It has just been announced that Tokyo will host the Summer Olympic Games in 2020. Will the city try to expunge all its unsavory elements ahead of the event?
The last time the city hosted the Games there was a similar campaign to “clean up” the streets, and when the Winter Games were held in Nagano they forced Pachinko parlors to close.
So can we look forward to the municipal government going full-out to hide unsightly shacks that serve as residences for the homeless or the slum-like drinking dens like Piss Alley in Shinjuku? Perhaps.
But we are most worried about what it may try to do to our favorite “dirty” districts like Kabukicho, Roppongi and Akihabara.
There are even rumors now circulating that it may try to ban the generous library of pornography publications to be found in every convenience store in the city.
During their tours to inspect Tokyo’s facilities, the IOC were apparently surprised by the amount of pornography that can be found in convenience stores. It is never placed on the “top shelf” or behind a counter like in other countries, and frequently has covers alone that leave little to the imagination.
In recent years the publishers have been cautious and sometimes add tapes to the magazines as tokens to potentially affronted browsers. But will the government enforce new rules and regulations to get the magazines hidden from sight?
We love how the porn is so open in Japan. Don’t hide it or try to sweep it under the rug! It is a natural and healthy part of life and society. To say otherwise is naive and a ridiculous attempt to pander to what Japanese bureaucrats believe is what other cultures say is moral.
Actually, the beliefs are not true at all, except for some self-righteous types. This kind of misunderstanding is one of the reasons why Japanese pornography is pixellated — because it adheres to a century-old law that tried to impose what it thought was a western version of morality, even though there is an Everest-sized mountain of non-pixellated porn in the west!
