Immediately following the Telegraph article, Amazon UK pulled RapeLay off its website and, two months later, Amazon Japan followed suit. 1 Players of RapeLay stalk women and children, and then rape them in a virtual world. The controversy over the Japanese computer game ‘RapeLay’ began when the Irish newspaper the Belfast Telegraph first reported on 12 February 2009 the sale of RapeLay by the online retailer Amazon UK. Keywords: RapeLay, video games, computer games, sexual violence, child abuse, pornography, regulation, legislation. I also problematise the fact the game’s content is not prohibited in Japan because it takes the form of graphic animation, as also the fact that the game allows players to simulate the experience of perpetrating rape. I understand the game to be problematic because its content is extremely discriminatory against women, and also constitutes child pornography. I then discuss problems inherent to the RapeLay game itself. In this article I first trace the recent history of the emergence of the RapeLay game controversy, and highlight the problems inherent to the gaming industry’s self-regulation policies. This led to a temporary subsidence in campaigning. The Japanese government was the first to respond to the campaigns, and roughly one month later instituted measures to strengthen the gaming industry’s system of self-regulation. The campaigns followed media reports about RapeLay, which first appeared in the English-language press in August 2009.
The speed at which opposition to this game spread throughout the world caught the Japanese gaming industry by surprise. Ongoing international campaigning against the Japan-made ‘RapeLay’ computer game since May 2009 has had a big effect on Japanese society.
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