This thesis examines the history of censorship in early modern Japan (ca. 1600-1868). It traces censorship from the persecution of Christianity beginning in the sixteenth century through publishing law of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the dramatic changes to the censorship system accompanying the decline and fall of Japan's early modern government in the nineteenth century. The thesis argues that censorship in early modern Japan was not solely a method to suppress ideas. It was also a space for governments to theatrically perform their own propriety, especially in times of political change and uncertainty.
Jack Snyder (2026) studied this question.