Ask John: Why was the Music in Girls und Panzer Episode 8 Censored?

Question:
Why was the old Russian/Soviet WW2 song “Katyusha” cut from the Crunchyroll webcast of “Girls und Panzer” episode 8?

Answer:
I’m not aware of Crunchyroll having ever internally decided to censor anything in the anime that it streams. Crunchyroll simply streams its anime episodes the way the episodes are provided by the original Japanese distributor. Japan’s anime industry, however, has traditionally been particularly wary of copyright infringement lawsuits and has been very proactive about removing songs & music from anime that may not be licensed for international distribution. For example, The original Japanese broadcast version of Vandread episode 6 used Louis Armstrong’s perfomance of “What a Wonderful World” as background music. The Japanese and American DVD releases replaced Armstrong’s version with an alternate version of the song, and the English dubbed version of the episode simply replaced the entire song with an entirely different song. The Japanese version of Speed Grapher used Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” as its opening theme, but that song was replaced for the American release due to licensing rights. A short piece of instrumental music in the first episode of the Gunbuster OVA series was replaced on the American DVD release because Bandai Visual was afraid that similarity to Vangelis’ “Chariots of Fire” theme would open the door to a copyright infringement suit. Similarly, the original Japanese broadcast & first generation home video background music for Dragon Ball Kai, composed by Kenji Yamamoto, was removed & replaced by a new score from composer Shunsuke Kikuchi because Yamamoto’s compositions were found to plagairize earlier published movie soundtracks, and Toei wanted to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits. So the most likely explanation for the absence of a particular song in the official American release of a Girls und Panzer episode is that the Japanese licensor only had authorization to utilize and distribute the song for commercial purposes within Japan, or is afraid of being sued for unauthorized use of the music.