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From the Guardian appears an interesting post after the murder of a 22 year old British teacher who had only recently arrived in Japan to teach English. She was found buried in a bath on the suspected murderer's porch.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/20...anga_does.html

Men don't kill women, manga does

Hentai manga is only the latest in a line of sensational media the press have seized on to 'explain' appalling violence.



Manga lite ... Tokyo's annual Dream Factory festival, featuring models dressed as the comics' doe-eyed young maids. Photograph: Katsumi Kasahara/AP

At the end of last week, the Sun, the Scotsman and the London Paper were all chasing a juicy new lead in the case of murdered teacher Lindsay Ann Hawker. "Detectives are probing the possibility that comic book fan Tatsuya Ichihashi had played out a sick fantasy from one of the stories in hentai manga - piles of which were found in his flat," wrote the London Paper. "The adult comics are extremely popular in Japan and often contain scenes of girls and women being raped and tortured." So we have our prime suspect: comics did it. Case closed. Good work, gentlemen. Such hyper-violent comics do indeed exist, but in fact the category "hentai" isn't even used in Japan - instead, there is a whole spectrum of erotic manga, most of which is no more explicit than an issue of Nuts. We may as well set aside the vagueness of this story, however. It's no surprise that both police and press are desperate for an angle. What's more interesting is the spotlight of blame swinging towards such an obscure cranny of the cultural stage. Perhaps manga's time has come.
Sales of manga comics in the UK have more than doubled since 2004. As Joel Rickett wrote last year, "manga is now mainstream, with most chain booksellers devoting shelf sections to it... To many readers the genre is baffling - and that's why teenagers like it." Video games used to occupy this same awkward position where most adults had heard of them but few had actually tried them out. But now that so many respectable men in their twenties and thirties own an XBox or a PlayStation, it has become increasingly hard to pretend that playing Grand Theft Auto will zap you into a homicidal trance.
Manga comics, by contrast, are still mysterious to most of us, and, like video games, they have unpleasant extremes which can be conveniently exploited to characterise the whole medium. Their country of origin is no help: Orientalism lives on, simultaneously shocked and prurient, seeing Japan as an alien, amoral place where schoolgirls exist only to have their underwear ripped off and sold in vending machines.
Comics have suffered through this before. In 1954, Dr Frederic Wertham's influential Seduction of the Innocent argued that comics were corrupting children, and led to decades of censorship. The same won't happen today, but manga fans should brace themselves for a frustrating few years: before long some British teenager with a stack of racy manga in his bedroom will commit a violent crime, and then the tabloid scapegoating will really start.