The great censorship trials of literature and film in postwar Japan, 1950--1983

Images of evil, scissor-wielding censors lurk in most narratives of literary and film history. Japan has had its own share of artists being persecuted by the official censors and their self-appointed minions. The brutal murders of proletariat writer Kobayashi Takiji by police in 1933 and of the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie by a Muslim extremist in 1991 are perhaps the most notorious cases of this. Such incidents, and other less spectacular acts of censorship, are often cited to prove that art in modern Japan has been at the mercy of draconian censorship.; This story fails to account for the complexity of the interactions between censor and artist. It depicts the censor as having the power to exercise a political or legal judgment on a work of art, and the artist as being able to respond only by being either admirably subversive or unscrupulously complicit. This approach reduces art to the status of mere political indicator used to gauge the ideological affiliations of artists. In other words, censorship has often been used to write political, rather than artistic, history.; In this study, I examine literary and film censorship in Japan by focusing on the most celebrated censorship trials of the post World War II period. I organize my dissertation around the artistic issues raised in the trials to show how the trials influenced and were influenced by artistic theories of authorship and reception, as well as by the notions of aesthetic value that define a canon. I draw from the seven postwar censorship trials that were prosecuted under obscenity laws and reached the appellate courts, with particular focus on the precedent-setting trials of the translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the 1950s and on the 1970s trials of Oshima Nagisa's book version of his infamous film In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no koriida, 1976) and Nagai Kafu's story "Behind the papering of the four-and-a half mat room" ("Yojo¯han fusuma no shitabari," 1924). By considering how legal and artistic discourses often collided, but sometimes colluded, with one another in these trials, I illustrate the dynamic relationship of censor, artist, and text in modern Japanese literary and film history.