The Other Tokyo Vice: A critique of VICE News' smearing manga and anime

How not to cover Japanese nerd culture

Back around December 2022, I worked on a draft piece critiquing VICE News’ then-newly released video documentary “Inside the Pedophilic Manga Industry in Japan” (which framed Japanese manga and anime as problematic), the media company’s decision to block its access in Japan itself, and the resulting fallout. Although the proposed article was completed, it did not quite pass muster among editors, partly due to how the subject might be too niche, with the material subsequently, if partially salvaged for later submissions.

Given how the documentary in question recently won an Emmy for Outstanding Arts, Culture or Entertainment Coverage (under the slightly less inflammatory title “The Dark Side of Manga”), and the justified backlash it’s received on social media as reported by J-List writer Justin James, perhaps those critiques are still relevant enough to post the full draft here for posterity. What it also says about those in charge of the Emmys for even having this nominated in the first place isn’t pleasant to ruminate on.

To say that the video was slanderous to an entire culture, especially when the very country being unduly scrutinized before the wider world couldn’t watch it even now, is an understatement. It’s no more acceptable now than it was when it premiered almost a year ago. Still, hope you all take a moment to check the would-be piece out.

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On November 22, 2022, VICE News released a provocative 17-minute documentary hosted by Hanako Montgomery, entitled “Inside the Pedophilic Manga Industry in Japan.” A project months in the making, this aimed to shed light on the dark world child sexual abuse and moral degeneracy within the otherwise vibrant manga and anime scene, only to meet significant backlash. Beyond critiques over the VICE video’s contents and the lack of a comment section, it soon surfaced on social media that access to it in Japan itself had been barred. While some had tried mirroring the video on Japanese platforms, it doesn’t change how the producers were not just smearing a country’s culture for a global audience unfamiliar with it, but also denied the very people being pathologized any say.

As shocking as this might seem, it’s nonetheless indicative of a persistent trend by Western media of treating Japan as an “Other”. The VICE News feature is simply among the most recent manifestations of this, if perhaps one of the most demonstrative.

Yellow Journalism

Beyond the eye-grabbing title, one has to wonder how this specific documentary (which has garnered over 741 thousand views on YouTube as of December 12, 2022) comes off so disingenuous. As covered by Justin James for the J-List blog, the flaws become apparently almost immediately. For instance, various sights around Tokyo, including the AnimeJapan convention, were shown with ominous music in the background before Montgomery says a word. Not long afterwards, she pointed at various posters, including a swimsuit-themed pinup for the popular Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, and being “uncomfortable” with the depiction of the female cast due to being purportedly children. As observed by James, the reporter hadn’t even begun her investigation at that point in time, given her likening tame anime like the works shown about in the convention hall to porn. 

Among those interviewed was a mangaka at the convention named Shinji, who draws adult-oriented manga featuring high-school girls in more compromised escapades. Another was Minoru Ogino – an artist, otaku advocate, and a political figure with connections in the industry. The way Montgomery approaches them, however, showed little effort to feign neutrality, from the visible contempt on her face while skimming through an explicit work, to how her questions were generally filled with leading claims about sexualizing children and rising abuses in Japan. This spin also manifested in the way VICE framed Kazuna Kanajiri – chief director of PAPS, an NGO catering to sexual exploitation survivors who called such works a “violation of human rights” – much more respectfully, and in how Takashi Kato, a former convicted pedophile turned anti-pornography advocate who blamed explicit manga for his urges, was presented as a cautionary tale of the apparent reality.

This biased spin would turn out to be even more pervasive. When the replies didn’t match up with her statements, the interviewer was quick to spin an alibi. Shinji’s stance on how explicit material can serve as a deterrent and that personal views shouldn’t sway laws regarding creativity, were brushed aside by her framing such liberties, including the protections on artistic freedom enshrined in the Japanese Constitution, as merely a loophole exploited to justify “animated child porn”. Similarly, Mr. Ogino’s later reply about the need for a scientific basis before any new legislation could be passed, as well as the lack of evidence connecting manga to her accusations, was met with emotional appeals about how many people believe that such links exist. Ms. Kanajiri’s admission that there’s no solid correlating proof likewise did little to stop VICE from presenting an unsourced graph from Japan’s National Police Agency (with approximately 800-1,600 “victims of child pornography” per year from 2014 to 2021) allegedly proving the industry’s complicity with an “ongoing child abuse crisis”. That the clips of her filming an otaku-catering shop in Akihabara (a nerd-centric neighborhood in Tokyo) were framed as akin to walking into a criminal den, and that Mr. Ogino’s footage, as he noted on Twitter later on (link in Japanese), was edited after the fact to make him look like a mobster, further cast doubt that VICE was acting in good faith.

Others familiar with anime and manga were quick to point out myriad faults. Bounding into Comics, for instance, brought up how on top of the lack of solid correlation between explicit works and sexual exploitation, there are plenty of studies that outright refute it. Translator and Irodori Comics owner On Takahashi posted scathing criticism on Twitter (link in Japanese), accusing the producers of muddling fantasy and reality, as well as judging the industry “based on American values”. Meanwhile, Japanese-American blogger Mako Nakamura made a lengthier thread (link in Japanese) highlighting the unsubstantiated nature of the documentary, pointing out how even if Japanese statistics aren’t taken at face value, these still pale when compared to the United States (with 63,000 children per year classified as victims from 2009 to 2013 alone). Mr. Ogino himself, while amused by the manipulative yakuza-style editing, was less than enthusiastic with how VICE covered the subject matter and that he was left in the dark on the end-product. As noted by J-List’s Justin James, this extends to how Montgomery’s “discreet” filming in Akihabara may be potentially illegal due how it’s forbidden to record an establishment if denied permission. 

