In a landmark ruling, the Tokyo District Court found an artist guilty of violating the child pornography law by creating and selling realistic computer graphic images of a naked girl.
The court on March 15 sentenced Akashi Takahashi, a 55-year-old computer graphic designer from Gifu city, to a one-year prison term, suspended for three years, and fined him 300,000 yen ($2,650).
The trial highlighted a gray area in Japan’s obscenity laws. The current law banning child pornography only targets works depicting actual people.
Takahashi’s defense argued that the defendant was innocent because his CG images were based on pictures in a photo book published in the 1980s, not an actual underage girl.
But Presiding Judge Takahiro Mikami ruled that three of Takahashi’s CG images violated the law because they were so realistic that they could be used to identify the girl in the photo book.
“Such obscene images can violate the child pornography law and thus fall into the scope of criminal punishment when even ordinary people recognize that the depictions of the face, bust, genitalia and other key bodily features faithfully describe those of an actual child,” the ruling said.
Takahashi in 2013 became the first person arrested over CG images suspected of violating the Law Banning Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, according to Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department.
Prosecutors, whose indictment listed 34 of Takahashi’s images, demanded a two-year prison term and a fine of 1 million yen.
The court said it was impossible to declare that 31 of the images were based on an actual girl.
But the ruling concluded that “the maliciousness (of the three images) was not reduced from that of the original photos because the defendant attempted to recreate the original photography as much as possible.”
At a news conference after the ruling, Takahashi said he has never intended to create child pornography.
“It is regrettable that the court failed to understand the value of my artistic activities,” he said, adding that he plans to appeal the ruling.
Hisashi Sonoda, a professor of criminal law at Konan Law School, said the court made a careful judgment by convicting the defendant on only three of his 34 drawings. A full acquittal, Sonoda said, would have had a negative effect on police efforts to crack down on CG pornography.
“When the current child pornography law was enacted, cases like this one were not foreseen,” he said. There is a need to revise the law to crack down on CG child pornography more effectively.”
(This article was written by Odaka Chiba and Miako Ichikawa.)
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