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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I couldn't find anything during a quick search that indicates that Japan has a higher rate of child sexual abuse than countries where ethical/drawn child pornograpy is banned.

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I would be interested to know if the reason why (to put it bluntly) porn in Japan is so extreme is due to their cultural repression of sexuality. The reason I ask is that many Asian countries have similar social stigmas around sexuality, and they also have similarly extreme forms of porn.

Not to mention the existence of hentai, yuri, and ecchi. All of which don't really have widespread western equivalents, despite western cartoons being fairly popular.

How is sexuality repressed in Japan?

Hentai etc are descendants of shunga pics; you've probably seen Hokusai's "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa". You may have seen "The Dream of The Fishermans Wife" (NSFW)

GP was saying that sexuality as in actual sex is repressed, and speculating that pornography was widespread as a result.

In social interactions maybe ? Japan seemed to be a very repressive/elitist society. You had to be polite in everything, and sexuality is often the opposite of that (you could probably have sex through polite chat beforehand, but I'm sure it requires maturity that most people don't have)

Just because people have a different view of sexuality, and confine it to a specific time and place, doesn't mean that it's a repressive society. You have to realize that most Asian cultures are heavily focused on context, and place, and not just the pure, isolated act.

I remember reading an article talking about how all the tentacle porn in Japanese hentai exists because USA banned the depiction of genitalia in the media after WWII, so they had to become creative about it.

Actually it's the other way around. Post WW2 the allies actually removed most of the censorship laws. But the premise might be correct tho the material predates Allied occupation by 150 years.

Major NSFW https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tentacle_erotica

It goes back much further, to the early westernization of Japan.

Or so I've read. I'm not really a historian.

Furries, BDSM and well rule 32...

From a Daily Beast article linked in TFA:

United Nations data show that Japan is still, in fact, the world’s largest producer and consumer of child pornography. Its usage is widespread, with as many as one in 10 men admitting they’ve watched it or that they own it, according to the book Sexnomics, by economist Takashi Kadokura.

Almost 80 percent of the child pornography transferred over the Internet is said to come through Japan. According to Interpol, Japanese “entrepreneurs” at home and abroad are also major producers of child pornography in the world market.

I'm interested in if this statistic (1 in 10 men) includes comics (which one would be justified in believing are harmless) or 'real' CP, as in, requiring the abuse of a real child and its recording. The number is surprisingly large if the latter is true, though it does little to indicate that child abuse is higher in Japan (or at least, this statistic does not show this anyway), and further, the necessary link to the production of pornography showing fictional characters, which would have to be fulfilled to justify the making of lolicon art/literature illegal.

That Interpol statistic seems to be an estimation from Interpol in 1999, when child pornograpy was legal in Japan, so it's not relevant at all anymore.

Crappy journalism in my view not to mention that the statistic you use is from a different century.

Yes, because making something illegal puts an immediate stop to it. And 18 years is a "century".

Most adult rapes are unreported too. Doesn't meant it doesn't happen.

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