Censorship in Japan

Censorship in Japan PDF Author: Heung Wah Wong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367544973
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book explores censorship, particularly film and video censorship, in Japan in modern times. It shows how most censorship has been the film and video industry exercising self-censorship and how this system has been problematic in that it has allowed dominant players in the industry to impose their own standards and exclude independent filmmakers. It outlines notable obscenity cases and discusses how industry self-censorship bodies have been undermined both by industry outsiders setting up their own alternative regimes and by the industry self-censorship bodies themselves being prosecuted for obscenity. The book also examines the conflict between the obscenity law, introduced in Meiji times when Japan was importing Western models, and the freedom of speech law, which was put in place by the US occupation administration after World War II. The book concludes by assessing the current state of censorship in Japan and likely future developments.

Censorship in Japan

Censorship in Japan PDF Author: Heung Wah Wong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367544973
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores censorship, particularly film and video censorship, in Japan in modern times. It shows how most censorship has been the film and video industry exercising self-censorship and how this system has been problematic in that it has allowed dominant players in the industry to impose their own standards and exclude independent filmmakers. It outlines notable obscenity cases and discusses how industry self-censorship bodies have been undermined both by industry outsiders setting up their own alternative regimes and by the industry self-censorship bodies themselves being prosecuted for obscenity. The book also examines the conflict between the obscenity law, introduced in Meiji times when Japan was importing Western models, and the freedom of speech law, which was put in place by the US occupation administration after World War II. The book concludes by assessing the current state of censorship in Japan and likely future developments.

Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan

Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan PDF Author: Rachael Hutchinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135069824
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Censorship in Japan has seen many changes over the last 150 years and each successive system of rule has possessed its own censorship laws, regulations, and methods of enforcement. Yet what has remained constant through these many upheavals has been the process of negotiation between censor and artist that can be seen across the cultural media of modern society. By exploring censorship in a number of different Japanese art forms – from popular music and kabuki performance through to fiction, poetry and film – across a range of historical periods, this book provides a striking picture of the pervasiveness and strength of Japanese censorship across a range of media; the similar tactics used by artists of different media to negotiate censorship boundaries; and how censors from different systems and time periods face many of the same problems and questions in their work. The essays in this collection highlight the complexities of the censorship process by investigating the responsibilities and choices of all four groups – artists, censors, audience and ideologues – in a wide range of case studies. The contributors shift the focus away from top-down suppression, towards the more complex negotiations involved in the many stages of an artistic work, all of which involve movement within boundaries, as well as testing of those boundaries, on the part of both artist and censor. Taken together, the essays in this book demonstrate that censorship at every stage involves an act of human judgment, in a context determined by political, economic and ideological factors. This book and its case studies provide a fascinating insight into the dynamics of censorship and how these operate on both people and texts. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in Japanese studies, Japanese culture, society and history, and media studies more generally.

The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan

The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan PDF Author: Kirsten Cather Fischer
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824865731
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
In 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. In The Art of Censorship Kirsten Cather traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line of sensational landmark obscenity trials that have dotted the history of postwar Japan. The objects of these trials range from a highbrow literary translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and modern adaptations and reprintings of Edo-period pornographic literary “classics” by authors such as Nagai Kafu to soft core and hard core pornographic films, including a collection of still photographs and the script from Oshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses, as well as adult manga. At stake in each case was the establishment of a new hierarchy for law and culture, determining, in other words, to what extent the constitutional guarantee of free expression would extend to art, artist, and audience. The work draws on diverse sources, including trial transcripts and verdicts, literary and film theory, legal scholarship, and surrounding debates in artistic journals and the press. By combining a careful analysis of the legal cases with a detailed rendering of cultural, historical, and political contexts, Cather demonstrates how legal arguments are enmeshed in a broader web of cultural forces. She offers an original, interdisciplinary analysis that shows how art and law nurtured one another even as they clashed and demonstrates the dynamic relationship between culture and law, society and politics in postwar Japan. The Art of Censorship will appeal to those interested in literary and visual studies, censorship, and the recent field of affect studies. It will also find a broad readership among cultural historians of the postwar period and fans of the works and genres discussed.

