Hentai blogger and translators group busted

By Ko Dong-hwan

Police nabbed a male who distributed hentai materials - Japanese cartoons with explicit sexual contents - along with his accomplices.

Incheon Metropolitan Police Agency’s Cyber Crime Investigation Unit booked without detention a blogger, a 19-year-old university student, and 37 Japanese cartoon translators and editors on charges of infringing upon laws regarding child and adolescent sexual abuse.

The police also booked without detention a 22-year-old university student, and 22 others who downloaded the materials from the blog.

The 19-year-old, through his blog whose server was set up in Japan, uploaded approximately 1,500 hentai cartoons from June 2011 until April 2013.

In operating his crime, he recruited online Japanese translators and formed a special translators group. Once he received translated cartoons from the group, he uploaded the materials on the blog.

Among the translators group were six students who attend a university with national reputation.

The hentai cartoons, compared to videos, are unlimited in boundaries of cartoonists’ expression, thus often show graphics charged with as the most imaginable sadistic contents on an extreme level can be drawn as possible.

He said during a police interrogation, “I was always unpopular among girls in middle and high school, making me preoccupied with the thought that ‘all the girls hate me’” and that “I operated the blog to restitute my downtrodden self-esteem.”

The police are currently expanding its dragnet in pursuing 40 to 50 illegal downloaders who used his blog.