While censorship in wartime and Occupation era Japan has received scholarly attention, as Kirsten Cather observes, there has been far less analysis of the ongoing dance between artist/producer and censor in the decades since 1952. During this time, successive waves of sexual representations from inside and outside Japan have tested the uneasy relationship between the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression and the still extant prohibition of obscenity by article 175 of the Criminal Code. The tension between artists and censors remains: the opening night of an exhibition at a Roppongi gallery has recently (February 2013) resulted in the arrest on obscenity charges of a Tokyo-based Singaporean photographer and an executive of the gallery owner for selling catalogues of the show that included depictions of male genitalia. The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan extends the study of censorship up to the present, and takes a wide view of obscenity trials, encompassing literary texts, film and hybrid media. It is divided into four thematic and broadly chronological parts: Part 1 discusses prosecutions of translated works from the late Occupation to the 1960s, principally Itō Sei's translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Part 2 addresses prosecutions of domestically produced soft-core films from the mid-1960s to 1980, specifically Takechi Tetsuji's Black Snow and Nikkatsu's long series of "roman poruno" productions. Part 3 covers censorship of pornographic adaptations or republications of classical works and what could loosely be called antiquarian erotica mostly in the 1970s, in particular the republication of Nagai Kafū's gesaku-style "Yojōhan"; and Part 4 discusses two cases between 1976 and 2007 involving hybrid media, namely the illustrated screenplay for Ōshima Nagisa's In the Realm of the Senses and the 2002 erotic manga Honey Room (Misshitsu). Cather draws largely on the extensive trial records from these prosecutions to analyse the shifting arguments deployed by prosecutors and defendants to define and redefine obscenity. She justifiably insists that her study is of the art of censorship, not just the censorship of art, as the book consistently and convincingly emphasises the degree to which prosecutors, defendants and judges have also acted as critics, engaging with questions of style, form and the artistic process, in particular their foreshadowing and development of reception theory in the service of judicial process. Cather's book also draws out the ways in which censorship, and artists' attempts to dodge censorship, can influence cultural production, as in the case of Black Snow, a 1965 film which the director, Takechi, shielded from

No abstract

This essay examines the censorship trials of Nagai Kafū's Taishō-period (1912-26) erotic short story 'Yojōhan fusuma no shitabari' (What I found in the sliding doors of the four-and-a-half-mat room) in postwar Japan. I consider why this story provoked censorship charges in two instances that span almost a quarter of a century and why it was successfully prosecuted in both instances despite the increasing shift toward a climate of sexual liberation in the interim. By analyzing the lawyers' and judges' arguments, I consider how the guilty verdicts were paradoxically also attempts to sanitize the reputation of literary giant Kafū. These censorship trials attempted not only to regulate sexual morality, but also to define the role and responsibilities of art, author and audience in society.

No abstract

This article considers the 1973 Nikkatsu Roman Porn film adaptation of a short story by Japanese literary giant Nagai Kafū, “Underneath the Papering of the Four-and-a-Half-Mat Room” (“Yojōhan fusuma no urabari”). This low-budget erotic film appeared in the international context of the “liberation” (or decriminalization) of pornography that had swept Europe by the early to mid-1970s and in the domestic context of a severe crackdown on such trends. At the time of the film's release, both the story and the studio were at the center of high-profile obscenity trials in Japan. In this essay, I examine how and why these contexts led the filmmaker to take considerable liberties in adapting the story, in particular its conspicuous incorporation of archival photographs that document the rise of Japanese militarism in the mid- to late Taishō period (1912–26). I argue that the insistent injection of such politically and formally radical content strove to legitimize the film and, by implication, also its source text, as politically and aesthetically defensible in both legal and artistic circles. But because the film had to function in its generic context as well, as a studio-branded “porno,” I insist also on considering the pornographic efficacy of such a strategy. I ask: What is the effect of injecting stilled historical images into a genre famous instead for its lush color moving ones? What can such a strategy tell us about postwar historical memory, the relationship of politics to pornography and of still photographs to moving film images, and the nature of film adaptations and their literary source texts? This film offers an extreme-limit case that brings to the fore the tensions between economic and generic demands on the one hand, and juridic, aesthetic, and auteurist imperatives, on the other, that are inherent in any film production.