My recent trip in Hong Kong saw yet another fad rise in this part of Asia, a borderline form of soft porn passed off as art. The differences in sexual taboos between America and Asia, especially America and Japan, created very different social differences in the two cultures.

What would be considered as child porn has been widely in circulation in Japan for years, magazines and comic books regularly showed photos of nude girls as young as 12 in ads, sexual melodramatic violence has been around for decades. The outburst of this type of "literature", sexual adventure comics, which is widely read by kids in Japan just as American kids reads Marvel comics, spread to other parts of Asia, mainly to Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Regional spinoffs quickly spawned in the new fad.

Youth workers don't like it, but these comics are very popular, even to girls, as the pseudo-porn is not sexually one-sided. The authors call it art, and I have to admit, the artwork is pretty impressive, being meticulously hand drawn and illustrated in great detail. However, it is still soft porn, and kids as young as 6 or 7 read them. They would never get past the censors in America, but the different social standards here in Asia, allow them through into the hands of children.

Then again, there is young and nubile Brooke Shields in her controversial role as a child prostitute. They tried to pass that film off as "art", but it did feature full frontal shots of the naked Shields. The French pass off their porn as art all the time. It is very easy to cross the line.

Comics are not "real", like hentai. But it is still porn if it was drawn with the specific intent to depict graphic sexual matter. Personally, I think the stuff in this grey area between art and full-blown child pornography should be censored by age, but then again, my rather large collection of pornography makes me somewhat of a hypocrite for saying that.

My Japanese porn regularly features "lolitas", 18-21 year olds. Some look 13 or 14, with the makeup. Is that child porn? No. But is a sexual comic book featuring a character that looks very young (like they always do in this new fad here in Asia) child porn? Probably. The laws break down at this point. You can't put a specific age to a comic book drawing.