The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Rape Games Banned-Not-Banned in Japan

Back in February, Amazon removed from its virtual shelves a Japanese video game called RapeLay. In RapeLay, according to an AVN story:

 . . .the player stalks and rapes women. If one of the rape victims becomes pregnant, the player must force her to have a abortion. In one scenario, the player takes on the role of a criminal who rapes a mother and her two teenage daughters.

Yeah, I’m kinda shocked myself, and I’m not all that easy to shock, or at least it kind of seems like I shouldn’t be.

The Wikipedia page also mentions some other choice tidbits, like the fact that the point-of-view character summons a gust of wind to lift the female characters’ skirts on a subway platform — by saying a prayer. Oh, and the POV character for part of the game, Kimura, is a “chikan” — a subway groper, for which he is arrested at the beginning of the game, setting the stage for later revenge scenarios where he evens the score for his arrest with the family of his accusers. He can do this because Kimura’s father is an important and powerful politician. Yow!! God and the government’s on the rapist’s side!

The game is published by Yokohama-based company Illusion, which also publishes such games as Battle Raper, Artificial Girl, and Sexy Beach, according to the article in The Register. The company’s defense was that it had “done nothing wrong,” and that if Amazon didn’t like it then, well, tough. The game, said Illusion, was not intended for the US market and conformed to those Japanese standards.

It’s true that while Amazon banning the game is significant in the West, as far as Japanese games go, the game is within what has been done in Japanese games — but definitely the far edge of it. In short, there’s no law banning such games. RapeLay is far from the only example of a Japanese rape game, and every once in a while such games make their way to US news sources and create outrage.

This past week, AVN reported that RapeLay was “banned” in an emergency meeting by the Japanese Ethics Organization of Computer Software. Since games site Kotaku observed a few weeks ago that the Tokyo Broadcasting System had erroneously edited an interview to imply that the EOCS had already “banned” the game, WTF is going on? Are rape games banned in Japan or not? Nobody seems to know. AVN’s story claims the group said it would ban any material that “deviates extremely from social norms” and all “sexual torture software,” but also mentioned that they “will” draw up guidelines for video games that restrict sexual violence.

The truth is that the EOCS doesn’t have the power to “ban” anything. It is a non-governmental business organization. In fact, the relative ineffectuality of this organization is highlighted in the way it was formed. In 1991, a junior high school student in Japan stole a copy of Saori: The House of Beautiful Girls. This game shows a non-rape side of Japanese perversion, but still manages to be pretty extreme. With its themes of lesbian incest in a Shinto shrine, teacher-student sex in a classroom, and more (including a preponderance of incest scenarios), Saori outraged the populace and led to the formation of the EOCS.

Nowadays, the organization claims that 90 percent of the games in Japan carry its rating stickers. But even that claim appears to be largely unsupportable in Western sources. And even if it’s true, do you have any freakin’ idea how many video games are sold in Japan? That leaves a lot of games sold that haven’t been anointed by the EOCS.

This is, of course, an attempt for the industry in Japan to self-regulate, in response to the claims of the Japanese government that video games cause sex crimes.

Sound familiar? If you follow the video game industry you might remember the California legislation from 2005 penned by Democrat Leeland Yee and signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It sought to ban sales to minors of any video game deemed violent, with the rationale, according to the Register article, that:

Exposing minors to depictions of violence in video games, including sexual and heinous violence, makes those minors more likely to experience feelings of aggression, to experience a reduction of activity in the frontal lobes of the brain, and to exhibit violent antisocial or aggressive behavior.

The legislation also claims that kids who don’t become more inclined to commit violence as a result of video games still experience psychological harm. I think someone said the same thing about comic books once upon a time. Is it true? Fuck if I know. I will, however, testify to the psychological harm caused by video games. Anyone who’s ever spent eight hours playing Doom while consuming nothing but Jolt Cola and Ho-Ho’s will back me up on this one.

The California law never took effect because of a pending federal appeal, and was was just rejected by the 9th Court of Appeals as being unconstitutional.

In the U.S., rape games are quite simply not considered OK, so it’s not usually an issue, but remember the Hot Coffee Incident?

Rape games in the US exist primarily as an underground — built largely out of games imported from Japan. They also exist in their own way on Fetlife, arranged not by malleable teens but by 40 and 50somethings of the “Meet my wife at the truck stop on I-5, she’ll be the one wearing pigtails and a schoolgirl outfit” variety.

Any accusations North Americans make that Japanese people are “weird” always feel rather spurious and glib to me. I do, however, confess to being stunned at the content of RapeLay.

Ultimately, in Japan as in the US, nothing has changed and nothing is likely to change. But the weird postscript is that Kotaku’s article mentions that:

[Erotic] game maker Syrup Soft is delaying its upcoming game Gang raped by the entire village—girls covered in milky liquid~ to re-moniker it The trap set by the entire village ~bodies covered in milky liquid~.

Huh? What? Fuck if I know. Random tildes in a video game title? Must be a Japanese thing. I’ll never understand it.

Thomas Roche blogs about sex and science fiction at ThomasRoche.com.

Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.