VISA has once again weaponized its financial monopoly for censorship, this time targeting renowned visual novel eroge developer YuzuSoft by cutting off their ability to process transactions through their online storefront as of January 27, 2025.
This move follows a well-documented pattern of VISA and MasterCard using their market dominance to strong-arm Japanese retailers and developers into compliance with their puritanical, Western-centric standards, forcing them to remove so-called “problematic” content or face exclusion from the global payment network.
Yuzusoft, a highly respected visual novel developer known for popular titles such as Sanoba Witch, Senren Banka, Riddle Joker, and Tenshi☆Souzou RE-BOOT! which specifically is among the many studios affected by Valve’s inconsistent and hypocritical enforcement of content policies on Steam, specifically being banned due to featuring loli characters.
Despite these challenges, Yuzusoft remains a cornerstone of the modern Japanese eroge industry.
Like many in the genre, their works often include petite heroines and youthful-looking characters, the main target of VISA’s overreach. As a result of this latest financial crackdown, customers attempting to purchase products from Yuzusoft’s official online store have found VISA transactions blocked.
However, alternative payment options such as MasterCard, JCB, bank transfers, and NetRideCash remain available for now.
Yuzusoft’s predicament is far from an isolated case. Over the past year, VISA and MasterCard have systematically pressured Japanese businesses and content platforms to eliminate material they arbitrarily deem “inappropriate,” all under the guise of “protecting their brand’s image.”
Their targets have ranged from individual doujinshi artists to major digital distribution platforms like Toranoana, which purged numerous doujinshi titles after being threatened with the loss of payment processing services. Similarly, Denpasoft, a Western-facing distributor of Japanese eroge and adult visual novels, was forced to remove 16 titles after being contacted by its “bank” a move widely believed to be dictated by VISA and MasterCard’s ongoing censorship campaign.
In stark contrast, major Japanese retailers like FANZA, DLSite, and Melonbooks have resisted these strong-arm tactics, opting to sever ties with Western financial institutions rather than compromise artistic freedom. Instead of bending to foreign corporate overlords dictating what Japan’s entertainment industry is allowed to produce and sell, these platforms have chosen to drop VISA entirely to protect their creators and customers.
VISA has repeatedly justified these crackdowns under the guise of “brand protection,” a vague and amorphous term that conveniently allows them to target any content they personally disapprove of, regardless of its legality.
This strategy serves as a means to impose a sanitized, global standard on Japan’s entertainment industry, with a particular focus on eroge, lolicon depictions, and other controversial yet legally permissible themes.
The reality is clear: Japan’s creative freedom is under siege by unelected corporate bureaucrats from the West, dictating what content is deemed “acceptable.” Under this pretense of “brand protection,” VISA and MasterCard have effectively appointed themselves as global arbiters of morality, redefining legal standards to align with their ideological biases.
The hypocrisy is glaring. While VISA aggressively censors legal Japanese fiction, it has no issue facilitating real-world child exploitation. A recent whistleblower complaint exposed that both VISA and MasterCard continued processing payments for OnlyFans, despite clear evidence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and human trafficking occurring on the platform.
This follows a pattern of selective enforcement previously seen with Pornhub, where VISA cut ties only after overwhelming public backlash. Meanwhile, OnlyFans, which has been the subject of multiple federal investigations for CSAM and sex trafficking has been left largely untouched by these same payment processors.
The hypocrisy is staggering. VISA is more than happy to profit from actual criminal exploitation but has no issue strong-arming an entire country’s creative industry over fictional depictions that violate no laws both in America and Japan for instance, simply because it’s not as lucrative as platforms like OnlyFans.
This relentless financial censorship has already claimed victims, including Manga Library Z, a service dedicated to preserving out-of-print doujinshi and manga, which was ultimately forced to shut down after losing access to payment processing.
It also follows the January 2025 closure of Niconico Shunga, a mature illustration platform that cited the “current social environment and international situation” as reasons for its demise, transparent euphemisms for financial blacklisting by Western payment processors.
With YuzuSoft now caught in VISA’s war on Japanese media, the concern is no longer if but when other major eroge developers and visual novel distributors will face similar restrictions. It’s only a matter of time before JAST USA and FAKKU, two of the most prominent Western distributors of Japanese eroge become VISA’s next targets as the company extends its control beyond Japan’s domestic market and into the global sphere.
As FANZA and DLSite have already demonstrated, telling VISA to go fuck themselves is the only winning move. However, this approach forces native Japanese consumers to navigate unconventional and inconvenient payment alternatives. With VISA, MasterCard, and JCB each holding roughly a third of Japan’s market share, this means that nearly two-thirds of Japanese consumers would need to abandon their existing payment methods and switch to JCB, an impractical solution at scale.
This is precisely why VISA and MasterCard have already claimed victims in this financial censorship campaign. Smaller retailers and distributors simply cannot afford to throw away customers and revenue, and for businesses centered entirely around erotica and adult content, losing access to these monopolistic Western payment processors is effectively a death sentence.
For Japan to safeguard its sovereignty and creative freedom, the solution is clear: payment processors must be regulated. If corporations like VISA and MasterCard refuse to process legal transactions, Japan must consider banning them from operating within its borders, forcing them to either respect domestic laws or forfeit access to one of the world’s largest entertainment markets.
As the battle over cultural sovereignty rages on, one thing remains evident: this is not about protecting anyone, this is about controlling what you’re allowed to consume.
