Spoil the story? Of an artbook?
I think it was supposed to be a joke, but I’m not following it either …
I think he meant the manga not the artbook. Btw, doesn’t Canada have the “freedom of speech/expression”?, I thought the artbooks are a form of expresion, and shouldn’t be a problem unless it really has offersive material in it, which in my case it doesn’t, besides I read that people made it through with adult magazines such as Playboy.
Do I have more or less chances for the package to be opened if it’s labelled as toys?
Yes, Canada has its own set of Freedom of Speech laws, but they aren’t absolute as they are in the US. Many people abuse their right to free speech to promote hate crimes, racism, slander, and sedition, so exceptions are permitted to allow such offenses to be prosecuted.
Naturally, this is a double-edged sword. A smaller “gray area” means everything is a lot more “black and white” than it should be. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this forum, if a person or character in a sexual situation is shown having undeveloped secondary sex characteristics (ie: a woman with a complete absence of breasts), their actual age does not matter - the material would be banned, even if the model is in her late 20’s. This is to get around the often-abused loophole regarding lying about a person’s age (this might clue you in to why I do not agree with JAST’s censorship policies).
If an anthology or an artbook that contains a single piece of obscene material (urination, defecation, vomiting, non-consensual infliction of pain/humiliation, violence/killing for the sake of getting off, sexual coercion, bestiality, rape, etc… There’s an actual checklist for this stuff), the entire collection is banned. Curiously, some rape-/gangbang-themed art CDs have gotten through just fine, according to the CBSA’s quarterly reports; the context is what matters most in all cases. A standalone piece of artwork is less offensive than a sordid tale of debauchery illustrated by said artwork. In short, if a piece satisfies their list of obscenity indicators, it’s deemed obscene until you file an appeal and prove otherwise, and the more items checked off, the harder it’ll be to make a solid case. If they have nothing to check off or if the checked-off material is essential to an otherwise great story, the work goes through no problem. Thankfully, “inconclusive” inspections always rule in our favor, regardless the reason; the burden of proof is on them, and if they can’t prove anything, they have to let it go.
I don’t think it’d have too much of an impact. I’d still list 'em as games, personally; remember that my last Himeya package was labeled as “toys”, and it was still opened by Customs (my hunch is that Himeya was blacklisted at one point, so all of their shipments were inspected). You never need to declare that an item is of adult nature (though you’d want to if the item is a vibrator or the like; adult toys are not subject to any of the above legislation and get through scot-free); even adult manga can be declared as “books” or “trade paperbacks” without any repercussions.
This is pretty much it. What they do is more or less up to the person who opens the package. I’ve had a bunch of packages of games held and released. One package actually had an inspection form packaged with it but they didn’t identify anything wrong with it and let it go. Considering the games I brought in (pic1 pic2), I’m surprised they didn’t try to sack me for it (Importing maiden breeder 2 was probably a bad idea, but they let it through none the less). Actually, recently my Sengoku Rance and Daibanchou copies slipped by just fine, which is unusual since someone mentioned here that they had their copy seized. Even with customs apparently being all over my shipments, they’ve never cracked the plastic wrap on any of my game boxes, they just looked at the boxes and put them back.
It actually scares me a bit when ever I try to import anything… I don’t want to have police breaking in my house because of an eroge I tried to get into the country. But what can a person do about it? So far I’ve had no issues with CBSA (other than the fact that they often end up delaying my packages by a few weeks), but I just have to be a little unlucky before it could be an issue.
This much, I can take a well-educated guess on. The one thing that my detained items had in common was that they all had many explicit CGs on the back of the box. That’s why they raised eyebrows at Customs. Cogwheel Country (Sharin no Kuni) went through just fine since there was only one, but Men At Work! 4 and Moon. were covered with them. This is another reason why I don’t approve of shamelessly plugging the sex scenes of a game with a strong story on the back of the package (ie: G-Collections’ original pressing of Figures of Happiness). On that note, I would love to be able to get a high-resolution version of the revised Figures box art that I could use to make a replacement insert at my local print shop…
As you can tell from my collection, I’m not exactly new to importing: pic1 pic2, and there’s over $400 work of stuff on the way this very moment.
Well if its not a nukige, I’m suprised they try putting any on there. The manditory Z label should give enough info with less explicit scenes on the back. I would also say it would be a way to differentiate themselves from those games that focus on each new sex scene.