It’s worth noting as well that enforcement against actual child pornography was first tackled in Act No. 52 of 1999, rather than only with the banning of owning said material in 2014 as alleged by Montgomery. Moreover, whether or not one morally agrees with the existence of explicit manga, they nonetheless fall firmly in the domain of fiction, especially in the absence of real persons being “abused”, children or otherwise. To suggest stifling such works under such emotional claims would risk opening the floodgates for broad censorship, or worse.

Double-Standards and Hypocrisy

While VICE News flaunts its role in helping clamp down on predators online, others on social media were quick to notice a peculiar tendency by the same company to frame them empathetically over the past decade, or in the case of a January 5, 2017 article, give one such individual a sympathetic ear. The publication’s September 14, 2020 defense of the controversial French film Cuties as a “thought-provoking and entertaining study of characters we rarely get the opportunity to empathise with” is similarly laden with seeming nuance. None of these were present in its coverage on Japan, in which not only the country’s manga industry but its culture at large is all but humiliated on-screen. The irony that both Mr. Kato and Ms. Kanajiri, the latter known for having a sketchy track record among Japanese commentators, are treated more fairly while their countrymen are given no such care seems lost on the producers.

Then, there’s the other elephant in the room: unless one uses a VPN, the original video is inaccessible in Japan due to VICE News blocking access to it. While it has been speculated on social media that Ms. Kanajiri likely requested the producers to block the documentary’s broadcast, it’s been confirmed that the outlet has been issuing takedowns on Japanese channels either mirroring or commentating on the exposé.

To call VICE’s actions both irresponsible, especially in a tense climate in terms of discourse, and hypocritical in light of its own Code of Ethics, would be an understatement. More so, when the country whose people are being maligned unduly are denied a chance to so much as express dissent. Alas, this affair is neither novel, nor even the most exceptional.

A Long Precedent

The documentary wasn’t the first time Montgomery had set her sights on Japan. On November 12, 2021, she penned an article for VICE News criticizing Japan’s refusal to ban explicit anime and manga, as well as pressuring the country to do so as it “may leave room to normalize sexual violence against children”. As with the 2022 video, this was in spite of the “offending” material being wholly fictitious and how this would open up a Pandora’s Box on stifling freedom of expression.

Neither her nor VICE, however, have a monopoly in painting Japanese society and culture in a dim light. In 2017, BBC Three journalist Stacey Dooley not only made almost the exact same arguments in her own feature on Japan, but as covered by Joey “The Anime Man” Bizinger at the time, she went so far as to cut out an interview with Girls und Panzer designer Takeshi Nogami due to how he countered her attempted narrative. Further back in 2010, CNN’s Kyung Lah scrounged up an out-of-print adult game called Rapelay, using its existence to stir moral outrage, which she almost immediately followed up with another hitpiece that year decrying Japan’s sexism and depravity. A New York Times Op-Ed from 2009 by Roger Cohen even tried passively-aggressively using otaku as a scapegoat for some of the nation’s perceived ills.

Dig deep enough, and one could also find similarly dubious sentiments coming in from otherwise credible institutions. UNICEF’s appeal to the Japanese government in 2008 openly decried “child pornography in manga comics, animated films, and computer games”. While in 2016, the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women had jumped on the bandwagon by calling for the ban on “the sale of video games or cartoons involving sexual violence against women”, despite a lack of solid evidence and, according to Dan Kanemitsu, misguided if not contradictory points.

Pathologizing the Rising Sun

As touched upon in my piece about the modern anime industry for Areo Magazine, the Japanese are no strangers to moralistic, censorious and slanderous attacks, both domestically and especially from foreign sources. It still begs the question: why does this keep happening?

One clue could be found in a December 17, 2020 piece by Ryu Spaeth for The New Republic. Although ostensibly about an apparent “rent-a-family” industry that fooled outlets like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, he set his eyes specifically on what he called the “Weird Japan” trap – a tiresome journalistic tendency depicting Japan as a “menagerie” of the odd and bizarre. In addition to painting a warped image where “men fall in love with busty Power Rangers, and the women vanish like ghosts into the gloomy mist of the suicide forest”, this has also served as a means for Western writers to project their anxieties about their own societies onto Japan, where it seems as if those fears (from seeming atomization and degeneracy to demographic decline) have already played out.

Another is provided by Montgomery herself in a March 22, 2022 interview for Splice’s “Asia Undercovered” newsletter. Ironically expressing similar observations about how “Weird Japan” has fostered clickbait-laden reporting based off disappointing stereotypes, she believed that while people can educate themselves, it’s also the media’s job to delve into serious issues to bridge the gap between cultures, thus “expand the conversation”. As seen in the VICE News documentary, however, this approach in practice goes past trading one set of faulty cliches with another. Instead, it comes off as tapping into the audience’s lack of familiarity (including her own ignorance of manga) and serving as a platform with which to judge by “global” – or rather, Western progressive – standards. All while invoking an adage to any moral guardian: “think of the children!”

Ultimately, it seems as though pathologizing Japan comes all too quickly for some, whether because of the country not being seen as “in vogue” as China or South Korea, decades’ worth of misguided “common knowledge”, projection of their own biases, or plain opportunism. The allure of viewing the Japanese as an “Other” to a level that would be unacceptable in most other contexts, rather than making even a passing effort to understand them on their own terms, is perhaps the greatest failure on display. Better to at least try to give a fair shake than to peddle a vicious cycle of ignorance and contempt.

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