I read through the entire topic, and I read the articles, and I only have one thing to say.
What the [tornado fang]?
Obscenity is a difficult subject because it's so hard to pinpoint. What may be considered obscene to one person maybe alright to another person. A judge, nor any single person, can't actually decide what is considered "obscene." To actually decide what is considered obscene the entire community has to decide upon that, not just one single person.
Now call me crazy, but even if the manga had "obscene" images in it, being sent to jail for 20 years over a [tornado fang]ing comic book is bullshit. Hell, being sent to jail at all is bullshit. It's a bunch of cartoons drawn on paper with ink, copied and then mass produced for sale.
There's something else too. Every manga, and I mean every manga, that I've bought over here in the states has had some rating on the back of the book indicating what age group would be most appropriate to reading said manga. It's kind of like the ratings on the back of movie boxes, except the ratings for manga is bigger and you can actually see it without having to look through the whole summary of the contents just to see a tiny line of text. If the defense was smart, then they'd bring up this rating system in court.
If you look at the ratings from each publisher they look different from each other, which means not only is there no regulated group in charge of the rating system for manga but the publishers are putting a rating on the back of the manga themselves. And for the most part these ratings have been pretty damn accurate.
This just reeks of people being too lazy to do any worthwhile research without yelling "Witch!"
Except in this case replace "Witch!" with "Pedo!"
Okay, I lied. I had more than one thing to say to this.