The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, by Kirsten Cather

While censorship in wartime and Occupation era Japan has received scholarly attention, as Kirsten Cather observes, there has been far less analysis of the on-going 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 It 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 Kaf's gesaku-style "Yojhan"; and Part 4 discusses two cases between 1976 and 2007 involving hybrid media, namely the illustrated screenplay for shima 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 The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan