The Four Color Media Monitor

The Mainichi reports an anime producer was jailed for 4 years for soliciting child prostitution:

A producer of the 2016 Japanese animated film "Your Name." was sentenced to four years in prison by the Wakayama District Court Feb. 28 for paying cash to multiple underage girls for sex and filming their acts.

Koichiro Ito, 53, a former production company manager and a resident of Nakatsugawa, Gifu Prefecture, had been charged with offenses including anti-child prostitution and anti-child pornography law violations as well as rape, with prosecutors seeking a six-year prison sentence.

The Japan Times says:

Koichiro Ito was convicted of "violating laws on child prostitution and pornography" as well as non-consensual sex and the filming of indecent images, a Wakayama District Court spokesperson said on Monday.

Ito, one of the producers of the critically acclaimed 2016 film, was sentenced on Friday.

Regional broadcasters reported that Ito was accused of paying a 15-year-old girl ¥20,000 ($130) for sex in 2023, and demanding that another teenager take and send him explicit photos of herself. [...]

"Your Name.," directed by Makoto Shinkai, was a huge commercial success in Japan. It won Best Animation at the 2016 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards. [...]

"I'm greatly shocked to see the news about an arrest of someone related to our work," Shinkai posted on social media platform X last month.

"First of all I express my deepest sympathy toward the victims. I also feel very sorry for causing worries to people who love and support our work," he added.

"I don't think the value of our output is undermined by this incident, but it is natural to receive looks of disbelief. That is very regrettable and deplorable."

Sick, sick, sick. It's interesting to note that Your Name is a story about a boy and girl who switch bodies with each other. It may not have been Ito who wrote it, but you could just as well wonder if people like him served as financiers because they thought this could be a great way to pander to woke agendas stateside. That aside, it is lucky this wasn't a screenwriter or an actor who was caught with the pants down, though the director does have a point it's sad that now, a bad man's name will sully the credits of the films he produced, much like Harvey Weinstein.

But 4 years is still a very light sentence, as Unseen Japan points out, and there are Japanese activists who aren't happy either:

However, despite the litany of charges, prosecutors only requested a six-year sentence. That’s the same sentence handed to a local politician recently for a single instance of statutory rape and prostitution.

Even this request seemed to Internet commentators to be extremely light. One popular X news account noted the disparity between this sentence and the one handed to Watanabe Mai, a.k.a. Sugar Baby Riri. Watanabe, who became addicted to a host at one of Tokyo’s many host clubs, forged fraudulent financial relationships with men to pay off her club debt. Watanabe received a full nine years for her crimes. (Her sentence has since been reduced to 8.5 years.)

However, Wakayama Court judge Fukushima Keiko thought even six years was too much. While saying his crimes had a “significant negative impact” on his young victims and that he bore “great responsibility,” she only gave him four years in jail.

Activists in Japan have long held that crimes against women aren’t taken seriously. Many sexual crimes, such as molestation, go unreported because women don’t believe police and prosecutors will actively pursue them.

What's got to be telling is that the judge was also a woman, and can serve as an example of a lady who let down other ladies. I have read at times that Japanese prisons can be hell on earth, one of the reasons they have a low crime rate, but that's still no excuse for the travesties they're leading to by handing out sentences too minor, and there have been at least a few other mangakas and other people in entertainment in Japan who got too light a sentence, and it makes little difference if they were shunned by the public. The fact is, the felons cannot continue to roam freely in public until they've served a long enough sentence for their crimes. So when will Japan's justice system begin to recognize that fact?

Labels: Europe and Asia, manga and anime, misogyny and racism, violence