Nikkatsu. The politically and sexually explicit film, which depicts the lives of prostitutes on the outskirts of a US military base in Tokyo, was ruled as "not obscene" by the Tokyo District Court in 1966. The lower court held that the defendants, Takechi and Nikkatsu distributor chief Satoru Murakami, were not culpable because the film had successfully passed Eirin, Japan's self-regulating movie regulator. The ruling was upheld in 1969 at the Tokyo High Court, which deemed that the film was obscene but acquitted the pair on the basis of the approval the film had received from Eirin. The rulings were followed in 1972 by a series of prosecutions against Nikkatsu's Roman Porno film series, which similarly ended in acquittals of Nikkatsu employees in 1978 and 1980 on the basis of Eirin approvals. In January 2004, Yūji Suwa, Motonori Kishi, and Kōichi Takada were prosecuted for producing and distributing the hentai manga anthology Misshitsu, in the first manga-related obscenity trial in Japan. Police reports found the depictions of "genitalia and scenes of sexual intercourse" within the manga to have been "drawn in detail and realistically", and that the censor bars meant to obscure genitalia and sexual penetration were "less conservative" than usual. Suwa and Takada pled guilty and were fined ¥500,000 each (about US$4,700), with Kishi receiving a one-year suspended prison sentence. After appealing to the Tokyo High Court, Kishi's sentence was reduced to a 1.5 million yen fine (about US$13,750). He then appealed the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that Article 175 violated Article 21 of the Constitution of Japan and its protection of freedom of expression. In its 2007 decision, the Court upheld the guilty verdict, concluding that Misshitsu satisfied the three-part obscenity test and was therefore subject to restriction. After the convictions of Kishi and Suwa, a number of retail bookstores in Japan removed their adults-only section, a phenomenon attributed to the chilling effect of the outcome. In July 2013, three people related to Core Magazine, a Japanese publishing company focused on adult material, were arrested for selling "obscene images" with "insufficient censoring". They later pleaded guilty in December. Internet censorship Internet censorship in Japan generally focuses on pornography and controversial political material especially in regards to Japanese history during the Empire of Japan. In 2022, Japan introduced a law to revise its Penal Code that would mandate a jail time for up to a year and