Japan Bans, Unbans Rape Games
This has been an interesting past couple of days. We actually have to go back a few weeks ago for when the trouble first began. An American group of women called Equality Now found out about a Japanese ERO game titled Rapelay (a conjunction of the words rape play), which is pretty much what it sounds like. The feminists were obviously very upset to find out that Japan actually makes games that focus on raping women, & thus made it their mission to force Japan to ban every single game that features sexual violence towards virtual women.
Jumping now to two days ago, the Japanese news program on TBS (totally unrelated to the American TBS channel, btw) reported that Equality Now's goal worked. Any games that feature the raping of women (about 10%-20% of all games on the Japanese market) would be no longer allowed. All current games were now declared banned. Needless to say, chaos spread like wildfire upon hearing this news. Cries of unfairness were being heard everywhere. Even world famous magician/comedian Penn (of Penn & Teller) made a video on his YouTube page, ranting about his thoughts on how incredibly stupid this decision was (see vid above). Of course rape is wrong, in real life. But something like this goes against freedom of speech. Arguing that video games causes real life violence has been going on for decades already, & anyone with half a brain & can tell you it's not true. If anything, you're only giving the criminals a scapegoat by blaming it on games. Same thing applies here.
But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, for now it came out that TBS is pretty much the Japanese equivalent of Fox News. Basically, they made the story up. The EOCS (Ethics Organization of Computer Software) is set to meet & make a new ruling for hentai video games on June 2nd, but no such decision has been made yet. TBS had conducted an interview with them shortly after the Rapelay troubles were began, but edited the interview in such a way that they misrepresented misrepresented EOCS's stance. Then this week TBS asked for a second interview, but because of what happened with the first one, EOCS denied them. After that, TBS went ahead & ran this preposterous story without talking to EOCS about it. So no worries, ERO gamers. Your hentai games are safe, at least for now.
Source: http://www.animevice.com/news/switcheroo-rape-games-not-banned-yet/1304/