it's slightly more mainstream than it is here, but not by much. whenever a female child actor stays relevant past her debut there's a national countdown of millions who are vocal about finding her hot. there was an snl sketch about how hot emma watson was in the 3rd harry potter movie when she was at most 14 during filming. pedophilia is a very real public phenomenon in the states, in some ways significantly more mainstream than in japan, it's just expressed differently
Age of consent there is something downright medieval. I think like 13 or 14.
Nope, that's just a myth pushed by ... genuinely don't even know who. The national age of consent is lower than that, yes, but that's only because they don't need to raise it because every individual part of the country has a perfectly normal age of consent.
The national age of consent is lower than that, yes, but that’s only because they don’t need to raise it because every individual part of the country has a perfectly normal age of consent.
CW: Discussion of SA
Like you said. The national age of consent is low. It's 13. What this reveals to me is, there's no federal protections in place, and if one random province decided to institute the national age of consent, nothing would be there to stop them. Just like there's nothing stopping any individual American state from banning abortion. It's worth asking why the national age of consent is so low in the first place, and why the people of Japan have to rely on local government to prevent adults from legally having sex with 13 year olds. I mean come on. Also prefectures don't have their own local ages of consent from what I was able to look up just now. Instead, many prefectures have local "corruption of minors" or "obscenity statutes" (淫行条例) which raise the de-facto age of consent to 16-18, unless they are in a "sincere romantic relationship", usually determined by parental consent.
However, Japan has two territories that have their own local age of consent laws. These territories are the Marcus Islands and the Okinotori Islands, where the local age of consent is the same as the national age of consent... 13... so... exactly what I was suggesting is the problem with Japan is still the problem with Japan. Also they have no "Romeo and Juliet" laws I.e. close in age exemptions. Which means if two minors engage in sexual activity they are both charged with statutory rape, regardless of the presence or absence of coercion or the direction of the coercion. Seems potentially problematic to me. A 13 year old boy sexually assaults a 13 year old girl and they both get charged with statutory rape? What?
Capitalism. Which one is gonna be more willing to schill out for merchandise? The normie or the sexless sex-obsessed guy thats being constantly had the heel of capitalism turning them into ground meat with no time to live for himself beyond cheap and easily accessible escapism?
It's more or less the same marketing concept that uses kids shows to sell kids plastic toys and the shitty microtransactions in video games, and gambling. Changing out the medium in which you're being rinsed of your cash of course.
I think that the rise of loli content in mainstream anime is directly tied to CP being outlawed in Japan in 2014. (production became illegal in 1999, but that didn't stop dvds from circulating and then of course the Internet got big)
Actual CP being illegal in Japan didn't make the mass market for it that existed in 2013 go away, or undo the decades of normalization that it had from being a mass produced (if niche) product. Its consumers dispersed and started making demands of adjacent industries to pander to them - thus the growth of so-called "junior idols" which ride the line of legality to appeal to pedos, and an increasing demand on anime for loli content.
IMO it's a clear example of how doing the bare minimum fails and you need a large scale social engineering project to fix large scale social problems. The Japanese government cannot solve the problem of normalized pedophilia without forming a Comics Code Authority and banning this shit at all levels and blacklisting authors who refuse to stop producing it (meanwhile the producers of junior idols all get the wall).
yeah its like, idk if it's breaking news to anyone but western culture is also pedophilic. not just in the velvet dungeons of the elite cabal, but in the culture consumed and reproduced by the whole social order. sure the exact form that tendency to sexualize youth, naivete, and vulnerability takes, and the attitudes and emotions surrounding it might be different, but it's clearly there.
I swear anime never used to be this bad, like, there was pedo shit but it wasn't every single damn anime doing it.
Now it's everywhere and has even taken over franchises that never used to be creepy pedo bait.
Dudes are always complaining that it's the woke mob and feminists ruining pop culture but honestly, I think it's horny dudes that have ruined Japanese anime and video games by being okay with the creepy pedo shit.
What used to be a niche part of Japanese media has become all of Japanese media.
Honestly this can be observed in the post 1980s market crash in which financialization of every aspect of a product became especially essential in a crashing market with lower and lower returns; and so sexless creepy pedos are more and more wiling to buy legal CP and adjacent items and such to build literal fucking shrines of (again look at how much plastic anime crap is oriented around owning your own small legal little waifu or some shit).