Mainstream Japan has an uneasy relationship with its own liminal youth cultures (Daliot-Bul 2014), yet exporting those same cultures for international consumption acts to normalize what is internally seen as undesirable and even deviant behaviours. At the same time that Japan is promoting its film, television, and other media abroad, it is also trying to regulate those same media in its own national borders. They are, instead, often uncoordinated and changeable policies that react to domestic markets and demands, national politics, international politics and economies, trade strategies, and sometimes just idiosyncratic leaders. What quickly becomes apparent is that media policies are not monolithic expressions of cultural needs and mores. Further, this is made more complicated by the fact that traditional film policies such as censorship and classification are often not considered in international trade policies, that those encapsulated by Cool Japan. The challenge with reconceptionalizing film policy within a Japanese context is that film and television is part of a transmedia landscape, and the policies of games, for example, define the policies for anime. Abstract: The challenge with Cool Japan as a media policy that encompasses film and television is that it is, at heart, a descriptive policy that attempts to harness the success of Japanese youth cultures abroad. Further, within this context, corporate, public, and political policies arise in tense dialectic with international actors that must be accounted for when studying video game policy. As such, in this chapter, I argue that the case study of RapeLay highlights high-stakes conversations concerning the dangers of cultural imperialism when public morals are used to pressure national industries acting in international markets. Thus, questions arise about the rights of nations to dictate their own policies and how those rights are challenged within international forums and markets. Circumventing rating and classification systems through alternative distribution brings games that are intended for limited distribution within particular markets into larger discourses. Games move in international markets as either commodities that can be purchased in traditional distribution centers (such as stores or online retailers), third-party distributors, or as code that can be downloaded anywhere. In this chapter, I consider the pressures brought to bear on national politics and video game classification systems by international markets, and in doing so, I complicate discussions of game classification, production, and consumption within intended and unintended markets. What this case highlights, however, is challenges brought forward by international markets and third party 2 distribution. Yet Illusion broke no domestic laws the company adhered to regulation and classification guidelines that govern the Japanese game industry. Suddenly, RapeLay, Illusion, and the Japanese game industry were open to international scrutiny, subject to pressure from international human rights organizations, and became a topic on national politics outside of Japan. could buy the game on Amazon (Fennelly 2009). Indeed, this 2006 game did not garner much interest until 2009 when the Belfast Telegraph ran a short report that summarized the game and pointed out that people in Ireland and the U.K. RapeLay, while reprehensible in content, is not abnormal in the Japan PC game market, which is the platform for most sex-simulation games.
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