To this point, American distributors of anime have been extremely cautious about the content and labeling of their catalogues. But the internet teems with fan sites dedicated to the opposition of editing, targeting companies who simply brief their production team to fit societal standards of "decency."

The shopping cart with the sticky wheel pushes on. Public issue politics has evolved to enough of a sophisticated degree for a majority of people to realize that censorship is not a product of an oppressive government or commercial monolith playing god. It stems rather from a mixture of traditional American attitudes toward sex and violence and the real national pastime, suing. Obscenity laws - federally declared and state enforced - form the integral framework onto which censorship advocates, as far down as the grass roots level, can execute a potent agenda.

The future of censorship in anime will face some of the same obstacles as high art. Even within the last ten years, the work of Robert Maplethorpe, a photographer infamous for artistically rendered perversion, has boiled the blood of many would-be social Paladins. Of course, Maplethorpe's fisting photos aren't available at the corner market in an innocuous Texan suburban community. But anime might have a harder time defending itself because it doesn't yet enjoy the luxury of being adopted into the western canon, much less considered art. In the meantime, anime producers and distributors cut, tweak and alter titles to slip them through the cracks in America's movement against obscenity.

Anime's popularity, though, is indicative of a trend toward more extreme entertainment. "Japan's animators are the world's trendsetters in producing both kiddie fare and violent nightmarish … animated adventures," Joseph Gelmis writes for Newsday. As America rushes toward the middle of the political spectrum, trying to reach compromises on issues of censorship, perhaps its sensibilities have neglected the poles of the human experience, poles that anime may be able to fill.