censorship and fansubs

I was catching up on reading Bleach last night on a fansub site. This sort of site is where folks scan in the latest episode of the manga as so0n as it's published in Japan. Then they clean up the text bubbles to remove the Japanese text and replace it with their own English translation. These sorts of sites are free or available for a small subscription price. The ones that are free are covered with ads - no big surprise there...

On my favorite free-online-manga websites, the f-word appears in the most recent installment of Bleach, issue 306. When Viz catches up with the Japanese manga, the Viz version of issue 306 will likely have no profanities whatsoever. I am not sure if the Japanese version uses the Japanese equivalent of the f-word - but that's not the point. The point is this: English translations on fansub sites sometimes use profanity while the English-language trade paperbacks of manga are devoid of profanity almost all of the time. That's because manga publishers censor what goes into the thought and speech balloons.

You may decide to prevent your kids from reading online manga - and that is a justifiable course of action. The counter argument is that most kids already know a whole rack of profanities by the time they leave grade school. Even if you stop your kids from reading fansubs, your kids already know a lot of profanity. How can they not know profanity when words like shit and motherfucker are thrown around like candy in shows like South Park? Based on this, one could argue that a manga with profanity is no worse than television - so what good does it do to prevent your kids from reading online fansub manga? Personally, I myself would still ban online manga for kids and teens. Just because one knows profanity, it doesn't mean that it's okay to use it. YMMV!

As I remarked in an earlier post, American versions of manga and anime censor their artistic content. I have already mentioned the attempts to cover up the genitals of the child Goku from Dragon Ball; the cover-ups are crude and actually quite funny. Sexual content is not the only thing that's censored by American manga publishers. Certain religious symbols are also censored. One good example of this is the death-of-Greed scene in Fullmetal Alchemist. The original Japanese version had Greed tied to a cross-shaped mass of rock. In the American publication of this episode, the cross was converted into an oval lump of rock instead. Perhaps someone was worried that the doomed Greed would be killed and resurrected as some kind of messiah figure...

I have a bit of a cynical view that the censorship is viewed as good business for manga publishers. Once a title has gained some popularity in the American market, it is not at all uncommon for publishers to release uncensored versions of an anime or a manga at a price higher than the censored version. What a racket...