a majority of adults in Japan don’t even watch anime. according to the Nippon Research Center, only 33% of Japanese adults watch anime. most of them only watch very mainstream anime, like Kimetsu no Yaiba, and don’t consume lolicon media at all https://twitter.com/rayforcegame/status/1337021605180887041

most of my students and friends don’t watch that much anime or read that much manga. They may find loli type characters to be cute in appearance but they probably don’t give it much thought other than that. I guarantee you that a majority of loli consumers in Japan are male lol

So it’s not that Japanese people *as a whole* are “more tolerant” of R18 lolicon content. I would argue instead that most of them don’t even have an opinion on it lol because most of them don’t even watch anime

Movies like the recent KNY movie made SO MUCH MONEY because a) it’s Extremely Mainstream so most people know about it and b) people apparently went to see it SEVERAL TIMES lol I have a student who saw it seven times during opening weekend haha

To give an example: I’m a huge Fate/Stay Night fan. FSN is pretty recognizable in the West, which is why Aniplex is (foolishly) releasing the final film in theatres. BUT most of my students in Japan have NEVER heard of Fate/Stay Night. MAYBE they know who Saber is lol

basically, I think it’s far more common to see anime lovers who only consume mainstream content and maybe one or two other titles than full fledged otaku. Otaku are NOT the majority of the population here, so otaku really can’t represent Japanese people as a whole

I’ve seen weebs come to Japan all excited to make Japanese friends IRL and talk about ALL the anime they watch only to be disappointed that most Japanese don’t watch anime regularly and only know the mega mainstream ones. (At least buying merch here is much easier though! )

Earlier this year in Kyoto when I was buying a crepe, one of the OPs from Fate/Zero was playing. The owner of the shop was like, “Oh, you like LiSA too?” and I asked him if he had watched FZ. He had NO clue what FZ even was lmaooooooo I had to tell him that this was a theme song

So I think OP, being Japanese I presume, is Fully Aware that only people in their online social circles with anonymous usernames and avatars are even really having discourse about R18 lolicon. IRL Japanese people are really not talking about this at all