I’m going to have to agree with this and say that Japan actually has a lot more rape victims than are officially known.
For one, I have seen anime and manga (written for girls) where girls are raped and are treated horribly by school mates/neighbors, peers. I have read a few where the girls committed suicide. See Tokyo Babylon, which will be released here soon, for a sad story of a girl raped by gang members who feels she has no choice but to kill herself.
But as anime/manga does not reflect Japanese society, I have a few cites:
[Seiichi Ota, a lawmaker with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) said “Gang rape shows the people who do it are still vigorous, and that is OK. I think that might make them close to normal.”
…Yasuyuki Takai, vice chairman of the Japan Federation of Bar Association’s committee on victim support, said Mr Ota’s remarks were indicative of Japanese society’s passive attitude to rape, which often goes unreported.
“It shows that in Japan, rape is not thought of enough as an awful act… Japan’s social views against incidents of rape need to be made more strict,” Mr Takai told the French news agency AFP.](BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Fury over Japan rape gaffe)
[“The case shows that Japanese men, especially young men, are contaminated with a rape myth that a girl who joins a party wants to have sex,” said Satoshi Sugita, a professor who published The Politics of Rape.
"Although having sex is totally different from being raped, men strongly believe that the two things are the same. It is because of an ideology that has spread in Japan through pornography, especially adult videos.
“About 80 to 90 per cent of male high school students have seen an adult video, whose typical plot is a man raping a woman after having got her drunk.”](http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/04/1057179159324.html)
Uchiyama also made another shocking discovery. Half the suspected rapists aged from 14 to 19 and 48 percent of those in the same age bracket facing charges of indecent assault say they were inspired to commit their sex crime based on what they’d seen in pornographic movies. Adult sex criminals were similarly influenced by adult movies, with 38 percent of suspected rapists and 21 percent of those accused of indecent assault saying they were merely copying what they’d seen on their VCRs.
[[V]iolence against women in Japan remains largely unreported due to inadequate laws and the failure of police and judicial officials to treat such crimes with the requisite degree of concern. In 1994, for example, only 1,500 rapes were reported in Japan. This under-reporting may be attributable to a six-month period of limitations within which a rape must be reported, as well as the difficulty of securing justice in rape cases.
In Japan, a rape victim must show evidence of having resisted the attack. The legal standard of the degree of coercion in sexual assault cases is that the force used must be so extreme as to deprive the victim of the ability to resist. A rapist’s misunderstanding of consent is still accepted as a defence.](Asian Human Rights Commission - AHRC)
Decisions not to report sexual assault in Japan
Now, on the flip side, I must admit that I get off on reading comics that feature males raping males. It is rather strange and I don’t understand it myself, especially since male on female rape disturbs me very much. I do not enjoy rape in real life at all (my boyfriend was almost raped) and I think that anyone who tries to rape anyone should be put away for a very long time, but I do find these comics very erotic. I put myself in the place of the victim most of the time too. I do not think that watching/reading things that involve rape make a person more likely to go out and rape unless they are already likely to do so.
There are comics that are made for women that feature males involved in romantic relationships with other males. In almost all of these comics (as in most h comics. the proper term is h or ecchi, not hentai) a primary male character is raped. In some of these, as also in H, the victim will eventually come to love his/her rapist, although in most of them, the rapists is the antagnoist who the brave “seme” (top) will save his “uke” (bottom) from.
I also have noted that in the male/male comics. (known as yaoi or shounen ai) The relationship between the two main male characters is sometimes violent. BDSM is very popular in a lot of these, although in the last 10 years or so, more light, cute and happier comics are on the market compared to their dark counterparts. Still, I have worked selling these comics before and the ones that feature the rape and bondage sell at a much higher rate than the cute fluffy ones. These are to people in the US, but I imagine the rates in Japan are about the same.
I collect various comics and I have a lot of them on my harddrive. Probably the most disturbing one I have is the homosexual, pedephilist, bondage, rape, beastiality one I found. The kid in the comic can not be more than 7. The shocking amount of pedephilistic rape in Japanese comics disturbs me much more than the rape itself.