[myanonaccount]

Note: perspective from non-Japanese observer. And unfortunately has to be posted from an pseudonymous account.

"it's accepted without controversy in Japan."

While not completely true as an absolute, this is close enough to the truth to be a fair statement.

Even some 児童ポルノ wasn't illegal in Japan fairly recently. And like the other Japanese censorship laws, was brought in as much due to a desire to align with Western pressure and laws as due to any moral sense. (I'm not trying to diminish the second aspect here; I'm saying that both were strong pressures to create the law).

Remember that Japanese morals are much more Confucian than Christian. Breaking a law is immoral in Japan in and of itself because laws exist to create harmony and breaking harmony is immoral. So the fact that 児童ポルノ is illegal, and ロリコン is not forms a large part of the opinion of whether it is immoral or not.

Also remember that the Western hatred of pedophilia and child porn is partially Puritanism. We've successfully thrown off the Puritan yoke, but that part of our culture was deeply rooted, so rather than disappearing, some of it has transferred over to perversions that it's still acceptable to demonize, namely pedophilia.

And I think the Confucians have it right on this one. Pedophilia and child pornography is one of those things that needs to be banned and made illegal for social harmony reasons, and practicers of softer forms of it like ロリコン should be marginalized. Different from, but mostly compatible with the somewhat commonly held opinion that pedophiles are "sick, not necessarily evil".

[CrystalLangUser]

> perversions that it's still acceptable to demonize, namely pedophilia.

The wording here implies that we shouldn't be demonizing things like pedophilia, or that somehow, we needed Puritanism to realize that we ought to be demonizing pedophilia, or that this is purely a western construct. Puritanism has just lead westerners to demonize sexuality in general.

For westerners, lolicon is no different than child pornography. And lolicon is still controversial even within Japan.

[myanonaccount]

"shouldn't be demonizing things like pedophilia"

We should demonize those who act on their pedophilia, not the majority of pedophiles who successfully hold it inside.

[repolfx]

That's not quite true. I remember being part of some debates over whether cartoons of young-looking people (rarely can you accurately guess the age of a cartoon) were child porn or not, in a western company.

The legal and moral justification for banning images of child porn is that distribution encourages production, and production of it is dangerous to real children.

This is a second order effect that's already somewhat debatable (does getting rocks off to porn cause fewer paedophiles to try and sate their desires in the real world, thus lowering abuse rather than raising it?), and it's therefore not entirely clear there's a strong moral or legal justification for banning cartoons or pure text, i.e. trying to ban people imagining child porn. For all we know, if it's true that paedophilia is caused by some sort of brain condition (and why would it be false), then these things could actually be helping children rather than hurting them.

[throwaway37585]

Why should you demonize pedophilia? Presumably the GP is referring to the correct definition (a person who is sexually attracted to children), as opposed to the incorrect definition (a person who sexually abuses children).