First things first: Yes, this is a sensitive subject. No, I'm not running cover for the pedo that used to run rampant here. I am honestly seeking answers.
I asked about this a long time ago, and if I recall, what really happened was that mangaka Nobuhiro Watsuki had his house raided, where they found lots of porn DVDs--one of which had an underage girl on it...who, so I'm told, was maybe two months under Japan's age of consent.
Which means either she lied about her age to do it (not unheard of), or was forced into it. It's not like she was eight years old.
He had a ton of porn, but that one disc ruined everything.
Now, obviously that's really bad. But I need further context about the case and if he deserved to be condemned. No, don't show me the disc contents, good lord.
I know that he got basically a slap on the wrist from the Japanese courts and was allowed to return to work. But since it's the 30th anniversary, a lot of other manga artists are paying tribute to the series today, including Yoshihiro Togashi, the creator of Hunter X Hunter and Yu Yu Hakusho, despite his debilitating health problems.
But not everyone agreed to do it. Hirohiko Araki, creator of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, made a really lazy tribute that was basically just lineart of Kenshin's head with the hair colored. One of the few that outright refused to participate was Tite Kubo, creator of Bleach.
And if it's true that this was a mild case, and we condemn him for it...then I hope we also condemn anyone who has a complete collection of every game released for the original Xbox, because a game called The Guy Game had a girl who lied about her age to be in it, then flashed the camera, meaning that game is, by the letter of the law, legally considered to be child porn.
As I was just discussing in another thread, you cannot trust anything the Japanese legal system says. They can and will lock you in an interrogation room and beat you until you sign a confession to the crime, and its a well known fact in the country that that is the case going back decades. Between the knowledge of that and the strong social shaming element of their whole society, no amount of "we found X" or "he accepted the charges" mean anything whatsoever.
But CP possession wasn't illegal in Japan until like 2014, and historically a lot of "model" teen girls had nude shoots sold publicly because Japan. He was charged in 2017. We can't truly wax about situations like this when so many different elements are completely different than our own. Its not a man doing something clearly and well known to be ultra evil by all of society, its something that was perfectly normal until just a few years prior and he was merely charged with owning it. If they said he was producing or distributing it, it would hold a lot more "morally evil" weight.
I spent a lot of time as a weeb, consuming more Japanese media than I probably should have been. Not just anime, but actual novels and "mainstream" media too. And these things are so normalized that it barely blips anyone there. Its a problem that is beyond simple "stop making lolicon media" in terms of solving.
It's the same thing outside Japan too.
A lot of drawn 2D content (especially non-pornographic) was never even questioned, let alone illegal. Now apparently they represent the real abuse of children. They're literally drawings. And it opens up a horrid gray area in the law where if you scribble down a depiction of child abuse (like Steve-O's sick little "ostrich" tattoo), should you be held legally accountable over a doodle? Historical precedent says yes.
The SCOTUS however literally said no, and it was pretty specific about it. As long as a real child wasn't involved and its not indistinguishable from being a real child it was protected speech. This was pre-Photoshop but their ruling seemed like it would cover that as well quite handily.
So the Bush administration passed another law that basically said "we are just gonna ignore that and return to the Miller test" (which basically says if its gross enough it stops being protected, so completely arbitrary) and its remained that way since because no one wants to be the guy that goes to the SCOTUS again for that.
Its one of those things where everyone knows they don't have a solid footing to make it illegal over, no matter how disgusting they may find it, so instead they rely entirely on social shaming to basically ruin your worse than legality.