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Please Put Them On, Takamine-san: Ecchi on the Path to Censorship

Posted on August 24, 2025 by Chris Kincaid

If I was in Texas, I would (possibly) be going to prison for watching Please Put Them On, Takamine-san. In my quest to expand my exposure to stories I normally avoid, I gave this ecchi a watch. Okay, a half watch. I worked on writing projects and did other things as I half-watched it. This one made me roll my eyes. This is one anime to avoid unless you like ecchi and massive mammaries. I’m reminded why I’ve avoided the ecchi genre. The show’s titular (pun intended) character, Takane Takamine, has other body features which make her double-D–maybe double-E–cup size in the realm of possibility: larger thighs, height, and a larger bottom. Her body plays a central role in the story.

Takamine has a Stand ability, to borrow the magic-ability term from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, called Eternal Virgin Road. This ability allows her to turn back time by removing her underwear. Which triggers a poorly animated scene of a wireframe butterfly flying through a door into space. The scene plays often to save frames for animating Takamine’s breast bounce, areolas, and nipples. Takamine is the perfect student: perfect grades, class president, perfect reputation, and so on. Her perfection is supported by her ability. One day, Koushi Shirota accidentally sees Takamine bare breasts, which allows him to travel back in time with her. She blackmails him into becoming her “closet.” She makes him carry several changes of underwear and makes him put them on her whenever she uses her ability. Her ability consumes the underwear. The rest of the story revolves around this dynamic where Shirota has to put Takamine’s underwear on her in increasingly ridiculous scenarios, culminating in hiding under her dress during her performance in their class’s Cinderella play. She knows him from their elementary school days and trusts him.

As for Shirota, he is the typical nice guy and seeks to protect Takamine from embarrassment. He denies being sexually attracted to her and never gets used to seeing her body. He has poor grades but eventually decides to improve them enough to follow Takamine to the university she aims toward. Shirota is as dense as osmium. He’s as submissive as she is dominant.

The story hits the usual rom-com high school beats only without the required beach episode. There’s the school festival, study session scene, and so on. The rom-com doesn’t have a triangle. Shirota has a childhood friend that he reconnects with, which makes Takamine feel jealous and threatened for a short period of time. But Erie is a lesbian. Erie immediately sees Takamine likes Shirota and so works to help them get along. Of course, this doesn’t stop Erie from pressing her breasts against Shirota and otherwise showing her body off to him.

Not much substance here. Takamine’s character arc is slight: becoming a little softer as she falls for Shirota. Shirota starts to step up in his own life even if it is just to please Takamine.

Please Put Them On, Takamine-san will run afoul of Texas Senate Bill 20, which was passed into law and goes into effect in September. There’s nudity throughout the anime, and the charactes are minors. There’s no other way to slice it. In my brief foray into the ecchi genre’s stories, that’s the unavoidable red alarm. Well, that and the general poor quality of the stories. Honestly, the poor quality of the stories offends me more. Most ecchi shows breasts and bottoms of fictional high school students. The Texas law reads:

A person commits an offense if the person knowingly possesses, accesses with intent to view, or promotes obscene visual material containing a depiction that appears to be of a child younger than 18 years of age engaging in activities described by Section 43.21(a)(1)(B), regardless of whether the depiction is an image of an actual child, a cartoon or animation, or an image created using an artificial intelligence application or other computer software.

Takamine-san is likely to be “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value.” Many anime stories will run afoul of this law and similar laws because of how focused they are on high school. Ecchi and the usual, rather trashy and tired, sexual tropes found in the other genres can likely be found as violating content. So by half-watching this anime, I would be a violating if I lived in Texas after the law becomes active in September. Anime and manga fans and librarians could be liable of the law. I’m not a lawyer, of course, so I don’t really know.

Perhaps more concerning for anime fans would be how Crunchyroll and other companies in Texas could be held liable under this law. The companies will either move their servers and headquarters or purge ecchi and other content from their libraries. That could mean they would no longer carry some simulcasts. That might be the companies would look for ecchi and other genres which feature adults instead of high school characters. But this also would hurt the ability of teens to use stories to explore their awakening sexualities and identities. Ecchi stories offer avenues for this. Takamine offers a way of exploring a confident girl-boss perspective. Shirota offers a means of exploring a submissive role. At the same time, there’s no way to get around the fact ecchi violates some US obscenity definitions dealing with minor content. The animated nature of the genre doesn’t protect the genre from this definition.

When I take off my neutral librarian glasses, I’m mixed on the shifts in obscenity laws. Please Put Them On, Takamine-san and most of the other ecchi stories I’ve looked into offend my personal sensibilities. The nudity and focus on titillation undermines stories that have potential. Takamine’s ability, as silly as the mechanism is, has potential to explore interesting aspects of psychology or, indeed, sexuality. This problem appears in anime and manga’s more mainstream genres. The obscenity laws might force the companies to favor ecchi and other stories which feature adult characters, and this has the potential of encouraging studios to produce anime based on stories with more substance. And ecchi comes too close to CSAM. I’m being nice by saying it “comes too close.” I suspect many courts will deem ecchi is CSAM.

Other states look to follow Texas. This will further reduce the profitability of ecchi story imports. Many anime studios pay attention to American market changes. It’s possible we will see a reduction in fan-service, ecchi, and other tropes involving minors. Of course, anime can get around this by stating all the characters involved are high school seniors or university age–18 years old. Will anime streaming companies move? If their servers and headquarters sit within Texas or other states with obscenity laws, that’s a major expense compared to the likely low income their receive on carrying flagged titles. More likely, they will quietly drop titles from their libraries. They already do this. Of course, it is also possible the law may be challenged in court. Time will tell how this will play out. If this change leads to Western anime fans receiving higher-quality stories, I would consider this a benefit. But I realize ecchi fans may be left out, and not all ecchi stories are low-quality. Kill la Kill can be considered an ecchi, and it provides interesting satire and social commentary. My Dress Up Darling could be categorized as ecchi, and I enjoy the manga and anime. The story has a lot of heart to it.

Librarians and teachers, as I wrote in my original article about Texas’s SB 20 legislation, may need to be careful of the anime and manga they provide access to. Censorship is something both take a stand against, but that stand can come at a greater cost to others. When librarians and teachers are imprisoned for taking a stand, they deprive patrons and students of their service. At the same time, with how close to CSAM ecchi anime and manga get, many librarians and teachers may shy away from taking a stand for them. There’s differing cultural dynamics at play here too, but you have to function within the boundaries of the culture you live within.

The ecchi genre could benefit from exploring college characters. The setting is close enough to the high school setting to offer coming-of-age stories without running afoul of obscenity laws. Perhaps a shift in the American market, which isn’t yet determined, may push anime studios toward these stories.

You may be wondering why I watched a story I obviously disliked. And if you liked the anime, great! Everyone has different tastes and resonances with stories. To be literate, a person needs to expose themselves to messages they dislike or find distasteful. This helps you check your bias–test your thinking and assumptions. You also cannot discuss something you don’t understand. If you label yourself an atheist, for example, you should read Christian, Islamic, and other religious writings. If you identify as a Christian, you need to read Islamic, Zen, and atheist writings. If you consider yourself Republican, you need to read Democrat writers and vice versa. Consuming only information you agree with limits your thinking to that silo. The principle applies here too. I have a dim view of ecchi, which means I should watch it and read it. Gushing Over Magical Girls and even this story had some story elements that surprised me. Both touch on ideas of facade versus true self along with awakening to sexual and self understanding. But courts may find these stories unable to reach the level of literary merit necessary under the law to prevent them from being labeled as obscene material. Time will tell.

References

Texas Penal Code. https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.43.htm

Texas Senate Bill. S.B. No. 20 https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/SB00020E.htm

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4 thoughts on “Please Put Them On, Takamine-san: Ecchi on the Path to Censorship”

  1. JP says:
    August 25, 2025 at 3:52 am

    Sorry for the lack of nuance. I was trying to not write a book but then when I deleted whole sections of what I wrote it ended up sounded like I’m just spouting off. I meant to evoke more arguments, not tell you my opinions ☝️

    Reply
  2. JP says:
    August 25, 2025 at 3:09 am

    “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”

    Reply
    1. JP says:
      August 25, 2025 at 3:50 am

      I appreciate you making a point to think richly about hot topics like this even if it’s something I have no problem banning due to the age of consent laws that our society has. If the character is a minor then yeah, I don’t think I would defend it even from artistic grounds.

      I certainly wouldn’t defend it to be in school libraries, which if I’m not mistaken is a big part of the whole book banning hullabaloo going on in the States. We’re not talking about libraries–we’re talking about school libraries for children at very specific ages, from what I can see…

      Reply
      1. Chris Kincaid says:
        August 25, 2025 at 7:29 am

        The Texas law targets AI-generated images, but school libraries have been a starting point for most legislation like this one. The legislation then spills over into public libraries and, sometimes, personal consumption habits as the Texas law does. The personal consumption aspect isn’t new to CSAM (Child Sex Abuse Material) laws. The literary merit aspects of the laws remain an open question. Many YA books could be caught in these censorship nets. Downstream, reducing freedom of expression can hurt discussions and inspiring other works. But CSAM is wrong no matter how you slice it. Authors can step around this by writing their characters as legal adults. In Japan’s case, that would be characters who are 20 years old or older and otherwise stop involving high-school age characters in sexual situations. This might improve the poor-quality writing many fan-service laced content has.

        But it would hurt discussions about sexuality that teens need to have. People identify better with characters their own age.

        Most school libraries already curate content and prevent titles like “Please Put Them on Takamine-san” from entering their catalogs. School libraries see a lot of book banning challenges for content that is marginal compared to the manga and anime world. Most banning battles come down to conflicting parental values which divide along political lines and less often that the book is objectively not appropriate for the maturity and reading level of students.

        Reply

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