Australian authorities are reportedly cracking down on the importation of hentai from Japan, signalling the latest measures in the nation’s increasingly hardline stance on the sexually explicit comics.
Japanese adult retailer J-List—which specialises in the sale of sex toys, anime, cosplay, figurines and manga—posted
a statement to their website earlier this month claiming that Australia’s Border Force (ABF) and customs had started blocking all their adult products from entering the country.
This includes pornographic hentai, Japanese porn videos, sexually suggestive figurines of anime characters, onaholes—that is, an artificial vaginas designed for masturbation—and any other product marked with a “+18” symbol. As a result, J-List has been advised to stop shipping to the country.
“DHL Japan called us last week, informing us that Australian customs have started rejecting packages containing any adult product,” the company wrote in their statement. “They then advised us to stop sending adult products to the country. Following that, current Australian orders with adult items in them were returned to us this week.”
“The best way to avoid getting anyone’s hopes up of receiving something new, shiny, and for adults only is to cease shipping adult products to Australia,” J-List added.
The ABF website declares that people travelling to or entering Australia must not bring in anything constituting “illegal pornography”—that being defined as “child pornography (any depiction of children in a sexually explicit manner)” as well as the fairly broad and nondescript catchall of “publications, films, computer games and any other goods that describe, depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence, terrorist acts or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults are not allowed.
www.vice.com
