It’s been two years since the online marketplace embarked on their last wave of anime figure bans, and though many hoped this meant Amazon had finally learned some common sense, it sadly seems they were merely biding their time before continuing.
As before, the seller who first brought Amazon’s latest bans to public attention was Chuck Gaffney, the eponymous owner of independent anime merchandise retailer Chuck’s Anime Store.
Taking to his Twitter account on April 19th, Gaffney revealed, “Just got an email from Amazon about an old figma figure that just got banned. It’s from Lucky Star. Kagami Hiiragi Figma Action Figure Summer Uniform Ver. to be exact.”
“Does Amazon or who ever is doing these anime figure flagging have anything better to do in their day?” he then asked”. “@amazon…just say you hate Japanese people already. Seriously, there are Barbie dolls & figures from Disney more [explicit]. WTF are these bans you’ve been doing for years now?”
Tagging official figma manufacturer Good Smile, Gaffney closed out his frustrations by alerting the company, “Hey @GoodSmile_US. These kind of false messages about your products from Amazon have been a thing for years now. Just in case you’d want to know.”
Though he would attempt to clarify that he had accidentally identified the wrong Kagami figure as having been banned [as seen in the screenshot above], in doing so Gaffney would discover that both versions had been hit, as well as a figure from Good Smile’s FREEing line depicting The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya’s title protagonist in a black bunny suit.
“FFS Amazon,” he would decry.
A few days later, Gaffney received news from Amazon that they would be discontinuing a further two items – the original and later re-release of a figma based on popular Japanese content creator Danny Choo’s virtual mascot for his Culture Japan show, Mirai Suenaga.
“The false flagging of anime figures is getting worse and seems to be targeting figma figures,” Gaffney warned on April 21st. “Again, a super old figure but Danny Choo’s own mascot is now banned on Amazon 😑. (Just got another email literally 3 minutes ago).”
The situation became even more concerning when four days later, Gaffney received an additional e-mail from Amazon informing him that a figurine of Okusama Wa Maho Shoji‘s Asaba Ureshiko, far from scantily clad and simply holding an umbrella, had been officially delisted.
“Hey um @AmazonHelp…I think you have a false flagging problem,” he acknowledged in turn. “Been a thing for years. It’s either internal or external crazed losers who hate Japanese products.”
Regarding the reason for these figures receiving the axe from Amazon, per the emails received by Gaffney, it appears that the site’s administration have come to believe that the affected figures “promote child exploitation or depict children or characters resembling children in a sexually suggestive manner.”
As of writing, Amazon has offered no further insight into or explanation for their decisions.