Simon, 35, had been out to buy groceries. When he came back, two police cars were parked in front of his house on the Swedish countryside. Simon’s first thought was that there had been a burglary. Then he noticed how police officers were carrying out his computer. One officer came up to him and said: “You’re under arrest for aggravated rape of a child.” Simon replied: “Is this a joke?”

Simon was in the middle of a child custody dispute, and it turned out that his ex-girlfriend had told the police that Simon had abused their two-year-old daughter. He was allowed to put the groceries in the fridge before joining the officers to the police station.

After questioning Simon and going through his computer, the police concluded that there was no foundation for the ex-girlfriend’s claims; the suspicions of child sexual abuse were completely dismissed. However, when going through Simon’s computer, the police found something else: Japanese manga drawings which could be deemed child pornography according to Swedish law.

“The Fridge Test”

Simon is Sweden’s foremost expert on manga. He teaches the subject at the university and translates to such an extent that for a time he was the translator of half of all manga that was published in Sweden. He owns what might be Sweden’s biggest manga collection, which he estimates includes about four million illustrations. Among those millions of drawings, the police found 51 that they thought might be illegal. (And of those 51, some were identical copies from a backup drive.)

Prosecutor Anna Hårdstedt handed in her plaint to the local court Uppsala tingsrätt in March 2010. In her charge, minor child pornography crime, she relied on police investigator Cecilia Wallin-Carlsson, who would become an “expert witness” in the trial. In an interview in the magazine Svensk Polis (“Swedish Police”, December 2009), Ms Wallin-Carlsson talked about her work with investigating child pornography. She said that when it’s too hard to draw the line between legal and illegal images, she uses what she calls “the fridge test”:

“Is this an image that I could put up on my refrigerator? If the answer is no, there’s a good chance that the image is pornographic.”

The 51 manga images apparently didn’t pass the fridge test of the Uppsala police. In June 2010, the court deemed all images child porn and sentenced Simon to a fine of 24,800 crowns (2,700 euro/2,930 USD).

Social Pariah

The real sentence, however, was the social one: As a convicted child pornographer, the manga expert would not be able to find work easily. His main employer, publisher Bonnier-Carlsen (belonging to Sweden’s largest media group Bonnier), immediately stopped working with him, despite the verdict had been appealed to a higher court. Simon, who throughout this circus made himself available for interviews, commented afterwards to newspaper Svenska Dagbladet:

“That was a stab in the back. It’s frightening when a publisher does not stand up for freedom of speech. I was standing there defending what they publish.”

The case naturally spurred debate in Sweden. Some compared with how it’s both offensive and illegal in Muslim countries to depict the prophet, but how secular democracies shouldn’t have the same kind of blasphemy laws. The Swedish Media Publishers’ Association denounced the ruling, but freedom of speech expert Nils Funcke concluded that it was probably correct, considering how the law was written:

“The guilty verdict was made possible because the Swedish parliament banned possession of child pornography in 1999. This was, in my opinion, a symbolic move which violated the fundamental rule of banning censorship and pre-approval of texts and images. A principal change which should worry all of us.”

Criminalizing Cartoons

Sweden used to have a very liberal freedom of speech legislation. In 1971, the old obscenity laws were abolished, making all porn, including child porn, legal to produce, distribute and possess. Child pornography would be re-regulated in 1980 and violent pornography in 1986, but it was not until 1999 — after heavy debate where the Swedish Union of Journalists and many other distinguished institutions protested — that it became illegal to possess child pornography.

The legislator’s definition of child porn was very broad though, as if they were thinking “better safe than sorry”, and included drawn images, since “it can not be ruled out that a living model was used as part of the production of them”.

There was also a passage in the law’s preparatory works, that such images are “offensive to children in general, not only to the child that may have been used as a model”. In other words: It was the concept of the child, not only actual, living children, that the new law served to protect.

The Public Defends Child Porn

No one paid much attention to the fact that drawn images now could constitute child porn in Sweden. Of course the police wouldn’t be as silly as to investigate the possession of comics! And in the beginning, they didn’t. Yet the phrases were still there, lurking in the law’s preparatory work, like a sleeping bomb. And 20 years later the climate in society had finally caught up with those once surreal, now painfully real words. The bomb had exploded.