Redacted

Redacted PDF Author: Jonathan Abel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520953401
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
At the height of state censorship in Japan, more indexes of banned books circulated, more essays on censorship were published, more works of illicit erotic and proletarian fiction were produced, and more passages were Xed out than at any other moment before or since. As censors construct and maintain their own archives, their acts of suppression yield another archive, filled with documents on, against, and in favor of censorship. The extant archive of the Japanese imperial censor (1923-1945) and the archive of the Occupation censor (1945-1952) stand as tangible reminders of this contradictory function of censors. As censors removed specific genres, topics, and words from circulation, some Japanese writers converted their offensive rants to innocuous fluff after successive encounters with the authorities. But, another coterie of editors, bibliographers, and writers responded to censorship by pushing back, using their encounters with suppression as incitement to rail against the authorities and to appeal to the prurient interests of their readers. This study examines these contradictory relationships between preservation, production, and redaction to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse. (Winner of the 2010-2011 First Book Award of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

Permitted and Prohibited Desires

Permitted and Prohibited Desires PDF Author: Anne Allison
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520923448
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This provocative study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, lunchboxes—or obentos—that mothers ritualistically prepare for schoolchildren, and children's cartoons. Anne Allison brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and gender in these and other aspects of Japanese culture. Based on five years of fieldwork in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, this theoretically informed, accessible ethnographic study provides a provocative analysis of how sexuality, dominance, and desire are reproduced and enacted in late-capitalistic Japan.

The Atomic Bomb Suppressed

The Atomic Bomb Suppressed PDF Author: Monica Brau
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351546139
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Swedish journalist and author Braw draws on declassified documents and interviews in Japan and the US to reveal how the US occupation authorities established elaborate systems of censorship and disinformation among the Japanese press, scientists, and even novelists and poets, about the bombing of Hi

The Man Who Saved Kabuki

The Man Who Saved Kabuki PDF Author: Okamoto Shiro
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824864840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
As part of its program to promote democracy in Japan after World War II, the American Occupation, headed by General Douglas MacArthur, undertook to enforce rigid censorship policies aimed at eliminating all traces of feudal thought in media and entertainment, including kabuki. Faubion Bowers (1917-1999), who served as personal aide and interpreter to MacArthur during the Occupation, was appalled by the censorship policies and anticipated the extinction of a great theatrical art. He used his position in the Occupation administration and his knowledge of Japanese theatre in his tireless campaign to save kabuki. Largely through Bowers's efforts, censorship of kabuki had for the most part been eliminated by the time he left Japan in 1948. Although Bowers is at the center of the story, this lively and skillfully adapted translation from the original Japanese treats a critical period in the long history of kabuki as it was affected by a single individual who had a commanding influence over it. It offers fascinating and little-known details about Occupation censorship politics and kabuki performance while providing yet another perspective on the history of an enduring Japanese art form. Read Bowers' impressions of Gen. MacArthur on the Japanese-American Veterans' Association website.

Cinema, Censorship, and the State

Cinema, Censorship, and the State PDF Author: Nagisa Oshima
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262650398
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The texts in this volume make up an intellectual autobiography that reveals a rare conjunction of personal candor and political commitment. Nagisa Oshima is generally regarded as the most important Japanese film. director after Kurosawa and is one of Japan's most productive and celebrated postwar artists. His early films represent the Japanese New Wave at its zenith, and the films he has made since (including In the Realm of the Senses and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) have won international acclaim. The more than 40 writings that make up this intellectual autobiography reveal a rare conjunction of personal candor and political commitment. Entertaining, concise, disarmingingly insightful, they trace in vivid and carefully articulated detail the development of Oshima's theory and practice.The writings are arranged in chronological order and cover the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s. Following a historical overview of the contemporary Japanese cinema, a substantial section articulates the theoretical and political rationale of 0shima's film production. Among many other topics considered in his essays, Oshima questions the economics of film production, the ethics of the documentary film, censorship (both political and sexual), and the relation of aesthetics and social taboos. A filmography and notes round out this important collection.

Censorship in Japan

Censorship in Japan PDF Author: Heung Wah Wong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315409054
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This book explores censorship, particularly film and video censorship, in Japan in modern times. It shows how most censorship has been the film and video industry exercising self-censorship and how this system has been problematic in that it has allowed dominant players in the industry to impose their own standards and exclude independent filmmakers. It outlines notable obscenity cases and discusses how industry self-censorship bodies have been undermined both by industry outsiders setting up their own alternative regimes and by the industry self-censorship bodies themselves being prosecuted for obscenity. The book also examines the conflict between the obscenity law, introduced in Meiji times when Japan was importing Western models, and the freedom of speech law, which was put in place by the US occupation administration after World War II. The book concludes by assessing the current state of censorship in Japan and likely future developments.

Censorship of Japanese Films During the U.S. Occupation of Japan

Censorship of Japanese Films During the U.S. Occupation of Japan PDF Author: Lars-Martin Sorensen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780773446731
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Numerous books on Japanese film have focused on important directors, such as Gosho, Naruse, Kurosawa and Ozu, and many fine histories of Japanese film have been written. Sorensen's English-language book focuses exclusively upon the occupation period and its effects on cinema. By offering this interpretation of cinema during the occupation, Sorensen gives us a new cultural history of the period.