Complex tales of censorship in 20th-century Japan

Sunday, Jan. 6, 2013

THE ART OF CENSORSHIP IN POSTWAR JAPAN, by Kirsten Cather. University of Hawaii Press, 2012, 342 pp., $45.00 (hardcover)

REDACTED: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan, by Jonathan E. Abel. University of California Press, 2012, 376 pp., $44.95 (hardcover)

Censorship in Japan has long been hot-button topic for everyone from journalists reporting on the latest police porn crackdown to academics delving into wartime controls on artistic expression, but as Kirsten Cather notes in "The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan" her fluently written, industriously researched study of seven postwar obscenity trials the writer's intent is often to score points off the evil censors, not examine the actualities and implications of each side's argument.

Cather has thus set out to examine "the often-overlooked connection between the censor and critic, a link that is crucial to understanding the dynamic relationship of censor, artist and text in modern Japan." In these landmark trials, prosecutors have frequently played the role of, as Cather puts it, "narratologists, reception theorists, critics, editors, or even coauthors (or auteurs)," basing judgments on criteria that shift from case to case, era to era.

Following Japan's World War II defeat in 1945, the U.S.-led Occupation assumed the mantle of censor, while officially encouraging freedom of expression. But in the first postwar obscenity trial, which started in 1951 over an unauthorized translation of the D.H. Lawrence novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover," the Japanese prosecutors were firmly in charge, if at first hesitant about how exactly to proceed since the new constitution, written under Occupation aegis, expressly forbade censorship. They took recourse in Article 175 of the prewar Criminal Code, which defined "obscene objects" as those that "produce the sense of shame or disgust in human beings."

Naturally, the defense argued that the new constitution took precedence over a Meiji Era (1868-1912) statute, but the trial, as Cather describes in blow-by-blow detail, was hardly as simple as legally determining who was on first. By the time the Supreme Court handed down its guilty verdict in 1957, the Constitution-vs.-Article-175 debate had long been overshadowed by the judges' concern, backed by the prosecution's supposedly "rational" evidence (including lie detector tests purporting to measure sexual response), that the book indeed titillated readers in socially dangerous ways. "At the core of the guilty verdict," Cather notes, "was the fear that readers would uncritically identify with unscrupulous fictional characters." Lady Chatterley, c'est moi.

This landmark trial set a precedent that strongly influenced subsequent obscenity cases, despite differences in medium and shifts in social mores. Judges were concerned with protecting "innocent" readers or viewers, particularly if they were young and female. Also, realism, be it of imagery or description, continued to be cited as contributing to a work's perceived obscenity. Fiction, even of Lawrence's highbrow sort, was considered worse than "scientific" depictions, since a skillful writer could conjure visions in a reader's head more compellingly actual than any anatomical drawing. Lastly, the triumph of the "native" criminal code over the "foreign" constitution in the trial proved lasting.

Verdicts in succeeding obscenity trials were hardly uniform, however. Tetsuji Takeuchi's pioneering 1965 pinku (soft-core porn) film "Black Snow" was ruled obscene by the High Court, since the judges regarded its cinematic pornography as more dangerous than the printed variety, while dismissing its "redemptive" ending as too little, too late. On the other hand, a 1972-1980 trial prompted by four soft-core films released by the Nikkatsu studio under its Roman Porno label ended in victory for the defense. This time the prosecution overreached by indicting not only filmmakers, but also the industry self-censorship board Eirin, which had given their work its seal of approval. The High Court judges ended up acquitting everyone, while praising Eirin for maintaining a "minimum degree of sexual morality."

All this will be fascinating to not only students of censorship, but anyone interested in Japanese society's evolving attitudes toward freedom of expression including the freedom to be violently pornographic. Cather has succeeded admirably in presenting the complexity of an ongoing legal debate between censor and censored, as well as the social, political and cultural backdrop of her selected cases.

See the article here:
Complex tales of censorship in 20th-century Japan