In a move that few who follow the Godzillian manga industry in the West saw coming, the city of Tokyo has restricted sale of certain kinds of manga. But, as the headline on a Mainichi Daily News report observes, “Metro Tokyo ordinance on sexually explicit manga walks fine line on freedom of speech.” According to the story,

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has filed a draft revision to a metropolitan ordinance to tighten control over sexual content in manga and animation. The move came after a previous draft revision was voted down at the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly in June, and the latest draft is an updated version of the rejected plan.

In the previous draft, characters aged under 18 that appear in manga and animated works were defined as “virtual youths,” and related industries were urged to voluntarily regulate the sale of works involving overly explicit sexual content by taking such measures as displaying those titles separately from other publications on store shelves and out of the hands of children.

That previous draft failed and the bill was passed on the second go-around with some minor changes in December 2010.

Could this be a tightening of hitherto relaxed attitudes towards this, the most dizzyingly popular of entertainments in Japan? A cursory glance through a subway car in the Tokyo underground is to behold a powerful, deeply transfixing sight of heads — male, female, young, old — buried in the stuff. The ordinance is not national legislation, and is not a ban per se, but penalizes companies that produce material that is deemed harmful to those under 18 years-old. (Unlike in the U.S., where companies that produce the material — and not retailers — would more typically come under fire.) The bill attempts to restrict, in the words of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, “only manga and animation that glorifies or exaggerates illegal sexual acts will be subject to the regulations, and freedom of expression will not be violated.”

However, manga creators have strongly objected to the ambiguous provisions of the law. Most of the big publishers who were also instrumental in drumming up oppostion to the bill, along with the manga creators announced their refusal to participate in the Annual Tokyo Anime Fair in March 2011.

The character of the bill’s chief architect, Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, has also come under fire for his comments on the opposition. As a story at Kotaku.com reports,

“This isn’t just about the kids,” Ishihara said at a recent PTA meeting. “Gays are appearing on television no problem. Japan is going way unchecked. I’m doing this with a sense of duty.”

But the report notes a certain irony in Ishihara’s involvment:

In 1955, a 23-year-old Ishihara won Japan’s most prestigious literary award with his novel Season of the Sun. The book depicted the country’s post-War rebellious youth culture: gambling, fighting and having sex. In its day, the novel’s frank depiction of sexuality shocked readers — yet, here Ishihara is decades later trying to tell other artists what they can and cannot do.

Leading manga artist Tetsuya Chiba, meanwhile, has another idea. According to a report in Japan Today, in a speech to the Tokyo municipal government, he said, “I have seen cases of our culture losing power because of regulations. We want readers to decide.”