A 33-year-old Honolulu man was sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Jill Otake to seven and a half years of imprisonment and 15 years of supervised release for transportation of child pornography.

Kenneth Lim pleaded guilty to the child pornography offense March 2, admitting that on Jan. 6, 2019, he arrived at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport aboard a flight from Japan with thousands of sexually explicit images and videos of girls ranging in age from 6 to 13 years old that were stored on his electronic devices, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Hawaii.

After another flight to Honolulu in December 2019, law enforcement officers caught Lim at the airport with additional images of child pornography on his electronic devices, the release said. In his plea agreement, Lim admitted that he told federal agents he had been arrested in Japan in 2016 for conduct related to his online contact with over 100 girls around the ages of 10 to 12 years old, and that he used social media apps to engage the minors and exchanged nude images with some of them.

“Lim’s conduct demonstrates the way predators utilize social media to exploit children, as well as the fact they store the pornographic images of their victims on their electronic media,” said U.S. Attorney Clare Connors in the release. “The law provides substantial prison terms for sexual exploitation of children, and it was appropriate that Lim received one in this case.”

The case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse. Homeland Security Investigations conducted the investigation that resulted in the charge.