Negotiating censorship in modern Japan
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Negotiating censorship in modern Japan
(RoutledgeCurzon contemporary Japan series, 45)
Routledge, 2015
- : pbk
Available at 4 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
First published: 2013
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
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.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan 2. Censorship and Patronage in Meiji Kabuki 3. Seditious Obscenity / Obscene Seditions: The Radical Eroticism of Umehara Hokumei 4. The Censor as Critic: Ogawa Chikagoro and Popular Music Censorship in Imperial Japan 5. Kawabata's Wartime Message in Beautiful Voyage (Utsukushii tabi) 6. Banned Books in the Hands of Japanese Librarians: from Meiji to Postwar 7. Self-Censorship: The Case of Wartime Japanese Poetry 8. Kurosawa Akira's One Wonderful Sunday: Censorship, Context and Counter-discursive film 9. Censoring Tamura Taijiro's Biography of a Prostitute (Shunpuden) 10. Censoring Imperial Honorifics: A Linguistic Analysis of Occupation Censorship in Newspapers and Literature 11. "Art" Il-legally Defined? - A Legal and Art Historical Analysis of Akasegawa Genpei's Model Thousand-yen Note Incident 12. Parodying the Censor and Censoring Parody in Modern Japan
by "Nielsen BookData"