‘Realistic’ AI-generated child porn in Japan sparks debate on legal loophole and ‘kawaii’ culture

Fujiko Yamada, who founded the Child Maltreatment Centre in Kanagawa Prefecture 25 years ago, accused Japanese politicians of letting the nation’s children down and warned of a link between depictions of pornography involving children and young people being lured into the sex industry.

“By law, child pornography is illegal in Japan, but the law only covers photos and videos of real people and it does not include drawn images or anything created by AI, no matter how realistic it is,” she told This Week in Asia.

Yomiuri reported that more than 3,000 images of children being sexually abused were so sophisticated that many were indistinguishable from actual photos. Such material was reportedly being uploaded monthly by an Osaka-based tech company. The firm’s website is accessible worldwide and has 100,000 registered users, generating more than 2 million hits every month.

The company is just one of several other firms generating and selling access to AI-generated child pornography.

An unnamed company was quoted as saying “we do not believe there are any legal problems” with the images. The representative added that the firm would continue to make images available because they were popular, and operations would only be halted under new regulation.

The issue has long been a contentious one, with campaigners demanding manga and anime be banned from depicting sexually explicit images of children. The government only passed legislation that outlawed the possession of child pornography in 2014, but the new law failed to criminalise images of children.

The campaigners were unable to defeat Japan’s powerful comic and animated movie industry, which successfully argued that as the images were merely drawings, there were no human “victims” and therefore no crime was being perpetrated. Artists, writers and publishers were also able to claim that imposing bans on their work would be an infringement of their freedom of expression, protected under the constitution.

“Politicians do not want to get into this issue because they don’t want to touch anything that involves the constitution,” Yamada said. “That’s a taboo.”

She insisted, however, that something needed to be done and that there were ways to introduce a ban on AI-generated child pornography.

“I do not believe we need to change the constitution, but we do need to start discussing its limitations,” she said. “Courts can require that freedom of expression must be respected, but they should not place that above anything that can affect the rights of our children and potentially have a harmful impact on them.

“We need to have a discussion on where the border between art and child pornography is and how we can stop one while protecting the other,” she said.

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Morinosuke Kawaguchi, a technology analyst and consultant who was previously a lecturer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, pointed out the debate on AI regulation was a topic of serious discussion among governments at present, but he admitted Japan had “different standards, based on cultural differences” when it comes to sexual images of children.

“The concept of ‘kawaii’ [cute] is an icon of Japanese anime, with that infantilised image of a childish, baby face with big eyes a huge part of the genre,” he said. “Appreciation for the small, vulnerable and cute goes back a thousand years or more in Japan and that explains why it lasts to this day.”

While Western religion strongly rejected sexual attraction to children, the same attitude did not take root in Japan, he said, adding: “The concept has not been fully digested here. AI has no moral sense, so it can be used to create this sort of thing and it has magnified what was already a very delicate issue.”

He agreed that discussion of the issue was needed, but added that change came very slowly in Japanese politics and the legal realm.

“Older generations appear unable to change their values at all, although younger people tend to change more rapidly,” he said. “It will take time for this to be considered unacceptable and it will also require pressure from global forces.”

Yamada said positive change needed to happen much faster because of the damage being inflicted on children.

Technologically savvy teenagers are adept at using social media and the internet to explore, she pointed out, with too many coming across sexually explicit images, including of children.

Prolonged and repeated exposure could “normalise” the images, she cautioned, and convince children that working in the sex industry was an acceptable way of making money.

“I accept there are many older-generation politicians who are slow to rethink their positions,” she said. “But I have hopes that a new generation of young politicians and more younger lawyers will be able to highlight this issue and act.

“The technology is moving much faster than the law, and politicians and children’s rights campaigners and civil society need to work together to make this unacceptable.”