Japanese blogs and forums have been set abuzz by the arrest of a man for allegedly publishing obscene doujinshi. 39-year old Masaya Miya****a (), a professional illustrator known for his work on erotic PC games, was taken by Matsuyama police on charges of distributing obscenity through five bookstores. (Miya****a supposedly worked under the pseudonym Shiyami Yasamata and has a website which is inaccessible at the moment. But heres the archived version.) 6,600 copies of his doujinshi were confiscated. Police also estimate Miya****a has made a profit of over 15 million yen from doujinshi since 2003.
I have yet to find any info on the doujinshi themselves, although one blogger describes one of them as a B5-sized 64-page book with a cover price of 1500 yen. (See Edit 2 below.)
Original Japanese news reports here:
Ehime Shimbun (with video)
Additonal Japanese blog reactions here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.
Most bewilderingly, nothing in the news reports or blog entries Ive looked at thus far give any indication as to why, out of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of adult doujinshi and manga published in Japan, Miya****as works were specifically targetted. Consignment sales of doujinshi through bookstores is nothing out of the ordinary, and with so little concrete information, some bloggers have sinisterly posited that the investigation may have originally been spurred by tax evasion suspicions, along with far more obvious theories such as the ongoing media backlash against lolicon or lack of proper mosaics.
Incredibly, police have also indicated that they may pursue actions against the printer and bookstores as well (highlighting one of the truly insipid aspects of obscenity prosecution this is the only crime where law enforcment proceeds on an assumption of guilt. For something to be obscene, it has to be found obscene by the courts. So before Matsuyama police decided to arrest Masaya Miya****a, the printer and bookstore were perfectly within their legal right to sell those books since they werent obscene until the police said they were!) It is unknown which printer/s and bookstores may be targetted, but from the video at Ehime Shimbun it appears the books were printed at the popular doujin-press Bros, while the bookstores are likely the usual major doujinshi sellers such as K-Books, Toranoana, or Melonbooks, although one cant be certain as any evidence of the books must have surely been removed from those websites by now.
With so many details still unclear, Im not sure what this arrest could portend for the greater doujinshi community and the ero manga market at large. But when adding together all the recent developments, from the obscenity conviction against Shobunkan being upheld, the greater media scrutiny over certain genres of ero manga, and now the arrest of a doujinshi author, it wouldnt be a stretch to say that free artistic expression by adults in Japan hasnt been in such a perilous state in quite a long time.
Edit: Coverage by ComiPress and Anime News Network, in case there are further updates.
Edit 2: Doujinshi seller Doujindou has cover images of Miya****as newer doujinshi which indeed matches the one shown in Ehimes video report, / Secret Special Stage.
Edit 3: Canned Dogs points to Nippon Hikikomoerr NHKs coverage of same, but note that NHKs website does not seem to have workable permalinks for the stories. The new wrinkle here is that the official reason for the arrest is leaning towards the covering up of privates being insufficient.
Checking through the 2ch messages again (over 1000 of them), someone does post a couple of scans of the doujinshi in question. The clitoris is whited out in the art but thats about all.
