Anime censored in America

I myself on this very blog in the past have fallen into the trap of saying the reason many Anime that were kids shows in Japan were censored for American Televisions is because Japan has different standards regarding what was and wasn't appropriate for children.

And yes Japan is a different culture and so their standards and values on things like this are different in some cases.  But I've come to realize that there is a huge problem in thinking that's truly the main reason so much Anime was subject to so much localization censorship.

Because think about Batman The Animated Series.  That show was a Saturday Morning show, it was deemed by American network censors as appropriate for children, but it and other Comic Book like shows got away with realistic Guns and sometimes fairly sexually risqué stuff.  And then even many Nickelodeon shows got pretty weird.  I've come to realize American Cartoons were filled with things that would have been censored on American TV if it was an Anime.

Hazel did a video about a short controversy over an Anime that almsot got an American release in 1991.  This Anime wasn't for kids, but the controversy involved those who had trouble accepting that any Animation could be for adults only.  And something I consider important in that story is how that whole fiasco caused Anime to be put on the radar of Focus on the Family, an Evangelical Christian "Family Values" moral guardians watchdog group.  They are also important players in the history of attempts to Censor Music and Video Games in the 90s and early 2000s.

Xenophobia and fears of "Degeneracy" frequently go together, the conservatives of every culture insist the things they find deviant and repulsive are never innate to their own culture but the product of foreign contamination.  The United States is a demographically predominantly Protestant Christian nation, and Japan is the last nation on Earth where true Ancient Paganism is still practiced as it was in Antiquity.

In other words, these "Chinese Cartoons" were held to greater scrutiny by Censors because they were foreign, because Japan was already being stereotyped as a land of weirdness and perverts.

Now the Anime and other related Japanese media that is definitely not appropriate for children is mostly the product of a Sub Culture, even in Japan they are not mainstream.  The truth is Shintoism is a perfect case study for debunking the way modern Christians think Paganism and Sexual promiscuity go hand in hand.  Kids shows in Japan are made with more mainstream sensibilities in mind and are thus actually pretty conservative.  Sailor Moon happened to be worked on by a few people who wanted to push boundaries but even their hands were often tied.

And yet because so many American Anime Fans have tied our love of Anime to a perception that Japanimation does what American't, we keep using the mere existence of all that censorship as proof that Japan must be a lot less squeamish about sex and gender nonconformity.  And I think a perfect case study for me to deconstruct the popular perception of and make my point with can be identified with one word.

"Cousins"

HaruMi is hyped by western LGBTQ Anime Fans as some shining example of Lesbian representation that even today Yuri Anime rarely lives up to.  But a lot of this is an informed reputation that comes from the infamy of how Homophobic North American television censors had to censor them into being "Cousins".

Allow me to reveal a dirty little open secret.  The Cloverway localization of Sailor Moon S didn't actually censor anything, it is by far the least censored of the four seasons of Sailor Moon that got Dubbed back then, for the one episode that was temporarily skipped over, why didn't have anything to do with HaruMi.  This change was accomplished not by removing anything but entirely in what they added, they added to almsot every episode a reference to them being Cousins so that their closeness had an alternate explanation.

But that exposes something doesn't it?  If they didn't need to cut anything to do that, then that exposes how HaruMi in the 90s Anime operated under the exact same plausible deniability most Yuri operated under.  There was never any onscreen Kiss or clear statement of "we're dating" or "she's my girlfriend".  Yet many Nostalgia blinded Yuri Critics think they achieved something many far more explicitly Yuri characters in more modern Anime have not.

Now in fairness the 90s Anime never featured an onscreen Kiss between Usagi and Mamoru either, because it was a kids show and so held to similar rules as 00s and early 2010s Disney Channel sitcoms.  In the Manga they do Kiss, and the Manga also had Girl on Girl Kisses, the Sailor Moon Manga was much more YA while the 90s Anime was toned down and dumbed down for the kids.

HaruMi on the 90s Anime in Sailor Moon S at most gave us Hand Holding, and that being in an Anime was enough to make Cartoon Network censors force the "Cousins" declarations on us while the Harley and Ivy episodes of BTAS didn't raise an eyebrow, proves that this stuff was being scrutinized differently because of where it came from.