In January 2011, Simon’s case reached the next level of the Swedish justice system, which consists of three levels of courts. The regional court Svea hovrätt decided to uphold the ruling of Uppsala tingsrätt, but they also decided to release 12 of the images, which they did not consider child pornography.

Thus, for the first time, the public was allowed to see which images the local court had found illegal. Newspapers published the images in their arts and culture sections, and people were shocked that a court had considered such images illegal to possess. Usually in child porn cases, the people are hardliners who demand much harder sentences (usually castration and death penalty) than the law allows, but in this case, almost everyone seems to have shook their heads and laughed at the silly court. Only representatives for so called children’s rights organizations seemed to still defend the law. (Curiously so, since children would probably be better helped if the legal system could focus its resources on real children instead of cartoons.)

Manga Artist Speaks Out

People now started to identify the released drawings, by way of searching for their file names on the web. Some of them were the works of famous Japanese manga artists.

I managed to get in touch with one of them, Arino Hiroshi, and went to Japan to interview him in his hometown in the Saitama prefecture outside Tokyo in December 2011. Mr Hiroshi had no idea that one of his images had been part of a child porn trial in Sweden. The image was the cover of a parody comic (a doujinshi) that he had self-published a few years earlier. While admitting that the content was pornographic, he was surprised that Sweden, which he thought of as a liberal country in matters of sex and freedom of expression, would have a problem with such images. He commented:

“In my opinion, it is central that there is no concrete victim. I am basically against regulating expressions of fantasy, such as manga and anime.”

Manga in the Supreme Court

Simon, meanwhile, had appealed the verdict to the Supreme court, which is the highest instance in the Swedish justice system. They only take on cases if they think their ruling might become an important guideline for the lower courts. They also have the power to interpret the law very freely; the Supreme court’s decision can nullify a law.

Before deciding on whether they would take on the case or not, the Supreme court asked the Prosecutor-General of Sweden for advice. He replied in September 2011 that he agreed with Svea hovrätt’s guilty verdict, but recommended the Supreme court to take on the case, so that the legality of cartoons could be thoroughly tested.

In November 2011, the Supreme court accepted the case, which now consisted of 39 images (some of them doublets), and in May 2012, the trial took place in Stockholm. As media interest peaked, Sweden’s biggest newspaper Aftonbladet published my interview with Arino Hiroshi, along with his now infamous and legal illustration.

Sweden’s biggest newspaper Aftonbladet published an image that the local court had deemed child porn.

Shotacon at the National Library

By now I had entered the debate in another way as well. On the symbolic date of April 1st, I released a Japanese shotacon comic by Tsukumo Gou, who I had met in Tokyo on my last visit there. The comic, which I had translated myself, contained uncensored sex between boys of an unspecified age.

I called it Entartete Shota; I wanted to show that our society denounces certain artistic expressions as offensive and therefore illegal in the same way as the Nazis did with what they called “entartete kunst” — degenerate art. Since I released the comic in Sweden, with a Swedish ISBN number, I was obliged to send copies to the National Library of Sweden and six university libraries. And since I was part of Sweden’s national book distribution system, the comic automatically turned up in every single book shop’s catalog.

Entartete Shota was defended by the arts and culture editor of newspaper Expressen, Karin Olsson, despite she claimed to personally dislike it (what’s wrong with gay sex, Karin?). After some bloggers, who called themselves “proud moralists”, contacted book shops that carried the comic, some chose to pull it, but the biggest book shop Adlibris (yes, they are also owned by Sweden’s biggest media group Bonnier, just like Expressen by the way), sent me a polite email asking about the age of the characters. (They have no age.) Adlibris chose to temporarily pull the comic until the Supreme court had made up their mind.

Acquitted by the Supreme Court

In June 2012, the Supreme court handed down their judgment. For Simon, it was a very clear verdict. It said: Not guilty. He was finally a free man, almost four years after the police visit in his home.

