pictSPACE, a Japanese online shopping service dealing with doujinshi, is the latest Japanese retailer to soon lose the ability to take payments through Visa and Mastercard. This is part of a growing trend of some Western credit card companies and their agencies refusing to work …Read more »
There’s been a controversy brewing over some Western credit card companies and their agencies when it comes to manga retailers that sell adult titles. Some of these credit cards will not purchase from the retailers, and Visa has publicly admitted that they’re one of them. …Read more »
Dozens of manga have been pulled from school districts in Tennessee to comply with the state’s new obscenity laws. For starters, Rutherford County Schools yanked more than 150 books from its districts shelves, and it’s reviewing the first volume of Fire Force and the first …Read more »
Another manga title has been pulled from an entire school district for review after a mother made a complaint. This time the manga is Unico: The Awakening, a story about a little unicorn that’s aimed for ages 8-12. The mother thought it was too violent. …Read more »
The Horry County School has officially banned Assassination Classroom from its district after a mother made a complaint. Jennifer Hannigan, the mother, learned about Assassination Classroom after her high school daughter brought it home from the school library. “Even if I didn’t have children, I …Read more »
Another Japanese business is being affected by Western credit card companies. Melonbooks, a chain store that sells doujinshi, will cease taking Visa and Mastercard payments on December 16. After this, people can still use things like American Express or JCB to make purchases. Melonbooks wants …Read more »
In August, Otaku USA reported on how some Western credit card companies have threatened penalties or told Japanese companies they need to stop selling some of their explicit manga titles. Manga creator and politician Ken Akamatsu spoke out against this, and now he’s been pulled …Read more »
In the latest news for manga bans or attempted bans, Horry County Schools in South Carolina pulled the whole Assassination Classroom manga series after a single parent complained. The series is being looked over by the schools, a process that is said to take 30 …Read more »
A percentage of Japan’s manga output includes sexually explicit material, and sometimes foreign credit card companies balk at the idea of certain titles. For example, website Manga Library Z was told by multiple credit card brands from the West that it needed to cease …Read more »
Manga in America have age ratings like All Ages or 16+, but who decides these ratings, how do they decide them, and how consistent are they? Some schools have pulled manga from the shelves over worries on what’s considered age-appropriate, and there was a case …Read more »
Book censorship is up in America, and as we’ve been reporting at Otaku USA, sometimes it’s manga being pulled from the shelves. PEN America and the EveryLibrary Institute have been keeping tack of book bans, and have come out with a list of the most …Read more »
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund — which protects comics and manga from censorship — was one of the groups that filed a lawsuit to block Texas’ House Bill 900, (referred to as READER) from going into effect. The vaguely worded act would force book …Read more »
The after-school manga club at Magnolia Middle School in Delaware was a popular club bringing in 20 to 80 students who would read manga, talk about it, and check out anime. In order to get in the club, kids had to have written parental permission. …Read more »
KHOU 11, a CBS-affiliated news station in Houston, has been investigating book bans in the area and believes, based on its research, that the Klein Independent School District is banning books while trying to make it look otherwise. Libraries are always going to get rid …Read more »
The manga Okinawa by Susumu Higa is being published in North America by Fantagraphics and Mangasplaining Extra (MSX), but its July 2023 debut got bumped to August 2023. It’s not much of a bump, and with COVID’s lingering effects and the war on Ukraine causing …Read more »
Danica Davidson
