We tried to warn you. It started with the censorship of big anime boobs in video games, escalated to light novels, and now it’s evolved to mangas. More specifically, seven manga series have been banned from Kinokuniya Sydney’s physical retail outlets and their online shops following a complaint from South Australian legislator Connie Bonaros, who claimed that the mangas contained “child grooming” and “child pornography”.
According to Adelaide Now, an Australian outlet, they didn’t go into detail about which manga series were banned, but noted that since entire series were banned the books removed from Kinokuniya totaled hundreds.
MP Bonaros complained that the manga’s contained “sexually explicit” material of young girls and that some of the stories contained topics and “connotations” of “incest” and “rape involving minors”.
Adelaide Now explained…
“In a letter to Ms Bonaros, Kinokuniya vice-president Keijro Mori wrote that her complaint led the company to re-examine the titles it carried in Australia. ‘Staff have been provided with updated special-order guidelines to ensure that these titles are no longer available to order into the store,” Mr Mori wrote.’ […]
“[…] The company said it would seek to comply with rules in other countries where it operates and ‘respect local law and culture, and make ordering decisions respectively and accordingly’.”
In a tweet published on July 19th, 2020, MP Connie Bonaros thanked Kinokuniya for banning the manga series.
I congratulate Kinokuniya on taking such strong and decisive action. If this action helps stop one child from being sexually abused, it is one child we have saved.
Together, we can all make a difference. @KinokuniyaAust https://t.co/OR1xCEPars— Connie Bonaros (@ConnieBonaros) July 19, 2020
While Adelaide Now avoided mentioning the mangas that were banned, Anime News Network did list the seven manga series that had been permanently removed from Kinokuniya:
- Eromanga Sensei
- Sword Art Online
- Goblin Slayer
- No Game, No Life
- Inside Mari
- Parallel Paradise
- Dragonar Academy
This comes after Amazon has also started banning light novels and manga from their online shops. They’ve yet to explicitly explain why the books are being banned, but don’t be surprised if the censorship extends to anime OVAs soon.
This also isn’t the first time that Eromanga Sensei has been on the receiving end of the banhammer. Australian Senators had previously requested for the manga and others to be banned back in February of 2020. The requests to have the mangas banned continued on through March, where Eromanga Sensei was eventually banned from some Australian shops. Now, the bans have escalated to other series, as listed above.
Again, we tried to warn you all that this would eventually escalate to this point, but people wouldn’t listen.
We’re seeing the exact same thing happening with Sony’s censorship policies, along with Valve’sinconsistent yet increasingly draconian censorship on Steam, with more and more games getting banned or forced to censor any sort of titillating or ecchi content aimed at straight males.
It doesn’t end here; but it’s too late to stop it.
Expect more shops to start enacting bans and censorship on anime and manga content in the near future, and don’t be surprised if older anime and manga get pulled from distribution as well.
(Thanks for the news tip MoonmanLGBT and Ebicentre)