People visiting Japan ask one question about manga over and over again, like reciting a mantra: "Why," they ask, "are manga so violent and pornographic?"

This is a loaded question, for it assumes that all manga are violent and pornographic, and as most MANGAJIN readers surely know, nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly, there are many offensive manga. Even I have to confess that, liberal as I am in matters of art, in recent years I have felt queasy over the content of some stories (and if I feel that way, I'm sure some other people are ready to faint). Fortunately, however, there works remain a minority. The vast majority of manga, even if they are basically trash with little educational value, are harmless entertainment. That stated, there are also some specific cultural factors which affect the perception non-Japanese have of manga, and make them seem particularly violent and pornographic.

First of all, every culture whether Moslem, Christian, or Buddhist, has different norms of acceptability in the arts. Modern manga, although they look like American comic books, have inherited a centuries-old tradition of Japanese narrative art that entertains, that is humorous, bawdy, and has a unique esthetic of visual violence. Specifically, I think that manga are the direct descendants of ukiyo-e prints and kibyoshi, the serialized, so-called "yellow-jacket" books that were enormously popular among the masses in the late Edo Period (1600-1867). Exaggerated sexuality and stylized violence were a regular part of both.

Second, no matter how erotic and violent manga are, they are not a direct reflection of Japanese society itself. If they were, Japan would resemble a violence-plagued Beirut in the eighties, or a sexually free-wheeling San Francisco during the sixties. Yet it does not. Despite an increase in the crime rate, almost all statistics show that Japan remains one of the best-behaved societies on Earth. There is, therefore, an enormous gap between fantasy and reality, and because of this gap, readers of manga may actually be better able to distinguish between fantasy and reality than readers in other nations. To a high school student in Japan, the notions of getting hold of an AK-47 and mowing down the teachers in his school is clearly absurd and in the realm of fantasy. But to a high school student in Los Angeles, it is a distinct possibility. He may know someone who has an automatic weapon that he can borrow and probably has heard of someone who has already gone out and done something similar to what he is imagining. The point here is that the inherent stability of modern Japanese society may give people more leeway in their fantasy lives. And a vivid fantasy life may in fact act to defuse some of the more primal impulses that we all occasionally experience.

The third point is that many non-Japanese who perceive manga to be pornographic and violent are often unaware of how biased their own perspective is. People from the United States, for example, are horrified by the contents of manga because they compare them with American comic books. Yet what they fail to realize is that manga today are no longer a medium for children alone, and are now a medium of entertainment as legitimate as novels or film. They also overlook the fact that until recently, American comic books were heavily censored. A draconian program of self-censorship was implemented in the United States comic book industry in the early fifties in response to political pressure, and comic books were nearly sanitized to death (circulations plummeted and have never recovered; in fact, according to comic book scholar Leonard Rifas, sales of comic books in 1988 were less than a third of what they were in 1953). Comics came to be stigmatized, and regarded as a shallow entertainment for little children. Indeed, rather than compare manga with American comic books, Americans should compare manga with videotapes. In terms of sex and violence, the contents of any video rental store in the United States easily rivals, if not surpasses, the contents of any manga shop in Japan.

Having thus defended manga, I must note that it is true that in some magazines things have gotten out of hand. In the eighties, in particular, the traditional limits on content that used to exist in Japan - the explicit, legal prohibitions against overt depictions of sex and genitalia, and the implicit, common-sense limitations on depictions of sex and violence that existed in society - virtually collapsed. With no clear guidelines left, the "me-too" syndrome so often seen in the Japanese media reared its head, and magazines vied with each other to produce the most provocative stories possible. Works such as Angel, Rapeman (which seemed to condone violence against women), or stories of the "Loli-kon" or "Lolita-complex" ilk (a type of "kiddie porn") began to appear in mainstream magazines designed for teenagers or younger.

Over the last year, a reaction to the most offensive manga has finally occurred, and crackdowns have taken place throughout Japan. In April over forty publishers, editors and artists involved in the production of offensive amateur or "underground" comic magazines were arrested. Many others have been warned by the authorities. Predictably, this has caused great debate in the industry, with some fearing freedom of speech is about to be curtailed, and others calling for more self-regulation. It is a long-overdue debate, and I, for one, see it as part of a natural process. Manga are so entrenched in Japanese society today that we are unlikely to witness an overreaction of the sort that occurred in the fifties in the United States. A balance between the interests of the artists and the interests of the general public will hopefully result. And I'm sure that in the eyes of non-Japanese, manga will continue to appear terribly violent and pornographic.