Police superintendent Keiji Goto logs onto his Toshiba laptop, opens his Netscape Internet browser and moves his mouse to the Yahoo! Japan search engine. He types in "adult." Down the screen scrolls a list of site categories, many of them with the telltale suffix "jp," denoting that they originate in Japan. He clicks on one that promises images of "lolitas." The home page appears with a picture of a pig-tailed Japanese girl in a sailor-style school uniform. He clicks again. On the screen appears another teenager, this one naked. Click. A girl is bound and gagged. Click. Another is being fondled. "Child pornography," Goto says, "is our national shame."

It's also the latest export market to be dominated by Japan. The country lags far behind the U.S. in the hottest industry of the 1990s, electronic commerce. Japan has just two of the world's top 100 information-technology companies, according to a Business Week survey, compared with 57 from the U.S. In one area of dubious distinction, however, "jp.com" competes with the best: child pornography. According to estimates from Interpol, as much as 80% of the child porn available on commercial sites worldwide originates in Japan. A police study found more than 3,000 Websites based in Japan distributing pornography, 40% of them featuring children. "Policing porn on the Internet is difficult anywhere," says Ralf Mutschke, assistant director of Interpol's criminal division. "But most of the world at least has laws that prohibit child pornography." Japan doesn't.

This lack of legislation frustrates global attempts to crack down. "We're asked by international police to help arrest child pornographers, but there's nothing we can do," says Goto, deputy director of the National Police Agency's community safety bureau. Japan's criminal law prohibits sex with minors, but a minor is defined as someone age 12 or younger, and the only act specifically outlawed is sexual intercourse. Taking lewd pictures of children is permissible. Some pornography--both with adults and children--is banned under an obscenity code, but only if it explicitly shows genitalia.

To show how difficult it is to prosecute, Goto zooms in on an onscreen photo of a naked girl. Bright pink Japanese characters spelling "secret" cover the girl's crotch. Employing special software that can be downloaded for free from other websites, Goto electronically removes the computer-generated fig leaf. Yet even this full frontal nudity can't be legally called obscene. "The photo is a little fuzzy there," Goto points out. "It's not really clear enough." Some especially sensational cases have been prosecuted. In March, a real-estate company owner was arrested for selling CD-ROMs containing hundreds of child porn videos apiece, all downloaded from the Internet. In January, a schoolteacher was accused of dressing up in wig and skirt to take videos of women bathing at a hot spring resort in Fukui. In March, a mother was arrested for letting men have sex with her 15-year-old daughter for $85 a session. Another mother was sentenced to four years probation in December for taking $850 from an Osaka hospital employee to photograph her 10-year-old daughter in the nude. Last year, a 35-year-old high school teacher in Gifu was accused of taking videos underneath girls' skirts by standing under a staircase.

"It's an embarrassment," says Mayumi Moriyama, a member of the lower house of parliament and a former education minister. "Anyone who wants to buy, sell or produce child pornography comes to Japan. We make it easy for them." Moriyama, a member of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party, joined several opposition lawmakers last week in introducing legislation to crack down on the scourge. A watered-down version of a bill that failed to pass last year, the law is far from perfect. It wouldn't make possession of child porn illegal. And the definition of what kind of pornography is punishable, while broader than the current obscenity code, would remain vague, making prosecution difficult. But the law would impose prison terms of up to three years for people who distribute, sell or display child pornography.

New regulations crafted to control child porn on the Net went into effect last week, but these are weakly worded as well. It requires distributors to register with the police (but threatens no penalties if they do not) and asks Internet service providers to remove objectionable material voluntarily. "The ojii-san (old men) don't understand cyberspace, so they don't understand how easy it is for pornographic photos of Japanese children to get sent all over the world," says Yutaka Iimori, a coordinator with the CyberAngels, a group whose 33 volunteers scan the Internet on their home computers and collect pornographic addresses, which are then turned over to the police.

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