The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan

Abstract

Kirsten Cather has written an important and carefully researched survey of Japan’s major postwar obscenity trials involving literature and film. The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan frustrates our typical comfort with simultaneously celebrating subversive art and mocking efforts to regulate cultural expression. Cather leverages close readings of argumentation by prosecution, defense, witnesses, and judges at the trials themselves and succeeds in demonstrating that these events are far more complex than we tend to assume. Cather’s book details the operative courtroom theories of literature and film, revealing assumptions and debates on the relation between representation and reality, the psychological impact of narrative and image on readers, and the position of arts in shaping a national self-image within a global frame. These debates at least rival and at times exceed the theoretical sophistication of academic research in their consideration of topics such as the time embeddedness of narrative in cinema versus that in literature or the role of sound in the production of diegetic immersion. The book concerns the ways in which “art is intimately shaped also by extraliterary (or extrafilmic) concerns: the state, laws, societal morality, and politics” (p. ix). As such, it will productively be read alongside a number of other studies in this area. Jay Rubin’s now-classic Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Rubin, 1984) and Jonathan Abel’s recent Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (Abel, 2012) are the obvious cognates here, but productive comparisons could also be made with research regarding the market pressures on publishing in Edward Mack’s Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature (Mack, 2010) or Occupation Era formations of discourse on vision and the body in Sharalyn Orbaugh’s Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity (Orbaugh, 2007).