Officer Held as Japan Moves to Stem Child Pornography

Armed with tougher laws, Japanese authorities are trying to crack down on this country’s thriving culture of child pornography. This week, they arrested one of their own.

Akihiro Otani, a 25-year-old police officer in central Japan, was arrested Tuesday. Otani is said to have posted 48 photos of naked 10-year-old boys on the Internet, the Asahi newspaper reported.

Tokyo Metropolitan police, who made the arrest, wouldn’t comment on the case. “We cannot disclose any details about the investigation because we are afraid there might be copycat crimes,” a spokesman said.

Interpol, the international police organization, estimated two years ago that 80% of the world’s commercially distributed child pornography is produced in Japan, mostly depicting foreign children. The Internet is no exception: Of 3,000 pornographic Japanese Web sites, about 40% contain images of minors, according to National Police Agency statistics.

Pornographic manga comics and newspapers splashed with young naked girls in suggestive poses are ubiquitous--and even read openly on trains--in Japan. Many men clearly favor the young: There is a term for the fetish: Rori Kon, the Japanese shorthand for “Lolita complex.”

Whole sections in the adult-film areas of video stores are devoted to joshi kosei--female high school students--in their ever-popular sailor suits. Some young junior and senior high school girls sell themselves to older men for several hundred dollars per sexual encounter, using the money to buy designer goods.

Agnes Chan, a television personality and Japan’s ambassador to UNICEF, said, “It’s definitely a culture where men like younger girls and boys rather than mature women,” which she speculates may be why Japan is such a mecca for child pornography. “And I think it’s on the increase.”

Parliament tightened Japan’s comparatively lax laws in November 1999. Before that, for example, it had been legal to have sex with children older than 12 in Tokyo and Nagano. The new codes not only ban sex with children younger than 18, but they also outlaw the production, sale and distribution of child pornography.

Last year, 119 people were arrested on child pornography violations, including 57 involving the Internet. They face penalties of up to three years’ imprisonment and fines up to $25,000.

In the past, most who posted porn on the Internet tended to be young, said Yasumasa Kioka, a senior official in the National Police’s juvenile division. It’s now expanded to all ages, he said.

Nevertheless, he contended that the problem is “shrinking dramatically” because the police “are enforcing the law very strictly.”

Otani, the police officer, hardly seemed the type, said a colleague in Kakogawa, a city of about 266,000 located about 25 miles from Kobe, where Otani had worked since 1998. Single and “very serious,” Otani was a “rather quiet person who worked very hard,” said the colleague, who asked not to be named.