On Tuesday, officers took manager Toshifumi Itogawa, 48, and three other employees into custody for possessing obscene media with the intent to sell. Officers also seized 60,000 master DVDs and 75 dubbing machines.
By law, films available and made in Japan are required to have genitalia properly censored.
Itogawa has reportedly admitted to the allegations. “I did indeed sell discs without a mosaic,” the suspect is quoted by police in referring to the result of a digital obfuscation technique used to conceal genitalia.
According to police, the operation used 17 sites on the Internet for the sale of the DVDs, with prices starting as low as 99 yen per disc. For nearly one year, month sales exceeded two million yen.