…Damn it. The CBSA does it again.
Earlier this week, I received the Japanese portion of my latest order, consisting of The Devil on G-String and Casual Romance Club. The shrink-wrap on G-String was removed, but it was otherwise handled pretty well (the game disc was thankfully still sealed when I got it). CRC, not so much. Like Men at Work! 4 and Moon in my Himeya order last year, the CRC disc looked as though the data area of the disc had been sanded (an inch of neat but densely-arranged concentric scratches). Running it through CDCheck, the disc appears to be unreadable - the table of contents loads, but many of the files report CRC errors (…how appropriate… -_-
and the program ultimately hangs…
Ironically, the American portion of my order, which actually contained items from the above list (TCI & AO), made it through no problem without even being opened. From this, I think it’s safe to say the country of origin of a package is a key factor in whether a parcel is inspected or not (I’m fairly certain the parcel wasn’t detained given how soon it arrived - just a few days after its American counterpart).
Surprisingly, I wasn’t anywhere near as pissed as I was last time around (my exact response upon inspecting the CRC disc was “…not again…”). In part because of the difference in value ($210 last time versus $19.99 this time), in part because I may be getting accustomed to this kind of stupidity, and in part because I was nursing a cold at the time…
Ah… that sucks. Well, considering I’m going to import from the US, that reassures me, but to know they treat that badly what they check - scratches everywhere , enough to make it unreadable?. Since it did pass, maybe you can fill a complain and get a refund?
I dunno, in most cases they won’t even touch games, especially ones not in English, and judge entirely based on the packaging. I’ve got a lot of packages inspected and they’ve never gone so far as to bother breaking the shrink wrap on the packages. I know they have staff that will play adult dvds but I don’t think they’ll play games, although maybe they will for english ones? It seems pretty rare that they would want to actually further inspect something like that, and concerning that they would take such poor care of it.
Not surprising at all, the same happens in Italy, videogames from the U.S. are barely noticed (besides slapping the import tax if the value is 22 euro or more 
… ), ANY pricey stuff from East Asia, ESPECIALLY China, gets the (thorough) check, it’s the reason I never ordered games from Play-Asia, for example…
I don’t know. You have to go out of your way to damage a DVD that bad. The only one I’ve seen that badly damaged after a short period of time was one that was placed inside a coat pocket without any protection for a day.
i just got back afew days ago, and went through the customs, reason was that we had dried food in our luggage. The customs officer went through the luggage, saw the eroge, but didn’t do anything about it. However, she picked up Sekirei (the manga) and took a look at it because it had the “Warning: This material contains which may offend…etc.” paper, then puts it back.
At the end, phew…glad everything went all right 
One reason we sell the games by download is to avoid the issue with customs. It works nicely.
True enough. One of the reasons I started this thread was so that people could make an informed decision when trying to import titles into Canada - by letting them know ahead of time which titles would likely be seized if their parcel was opened for review, in case they wanted to avoid the issue entirely with a download edition.
Personally, I’ve had zero problems importing from the US, but I haven’t had as much luck with Japanese imports. And, every single time problems came up, it was due to tasteless screenshot choices on the back of the package…
On that note, would it be possible for me to get a replacement insert for Figures of Happiness? I have the original pressing, and the back of the box is pretty trashy. The revised packaging shown on J-List looks much better, but physical copies are sold out (so I can’t buy a replacement and sell my old one). I wouldn’t mind a mailed insert or a high-resolution PSD / PDF / TIF that I could take to my local print shop…
Yea, I wish they wouldn’t put them on the box art.
Hmm, pretty all the copies of that are gone. I’ll see if any inserts are sitting around for any reason.
Much appreciated. If you don’t have any, like I said before, high-resolution digital copies I could take to my local print shop would do nicely. I’m pretty sure you have those on-hand seeing as the cover art has been updated on J-List to include Windows Vista / Windows 7 compatibility. Personally, I’d prefer layered / unflattened Photoshop files if they’re available so I could customize them just a little (ie: touching up the white glow behind the Figures of Happiness logo).
I suppose I may as well add Crescendo to the list - the copy text on the back of my package does not match the copy text on the J-List boxart (that’s part of the reason why I messaged you about my copy being a possible bootleg way, way back).
