As a new wave of forced-puritanism continues to creep its way into the Japanese economic sector, local social media network Niconico has announced that they will soon be shuttering their adult art-oriented ‘Nico Nico Shunga’ service due to “the current social environment and international situation”.
One of the most popular social media networks within the Land of the Rising Sun, Niconico was founded in 2006 as a video sharing service, with its noted ability to allow livestreams of concerts or anime giving it a particularly advantage within its home nation.
In 2009, the service would extend its offerings with a Nico Nico Seiga, an imageboard-style sister operation which functioned as a platform for artists, both amateur and professional, to share their works and engage with fans.
And in providing a space for those with more adult tastes, two years later the Nico Nico Seiga service would launch its own imprint service known as Nico Nico Shunga, thus allowing for artists of ‘R-15+ content’ to enjoy the same social networking freedoms as their Safe For Work peers.
(Despite the title, content that receives an R-15 rating from Japan’s Eirin ratings board is not marketed towards young teenagers. The number is instead meant to indicate that the content should only be viewed by people over the age of 15. In reality, an R-15 is more equivalent to the American TV Parental Guidelines system and Motion Potion Association’s respective TV-MA or R ratings.)
To put it in more Western terms, imagine if YouTube owned and operated both a standard and an ‘Adult’s Only’ version of Tumblr, minus all the tired discourses.
However, it seems those who found a home on Nico Nico Shunga will soon find themselves in search of relocation, as on January 16th, the overall Niconico parent company published a blog post to their official website informing users that they “will be discontinuing” the service by month’s end.
“We have been providing the ‘Nico Nico Shunga’ service since August 2011 with the aim of creating a separate space within the illustration corner of Nico Nico Seiga,” explained the company of their decision, as machine translated by DeepL. “However, after careful consideration of the current social environment and international situation, we have decided that it is difficult to continue the service in its current form, and so we have decided to discontinue the service. We would like to thank everyone who has used the service so far, and apologize for this sudden announcement.”
Per Niconico, the Shunga service will finally close its doors at 2:00 PM local time (GMT +9) on January 29th, after which time all of its contents will be fully and totally deleted.
Further, while users who uploaded any such mature content to Nico Nico Shunga service prior to its shutdown will not be penalized for having done so, the company did confirm that going forward, “illustrations that are judged to contain sexual or radical content that exceeds the previous Nico Nico Seiga R-15 standard will be deleted and usage restrictions such as prohibition of illustration posting will be implemented.”
Drawing their statement to a close, Niconico ultimately added, “In addition, Nico Nico is working on reviewing the scope of restrictions for the entire service from Wednesday, October 30, 2024, in order to continue operating and providing services.”
“Even if the content does not meet the previous R-15 and deletion criteria, we may take necessary measures, including deletion, based on a comprehensive judgment of the content,” they concluded. “We appreciate your understanding.
We look forward to your continued support of Niconico.”
Notably, Niconico did not explicitly cite a specific motivating incident as to why they have chosen to shut down their Shunga branch – but thankfully, their above mention of “the scope of restrictions for the entire service” does provide some potential insight into their action.
As explained by the company in the relevant ‘scope review’ announcement, the entire reason Niconico has began down a path towards self-censorship was “due to changing times and the diversification of devices, a need has arisen for a comprehensive approach that also takes into account overseas laws.”
Sadly, Niconico is not the first Japanese company in recent months to find themselves forced into dropping their perfectly legal Adult content offerings due to pressure from outside nations.
As previously reported, thanks to ultimatums delivered by various international credit card processors, popular online doujinishi retailer Melonbooks, iconic Tokyo-based book retailer Toranoana, and out-of-print manga archive Manga Library Z have all had to close the doors on their Adult content businesses under threat of having their financially vital digital payment processing services totally and unequivocally revoked at a moments notice.
While it’s unknown if such credit card processors also had a hand to play in Nico Nico Shunga’s closure, it’s clear that the entirety of these events – and those sadly still to come – all stem from the same tree of Western busy-bodyism.