For the rest of us, the verdict was not as clear. The Supreme court ruled that 38 of the 39 images were “unrealistic” and therefore didn’t count as child porn. They were released to the public so that everyone could see what both the local and the regional court had considered to be child porn.

However, the 39th drawing was realistic enough to count as child porn, according to the Supreme court. Simon was acquitted since the possession of this image could be justified in his particular case, him being Sweden’s foremost expert on manga, and this image being one in four million. But for anyone else, possession of this image would be illegal.

Those present at the trial, when all images were shown, are at a loss to explain the judgment. According to them, the 39th image did not differ in any substantial sense from the other 38. Simon himself commented:

“The only difference from the others was that the nose was drawn too, in that case it would be the nose that is the definition of what is on the wrong side of the border.”

Many commentators agreed that the ruling was cowardly; the Supreme court had acquitted Simon, but they had not dared to nullify the law that had sent him there. And since no one is allowed to see the 39th image (though it has surfaced in some forums) and check how it differed from the rest of the drawings, the confusion regarding the legality of cartoons in Sweden is just as big now as it was before the Supreme court’s ruling — for the public as well as for the lower courts.

At least the lawyers of Adlibris had made up their mind. I was contacted by the sales department after the Supreme court’s ruling and let know that they would start selling the comic again.

Politicians Lacking Integrity

Many politicians, sensing where the wind blew in this question, criticized the law during the worst media turmoil, but no Member of Parliament took action to change it. Except for one. Conservative MP Maria Abrahamsson had been a fierce critic of the law, and in September 2012 she wrote a parliamentary motion titled “Differ between manga children and children of flesh and blood”, with the purpose to mend the child porn law to not cover drawn images.

The motion was discussed by the parliament’s Committee on Justice, which advised the parliament to vote no to the motion, which they did in March 2013. Since they voted by acclamation, not by pressing buttons, it’s not possible to check how individual MP’s voted. Mrs Abrahamsson commented to Svenska Dagbladet:

“I saw when I laid out my arguments from the podium, that several MP’s agreed. Then they voted no anyway. There is no political will in any party to change this. They are afraid of being criticized for not taking the question of child sexual abuse seriously.”

A telling example of this: At the annual party convention of the Centre Party in 2015, a motion was proposed by Andreas Larsson to change the child porn law “to exclude pure fiction”. Mr Larsson has a master in Japanese, has lived in Japan, and, being an amateur illustrator himself, he is well acquainted with the Japanese doujinshi scene and its many expressions. The board stressed the importance of protecting freedom of speech, but … from a “children’s perspective” it couldn’t be ruled out that “what seems to be pure fiction can have a real background”.

Mr Larsson comments:

“I consider this offensively bad argumentation. With that logic, any kind of art can be banned, as you often can’t completely exclude the possibility that a work is modeled after reality.”

The board of the Centre Party advised the members to vote no to the motion, which they did.

Mrs Abrahamsson has continued to fight to change the child porn law; she is very active in the debate in Sweden, and has written more motions in this question.

Endangered Freedom of Art

So what happened after the Supreme court made its ambivalent ruling in what went to history as “mangamålet” — the manga case?

Well, in March 2014, Uppsala tingsrätt — the local court that first sentenced Simon — did it again. This time, the 27-year-old defendant claimed that the manga images he stood on trial for were not child pornography, since there were no “real children” in them. The court referred to the fresh ruling by the Supreme court when it decided that the images were “realistic” enough to count as child porn — hence the man was found guilty. (He was also found guilty of other, more serious and unrelated crimes, so it’s hard to say something about the sentence.)

And in the very same month, in the very same local court, a 68-year-old man stood trial for possessing 905 manga images (many of them doublets). He explained to the court that the discussions in media about child pornography in drawings had made him curious, so he downloaded a lot of images, but soon lost interest and thought he had deleted them. It was when his computer was repaired that the repair company found the images and called the police. (That’s apparently the common reaction in Sweden now: To call the cops when finding indecent cartoons.) The court referred to the law’s preparatory work and sentenced the 68 year old to parole.

In other words, our story ends like it began — with a legal system that persecutes people for possessing cartoons. Or in Andreas Larsson’s words: