Question about games' age rating system in Japan

[Vetusomaru]

Before the creation of CERO who was responsible for rating video games in Japan?

 

[DragonMals]

from what i looked up, this seems to be it.

 

[baku-chan]

from what i looked up, this seems to be it.

A translation of that page — along with my very rudimentary understanding of basic Japanese — says that organization was founded in 2009 — quite a ways after CERO which was founded in 2002 — and that it focuses on 18+ rated games in particular. So I don’t think that’s it…

To my knowledge, no industry-standard precursor to CERO ever existed in Japan. With that said, SEGA of Japan — perhaps unsurprisingly, given that they’re SEGA — did have their own ratings system that they used for Japanese Saturn games: a three-tiered color-based system that was basically the rough equivalent of the early ESRB’s Kids & Adults (Green), Teen (Orange), and Mature (Red). I say “rough” because Japanese standards for what’s considered mature content tended to be very different from those that exist in the West (and especially from those in the States).

Neither Sony or Nintendo had any equivalent of what SEGA did with the Saturn back then with the N64 or the original PlayStation, to my knowledge. That said, I do recall that some especially violent games in the PS2 era such as say, Resident Evil games (that’s what I remember seeing, anyway; it could’ve easily been just been any other kind of horror games, though), tended to have a large red content warning on the front cover; I don’t know such games were legally age-restricted or not before CERO.