As we previously discussed, Vice uploaded a video titled “Inside the Pedophilic Manga Industry in Japan” roughly a week ago, and the backlash has been consistent ever since. Vice News and their contributor Hanako Montgomery produced the piece, and have yet to comment on the uproar, but it is apparent that they are aware of the controversy generated both in the West and Japan itself, given that comments on the video have been disabled, the video itself is blocked from being viewed in Japan, and they have since sent DMCA claims against reuploads of the video that are available in Japan and have Japanese subtitles.
To summarize the events of the video, Ms. Hanako Montgomery of Vice News traveled to Japan with the intent to prove that the manga industry is full of pedophiles, and that characters that appear underage in manga are a real risk to actual minors. By their own reporting, anime and manga are Japan’s most popular and lucrative cultural exports, so they likely expected some form of pushback, especially from Japan, which may explain why the video was blocked in Japan and comments were turned off.
Japanese fans quickly discovered Vice’s attempts to keep them ignorant, and people like Seriema reuploaded Vice’s video to make it available in their country. As confirmed by the YouTuber Rev says desu, Vice sent out DMCA claims to both YouTube and Niconico, a popular video sharing website in Japan, to strike down reuploads, especially reuploads with Japanese subtitles for the English-speaking sections, where such videos gained a tremendous amount of traction and reached second place in the ‘politics’ section.
Mirrors still exist, and the archive link is still there, at least for now. Japanese fans don’t seem eager to quiet their discontent with Vice News and Hanako Montgomery anytime soon, so Vice’s social media team may yet have their hands full trying to strike down reuploads of their video.
