This hilarious series is suffering through some truly tragic censorship.
Earlier today, The official Osomatsu-san (Mr. Osomatsu) anime website declared that the show’s first Blu-Ray/DVD volume will omit the first episode. In addition, the second and third episode will be completely reworked for the release.
Furthermore, the Osomatsu-san staff reported that the show’s production committee will pull the first episode from streaming sites. The episode will be pulled from the following sites on November 12, at midnight local time:
- dTV
- Ani Tele Theater
- Rakuten ShowTime
- Video Market
- U-NEXT
- Anime Hōdai
- Bandai Channel
- J:COM On Demand
- Video Pass
- milplus
- Auhikari
- iTSCOM On Demand
- TOKAI On Demand
- Actvilla
- Hikari TV
- PlayStation Video
- TSUTAYA TV
- DMM.com
- GYAO!
- Niconico Video
- d Anime Store
On October 29, TV Tokyo held a press conference regarding the show. During the conference, TV Tokyo’s Yūichi Takahashi apologized for the third episode, which contains a lewd parody of children’s character Anpanman, in addition to spoofs of Saw and a number of other properties.
The first two episodes also contained numerous parodies of popular shows, including Attack on Titan, Sailor Moon, and Boys Over Flowers.
Japan’s copyright law doesn’t include a parody provision, meaning that spoofs and satire of copyrighted works are not protected speech. Rather, creators have three moral rights:
- Divulgence: The rights holder can decide exactly when and how his/her work is made available to the public
- Authorship: The rights holder can choose how s/he is represented in the work, whether it’s under a real name, a pseudonym, or anonymously.
- Integrity: The rights holder controls how a work appears, and all modifications to his/her work.
Because of this, parodic works are treated as infringing works, due to a violation of the Integrity clause. Because of this, all parodic works require creator consent.
Osomatsu-san is based on the late Fujio Akatsuka’s manga of the same name. The series is being directed by Yoichi Fujita at Studio Pierrot. Naoyuki Asano is providing character designs, while Shū Matsubara handles series composition. The show kicked off on October 5, as a celebration of what would be Akatsuka’s 80th birthday.
In North America, Crunchyroll is streaming the series as it airs in Japan.
Japanese culture blog Esuteru published a comparison shot between the original and edited versions of the Dekapan-man sketches, which you can check out below. The edited version is represented in the left set of images:
Source: Anime News Network
