The visual novel company behind titles such the Ef series, Wind: A Breath of Heart, Angel Type and the upcoming game Eden have blocked access to their official site to anybody outside of Japan. By visiting their website outside of Japan you can see the following message:

Some foreigners seem to be having an antipathy against EROGE.
Therefore, We prohibited the access from foreign countries, to defend our culture.
Sorry for you of the fan that lives in a foreign country.

minori Inc.

Why minori blocking foreign accesses?

We are little perplexing now because we received a lot of response about this issue from foreign people.

Now we will tell you the short detail about the reason why blocking you to this website, because of we, all Japanese EROGE makers were facing at the problem, the crisis of "Freedom of speech".

Currently, The bill that allows to limiting the content (It is censorship. Isn't it?) to all EROGEs is being discussed in the Diet because intellectuals and politicians said "Japanese EROGE were being problem and troubled with the foreign country. Therefore we should make EROGE hidden away from foreign country, and also its content should be limited and censored".

Okay, now we trusted the word what they said at once. So we blocked you to make stay away from the trouble.

...Do you like that?

If not, please tell your idea directly to Japanese government and politicians.
(For example, you can write the letter to the administration of Japan directly from here.)
(If you can comprehend Japanese...There is information of the politicians in Japan.)

Otherwise, you just can talk your idea about this issue at your blog or other media to inform the existance of this problem to the public. It would be very helpful for us.

If you do so, we might be able to recover the "Freedom of speech" and the barricade lying in between us would be taken away.

Please help us.

We hope this separation would be only for short moment.

Sincerely.

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This is a very sad occourance, and it's a shame that Visual Novels and Bishoujo Games must face the same kind of censorship as violent video games or graphic movies. I know there is a big debate on this, on this internet as always, so I have just taken Minori's advice and written about it on my blog.

I can understand why they are doing this, but it is obviously inconvienient for people outside of Japan. It's a shame because I think that people who buy Bishoujo Games are in such a niche market that they are very unlikely to commit crimes such as rape or other sexual abuse.

There has also been a ban of certain elements in Bishoujo Games such as rape, loli (young girl), gang rape, sexual violence, cruel sexual play, reverse rape, shoujo (I think this would be young girl, but not child young), forbidden sex (adultury, incest etc.), and so on. Simply anything that is not normal sexual activity.

Of course this will severly ruin content in many eroges to come. There are a number of titles I hope are not held back because of this, but many developers are having a hard time because they have to cancel projects.

However, what many people in Japan are saying is that this content is likely to be distributed through patches instead of packaged with the game, seeing as it won't count as the actual game itself. I think this is an interesting idea and maybe we are saved after all.

I advise that you follow the links above and write to the Japanese administration about this issue and make it known about how much this is upsetting people. (You do not have to write in Japanese).