Critical support to the Japanese Communist Party

Article for you nerds.

This push to vilify anime and manga appears to partially contradict the party’s statements in 2021, where the JCP affirmed their alleged commitment to “free expression” but had reservations about how women are portrayed in creative works.

"

You commies say you support muh freedumbs but you don't support muh freedumb to be a weird misogynist pervert!!! Checkmate tankies!!"

Extremely critical support to Vice, I guess? Damn this gamer is furious.

this fucking website is gonna be an absolute goldmine of horrible gamer/weeb takes isn't it?
- Yeah it's basically a OneAngryGamer bit combined with the worst weeaboo tendencies. Goldmine indeed!
That Vice documentary was... uh... I can't even put it to words, this is absolutely disgusting. I knew the pedophile problem was bad, but I didn't think it would be that bad. Holy shit.
- If you think that's bad you should check out their other documentary about kids for sale in Japan
  Japan as a whole needs a complete restart. Communist revolution when
- Real day-ruiner, right?
Gamers trying to go after vice for going after pedophilia is so pathetic it's hilarious.
Despite all this, Vice News has hypocritically supported actual pedophilia, as noted by their past articles and videos:
Of the listed, just reading the top line shown in the screengrabs the gamers deigned to share, 5 are clearly about people with an attraction disorder but didn't commit CSA, and one about satanic panic. Can't even read the first paragraph and probably just googled "vice pedo" and cobbled the results together, what unserious people.
Wayback Machine links for both (for the people who have trouble accessing archive.is, assuming it isn't just me):
https://web.archive.org/web/20240329152436/https://nichegamer.com/japanese-communist-party-encourages-members-to-report-fanservice-manga-to-the-un/
https://web.archive.org/web/20231226201349/https://nichegamer.com/vice-news-documentary-that-slandered-anime-manga-industry-wins-emmy/
Wtf

I would like to report Japan's crimes against humanity. Uh... no. Not the ones from World War II, no. It's the manga.

Yes hello it is me Mr. Nations my friends call me United

Sending in the White Helmets to contain and secure Akihabara until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
- I haven't been to Akihabara (or Tokyo at all) in my one trip to Japan, but I have been to Osaka's smaller equivalent Nipponbashi Den Den Town.
  It's very much a town of contrasts and alongside the mostly fine but usually expensive hobbyist shops and the completely unproblematic electronics stores, there's the horny sections of weebery.
  An uncomfortable experience ngl, which also extends to a lot of women on the streets advertising for at least partially sexualized establishments like maid cafes etc.. Some of it aimed at tourists, but by necessities of language barriers, mostly for local weebs.
  A minor interesting thing was how it was basically impossible to find any merch etc. for anything older than a year or so except for the huge shows and surprisingly, old mecha. Everything moving extremely fast, jumping from cash cow with waifus to the next.
  Indeed, as much as it would fit the bit, the only Azumanga related stuff I saw was the comic itself. 😔 Pretty good music stores though.

Unlimited genocide on fanservice manga

long live Hayao Miyazaki thought

seeing a "this convenience store is hentai-free" sticker on the entrance door

Every morning the JCP flips a coin. Heads it's kind of funny, tails it's controlled opposition.

I found a screencap of the story from the JCP's newspaper on a JCP member's blog. Did my best job to grab, order, and correct the text (I wasn't super sure what order to read things in so I apologize if it's a bit disjointed, but Google had zero fucking idea, and the quality is kinda shit) I'll include a lightly-edited DeepL machine translation as well as the original text (please point out any transcription errors!). Not entirely sure if this is the whole story--seeing as it's a front-page story, there might be more, but I have no way of accessing the full issue.

edit: Oh yeah, I should give a TL;DR: adult magazines which include some pretty gross content are sold out in the open at convenience stores, which (unsurprisingly) a lot of people find objectionable. The article goes through the history of convenience stores saying they would stop selling them, but then not really stopping, whether the franchises are really that independent of their parent company (which basically says "we can't stop them from selling what they want"), and so on. The "secret poll" is a survey being conducted by the New Japan Women's Association which readers are invited to participate in to get a more complete picture of what publications are being offered in which stores (the figures given in the article were from a sample of 517 stores compared to the ~58,000 in Japan). The UN is mentioned mostly to highlight the dire state of women's rights in Japan, and that a UN committee (CEDAW) had commented on the supposed halt on sales of the magazines as part of an earlier report.

