Osaka police recently uncovered a booming mail-order business servicing the entire nation with pornographic DVDs which lacked the legally required pixellation over actors’ genitalia.

On 9 February Osaka Prefectural Police announced the arrest of 39-year-old Hiroshi Suzuki of Osaka on charges of possession of obscene material with intent to distribute. He was found on the second floor of a Nipponbashi area commercial building along with 50 copies of DVDs featuring uncensored adult material.

In Japan it is illegal to sell adult videos which show the performers’ genitalia, so adult filmmakers must cover them with a mosaic pixellation effect. Like in this shot of our beautiful RocketNews24 Japan writer…

To bypass this restriction, Suzuki stands accused of obtaining copies of films without the mosaic and selling them online for 150 to 200 yen ($1.30–$1.80) each. He had allegedly been renting both the second and third floors of the building in which he was arrested and where police seized 52,000 blank DVDs and 150 DVD burners.

Judging by the amount of materials, the organization — which police believe consisted of six men between the ages of 20 and 50 — was expecting a lot of future business. And according to a police investigation into Suzuki’s bank account, they were right to think so.

Through transactions made on websites he allegedly ran such as Himitsu no Rabo (Secret Lab), approximately 800,000 discs were said to have been sold in the past year alone, resulting in estimated 130 million yen ($1.15M) in revenue for the mosaic-free DVD distributors.

▼ The Secret Lab has since been taken down.

Image: Adultwalker

It’s a staggering figure considering the DVDs were bought over the internet, where people usually have to make an effort to avoid seeing uncensored porn.

When questioned by police, Suzuki reportedly admitted saying, “I did it for the money.” And in doing so, he passed up an excellent opportunity to make himself into an anti-censorship martyr.

Nevertheless, the Secret Lab has now been shut down, and Japan can rest safe knowing that all those images of reproductive organs were taken off the market. After all, nothing causes social collapse faster than seeing dingalings and hoonaners.

Now, tentacles; that’s how you build a strong and healthy civilization…

Source: Mainichi Shimbun (Japanese)
Images: RocketNews24 (Unless otherwise noted)