Ask John: Is Japan Censoring More Anime Now?

Question:
How have TV censorship standards in Japan changed in the past 10 years and how has it affected anime?

Answer:
This is honestly a virtually impossible question for me to answer with certainty because it’s a question that requires an extensive familiarity with Japanese television and Japanese television broadcast standards. All I can do is theorize based on an outsider’s observations and perceptions.

I’m presuming that this question is motivated by a number of instances of anime censoring in Japan in recent months. To recap:

Last February, the opening animation of the Area 88 TV series caused some controversy when it was accused of featuring a nearly subliminal image of a nude woman. The opening was re-edited to remove the offending image. However, it was not the nudity that caused the controversy; it was the fact that the image was on screen so briefly that it could arguably be called “subliminal.” Anything resembling subliminal imagery is prohibited on broadcast Japanese television. Anime openings including the famous opening of Brain Powerd prove that it’s perfectly acceptable to have nude women in an anime opening animation, ironically, as long as they remain on screen long enough to be clearly visible.

The April broadcast of the Gantz anime TV series and the July debut of the Girls Bravo TV series, both on the Fuji Television network, were both censored. Gantz was heavily edited to remove graphic gore and some adult content. Girls Bravo was heavily censored to obscure graphic nudity.

In May, the Animax satellite TV network digitally censored bare female nipples in an episode of Midori no Hibi while the terrestrial broadcast by Osaka Broadcasting aired uncensored. Ironically, it was the free broadcast version that showed full, graphic nudity while the premium network broadcast was censored.

In June, TV Asahi did not broadcast Koikaze episode 8 while premium cable network Kids Station did air the episode. Conspiracy theories aside, there may have been a simple explanation for the omission, beside censorship, because the episode in question contained nothing visually or overtly offensive, and preceding and following episodes were broadcast on TV Asahi as scheduled.

Japanese television has always been less restrictive with depictions of nudity and violence on broadcast television than American television. And I think that the anime industry has pushed the envelope of what’s considered acceptable for Japanese television within the past decade with the uncensored broadcast of programs including Berserk, Evangelion, Devilman Lady, and more recently series like Fullmetal Alchemist and Elfin Lied, which contain frequent scenes of intense, graphic violence and, in the case of Elfin Lied, graphic nudity. Numerous other recent anime TV series including Kono Miniku mo Utsukushii Sekai, Popotan, Mao Dante, and UFO Princess Valkyrie haven’t been shy about including full nudity.

Based on my observations of Japanese television anime over the past several years, I don’t think that there’s a significant developing trend toward censoring anime for television broadcast. On one hand, it may seem logical for Japanese distributors to want to tone down anime to make it more suitable for overseas distribution, but doing so, in fact, eliminates one of the elements that makes Japanese animation appealing to foreign viewers, and practically Japan is still the largest and most primary market for anime. Rather than censor the broadcast, the premier episode of Elfin Lied opened with a warning that the show’s content was not suitable for younger viewers. In the case of Fuji Television censoring Gantz and Girls Bravo, I can sympathize with the decisions. The official Japanese Gantz website has published photos of some of the excised footage. While the version of the Gantz anime that was broadcast on Japanese television did retain some nudity, the degree of violence in the uncut version of the show is simply too excessive, even by liberal Japanese standards. The September 2004 issue of Japan’s Megami Magazine includes screenshots of the uncensored version of Girls Bravo episode 1. Again, having seen the uncensored scenes, I understand why they were censored for Japanese television broadcast; nudity is one thing, but, to be blunt, the size of the nipples on the girls in Girls Bravo is just excessive and shocking by anime standards.

I think Fuji Television’s censoring was justified and necessary in each case (that’s not to say that I agree with it, only that I understand why it was done) and merely a coincidence that it occurred with two consecutive series. So while there have been isolated examples of television anime being censored in Japan recently, and two recent shows being censored by the Fuji Television network, I don’t think these instances are a sign of changing standards in Japanese broadcasting. I think that they are all isolated instances, not influenced by each other, that all happened to occur with a relatively brief period of time. However, I’m not familiar with Japan’s present political situation nor the consensus of its contemporary moral barometer, so I can’t make any definitive statements. I’m only providing a theory based on superficial observation and experience.