Critically: Unless the article takes a wild turn on a subsequent page that I can't see, the NJWA doesn't actually say anything (in this article) about a general ban on the sale of adult magazines--they just want people to be able to work their shitty-paying service jobs, grab a bento, or take a piss at the 7-Eleven in peace without seeing a bunch of degrading sexual material. And the JCP literally doesn't make a policy prescription--it's an article about this issue which has been a point of discussion for years and the NJWA's actions, not an official party proclamation. So the JCP has not done anything worthy of critical support (because they literally didn't do anything) and no one is coming for these gamers' shitty manga.

So... basically they're saying this adult content shouldn't be sold in regular convince stores but at retails specially marked as "adult" vendors of erotica?
That seems... reasonable.
- Not being able to procure wank material at the convenience store is literally 1984
I wonder if that's the same Ryoko Ikeda who wrote the Rose of Versailles manga.
- Nope, different characters for the given name (mangaka is 理代子 and NJWA member is 亮子), and the mangaka is also Riyoko rather than Ryoko (not just a romanization difference). Honestly, I can't even be absolutely sure if her name is Ryoko--it's the most common name reading for those kanji, but it could be Akiko or something else for all I know
edit: idk if anyone's gonna see this at this point, but can anyone confirm if I got the reading order right? It should be simple in principle (right-to-left, top-to-bottom) but those pull quotes threw me for a loop. It seems to me like they essentially created separate columns, where each time you hit the pull quote you reset to the right and go down until you get past the pull quote, then start again at the top of the column on the left of the pull quote. The bit about polling squished in the lower right was the part I was least sure about since it stands alone.

This is targeting pedophile content. But of course the reactionaries are presenting it as an attack on all lewd works.

If the left took an absurdly anti-anime and anti-manga stance I feel like the people we alienate on the left would be outnumbered by the people joining us because of their intrinsic hate of anime. Lets characterize an entire art form as reactionary and see what happens, im willing to gamble with your treats.

There's a weird fixation on anime and manga being labeled as inherently bad, bordering to a small scale moral panic, among english-speaking internet socialists.
Possibly, same as the whole age of consent stuff, because libertarians and adjacent ideologies are infamously defensive of the worst aspects in both these things.
- I agree, but I think it's primarily driven by how accepted certain content unique to the medium is online. If weebs were just as mortified by the existence of simulated CP as we are then things would be different, but they're all seemingly super into it, which heightens our own feelings of disgust and makes people want to paint the whole medium as being that way.
- My take would be quite long but just two things:
  1- The good discussion to be had is drawn out by the nature of HB as a "dunk" site. In general a large percentage of people come here to be "morally outraged". I certainly engaged with this in the past so I'm not being cynical here. But with regards to anime, it is the lowest of the low hanging fruits. Weebs are pretty much adjacent to gamers and public enemy #1 of the online left, for some very good reasons of course, nobody is stupid or blind.
  To be clear there is very little to defend about these communities, specially someone that self-identify as a "Gamer" or "Weeb".
  But people are very eager to take the shortest path to guilty by association arguments. "Oh you watch anime in 2024? Certainly you like the absolute bottom of the barrel trash incest anime from 2011!"
  Either you enjoy the party approved treat or else its the gulag. But the actual irony is a lot of people here have consumed and will continue to consume games, western TV shows, the occasional capeshit etc. Nobody is actually willing to give up their treats, but everyone is certainly willing to police each other. Why? because its the fate of the western left realy. We are not organized, we're not politically active, but in the struggle to find any meaning or any change, its easy to attach to the simplest cause at hand because very often its the only cause we can actually organize towards.
  Social media activism is one of the strongest forms of liberalism.
  2-I certainly had my hate for Hasan in the past, but one of the things I like about him is he is very much upfront with the no ethical consumption shit. He will say "yeah I go to Japan, Yeah I watch One Piece or whatever other popular show I like, yeah I play games, yeah I watch TV..." Is he correct? Maybe not 100% but certainly he is not wrong, we know that when people criticize leftists habits they're always hypocrites, chuds complain about woke but they're also consuming just as much etc.
  Engaging in treat wars is not productive because its hypocritical. "Oh you're not living on some dirty shack drinking vodka and watching old USSR movies from 1965? YOU'RE DOING SOCIALISM WRONG". Hasan dunks on that constantly and he does it well imo.
But the JCP didnt take an anti manga/anime stance, they are against selling fanservice manga/adult magazines in convinience stores which i think its fine
- Maybe they should take a more hostile approach towards anime? Theres many more problem with the industry than 7/11 selling hentai rape.

Chun Li is in hot water for her raunchy manga

I don't understand this, isn't it redundant because celibacy is already voluntary?
- It's a play on incel and became a meme on the old cth subreddit to combat horniness and people being creepy to/about women.
- Not to incels