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Legendary anime figure weights in on debate of if you have an obligation to pay for your child’s education if their dream is to make ero games.

In Japan it’s customary for parents to cover their children’s university tuition and living expenses. Yes, a lot of college kids have part-time jobs, but what they earn is generally theirs to spend shopping or on their social life, with Mom and Dad footing the bill for the last part of their education before they enter the working-adult world.

That brings us to a 50-something woman who wrote in, anonymously, to the advice column of the Asashi Shimbun Digital newspaper. The woman, who we’ll call Mom-san, has a son in university, and he has a pretty clear vision of what he wants to do after graduation, which ordinarily would make most parents feel happy and reassuring.

However, Mom-san’s son isn’t interested in following the traditional Japanese path of applying for a job with an established company after graduation. And even though entrepreneurship is becoming more common and smiled upon in Japan these days, what’s really bothering her is the field he wants to work in.

Mom-san’s son has been an anime otaku since high school, and his goal after graduation is to start a company that produces music for and video game adaptations of anime, as well as planning promotional events for anime/game titles. Some might call that a pie-in-the-sky ambition, but her son has actually already started getting work in the video game field. What’s really got the woman worried, though, is that she recently found out her son is currently contributing to the production of a pornographic video game, or ero game, as they’re called in the fan community.

“The main character is a nurse, and if a woman who works as a nurse were to see the game’s contents, she’d be so humiliated and hurt,” Mom-san laments. “I’ve asked my son many times to stop working on these kinds of games, but I can’t change his mind.”

On the contrary, Mom-san’s son has responded by digging in his heels, asserting that it’s impossible to have a career in or related to the anime industry without ever working on pornographic content. “Games like this have the societal effect of preventing large crimes from taking place, and they’re displayed and sold so that kids can’t see them, so there’s no blame on the makers,” he argues. “All of the people working on these games are kind-hearted, normal people, people with real talent, so I’m going to continue working with them, instead of being prejudiced towards them.”

The idea of her son being involved in work that, in her words, “hurts people and can’t be shown to children” is just too much for Mom-san to take, and she’s now thinking she might stop paying his tuition and living expenses, under the logic that financially supporting his education is indirectly contributing to the work he plans to do after graduation, work that she is strongly opposed to (it’s unclear whether her son’s field of study is directly related to animation/video game production). Still, before she pulls the plug on his student life support, she wanted a third-party opinion, and she got one from none other than Toshio Okada, one of the founders of anime studio Gainax and the man commonly called Otaking.

Okada, who’s now transitioned from creating anime to being a sort of social anthropologist regarding otaku culture, knows a thing or two about the overlapping fields of Japanese animation and ero games. While Gainax has produced a number of landmark series, it’s never been a particularly stable company, and Okada says that during a period when its anime ventures were losing money, the money the company earned making adult video games saved the company, so he can definitely see how they’re, at the very least, a means to an end for someone wanting to work in the anime industry.

▼ Even the gesture for “money” in Japan can look oddly pervy.

That said, Okada also recognizes that Mom-san is uncomfortable essentially indirectly investing in the creation of products she finds morally reprehensible by continuing to financially support her son. “Just as he has a dream he doesn’t want to give up on, you have values you don’t want to compromise,” the Gainax founder says. “It isn’t a situation where one of you is right and the other wrong, so please discuss the issue together and see if you can’t come to some sort of compromise.”

It’s a level-headed, conscientious response, but you can’t help but wonder if there’s much mental flexibility to be found in a mom who apparently never knew that nurses were fetishized in pornography and a son who believes that every single person who works in the ero game industry is kindhearted. There’s also the looming fact that a large number of newcomers to the anime industry continue to require parental support to make ends meet, so Mom-san might be worried that if she doesn’t cut the financial cord now, she’ll be paying to help her son make ero games for years to come.

In any case, it looks like Mom-san and her son have a long, difficult discussion in their future. Even if she does say she won’t be paying for the rest of his education, though, he can always take solace by remembering that Okada himself was a college dropout.

Source: Asahi Shimbun Digital via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso (1, 2, 3)