're being the bad kids, being taught by everyone, while not even being able to understand what's so bad about it.
So, they just brush it aside.
Shouganai wa ne... And keep doing their stuff without involving us any further.
Now, I hope that it will change and that Japanese producers of adult content will stand their ground and try to release internationally everything that is not downright illegal (ie. lolicon), just like Illusion seems to be trying to do with
VR Kanojo.
I think that most people are way more relaxed than what the media are showing us, or just actually don't give a damn. But the silent majority is well, silent, and the vocal minority is here to push their totalitarian agenda. SJW aren't the target audience of these games, and I doubt they play them, they are just here to try censor products, as the religious zealots they are.
And as long as the trend in the US is to say yes to all of their caprices, then the era of self censorship is far from being at its end.
This.
I do believe that there will be an inevitable confrontation. We have producers, ready to make full-fledged uncensored porn featuring any kind of fetishes, we have a market with people ready to throw their money at anything that fancies their fantasies and yet... we have more and more bans piling up because a bunch of whinny neo-puritans have the ears of politicians.
But it's cracking. Just look at the zeitgeist : gamers outraged by censorship everywhere, Trump president, SJW being made fun of by everyone.
That's why I think VR Kanojo going international is a really bold and clever move. I'm sure it's going to be targeted, I'm sure many countries will ban it, but I'm sure a lot of people will stand for it. It's going to force many to take stance for or against censorship.
It may not end well. But if this game becomes the focal point of the censorship controversy, there are good chances it can lead to some really interesting outcomes.
That's an interesting line you have drawn between a underage and post-pubescent.
I didn't draw a line between underage and post-pubescent, but between pre-pubescent (pedo) and post-pubescent (ephebo). Technically, both are considered "underage" in most first-world countries.
And I wouldn't confuse them, simply because "underage" is legal term relying on social norms and varying between countries (age of consent or majority) while the other relies on biological and physical development. If there's a line to draw here, it wouldn't be considering ages and biology, but morals and social constructions.
Now, there's another line that we'll have to draw : the difference between real people and cartoony video game characters, between fantasy and reality. We all know where that line is, and we all know it shouldn't be crossed.
Do you know the minimum age of puberty can be from 12 to 16. If I embarrassed large community of people having that fetish then they are one who need real help. They can have my sympathy for mental-disorder they are suffering but not my regrets and nor apologies for what I said earlier.
Except than ephebophilia is not classified as a mental disorder, neither in DSM nor in the ICD. Actually, it's a perfectly sane and normal behavioural pattern : the attractiveness of juvenile features is well-documented subject in human sexual selection, stemming from the association of youth and fertility, and neoteny, especially in females, is a direct consequence of human evolution.
This is the reason why the use of exaggerated neotenic features is prominent in the anime industry : because it's cuter that way and ease empathy towards the characters. The attractiveness of the whole "moe" genre, that emphasise pedomorphic features even in older characters, has well-known roots in evolutionary psychology, on top of being culturally admired in Asia.
But if you don't know what you're talking about, please ask the Doctor. I'll be delighted to enlighten you.
I am not sure why would Western get nuts over porn games when there is wild spread of 3D Sex Villa and other Western porn games already in their region. The nudity in GTA, God of Wars etc. This is a pure double-standard bullshit that doesn't justify why Eastern region (specifically Japan) not to introduce their products in the West.
No. Read above. You simply can't compare Japanese eroge and titles like GTA or GoW. And you can't compare the hundreds of adult titles made available each year in Japan with the couple indie productions made in the West (3D Sex Villa, seriously ?). There's huge differences both in scale and nature, on top of cultural ones.
And the fact that Japanese people don't get batshit crazy and label their peers as mentally ill for liking their non-existent, purely fictional anime girls with bigger eyes and smaller legs. On a forum dedicated to fucking anime porn and games. It may be a reason why they're so adamant about keeping their games "Japan Only".
