Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan 9780520953406

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Translations
Introduction: Archiving Censors
Part I: Preservation
Part II: Production
Part III: Redaction
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Redacted

Asia Pacific Modern Takashi Fujitani, Series Editor

1. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg 2. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, by Shu-mei Shih 3. The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945, by Theodore Jun Yoo  

4. Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, by John D. Blanco 5. Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, by Robert Thomas Tierney 6. Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan, by Andrew D. Morris 7. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, by T. Fujitani 8. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter 9. A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation State, 1900–1949, by Tong Lam  

10. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923, by Gennifer Weisenfeld 11. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan, by Jonathan E. Abel

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

Redacted The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan

Jonathan E. Abel

University of California Press Berkeley  Los Angeles  London

This book is dedicated to three teachers who will be unable to read it: Ronald M. Abel (1941–1993), Earl Miner (1927–2004), and Richard H. Okada (1946–2012).

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abel, Jonathan E., 1971–   Redacted : the archives of censorship in transwar Japan / Jonathan E. Abel.    pages  cm. — (Asia Pacific modern ; 11)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-520-27334-4   1. Censorship—Japan—History—20th century.  2. Japanese literature—Censorship—History—20th century.  3. Expurgated books—Japan—History—20th century.  4. Prohibited books— Japan—History—20th century.  I. Title.  z658.j3a34 2005  363.310952—dc23 2012011397 Manufactured in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on the Translation

Introduction: Archiving Censors

ix xi xv 1

Part I. Preservation 1. The Censor’s Archives and Beyond

23



2. Indices of Censorship

44



3. Essaying the Censors

61

Part II. Production 4. Seditious Obscenities

89



5. Literary Casualties of War

112

Part III. Redaction 6. Epigraphs

143



7. Redactionary Literature

154



8. Beyond X

194



9. Unnaming and the Language of Slaves

217

Coda 10. Redaction Countertime Notes Bibliography Index

251 267 309 345

Illustrations

Figures 0.1. Examination copy cover of Proletarian Poetry

5

0.2. Open examination copy of Proletarian Poetry

6

0.3. Publishing Police Report on Proletarian Poetry

7

0.4. Marginal notes of the censor on Taki Yōsaku’s Poem “Prepare! It’s Time!” in the examination copy of Proletarian Poetry

8

1.1. Number of literary books banned

33

1.2. Total number of books and literary books published

36

1.3. Literary books as a percentage of total books published

37

3.1. Suzuki Kenji’s “The Censors’ Saliva” from the February 1928 Special Edition of Proletarian Arts

72

3.2. Shimizu Keimokurō, “Improve the Censorship System!” from the January 1928 issue of Liberation

73

3.3. “Parasitic Rare Words” in The Osaka Humor Press, November 1908

82

3.4. “Reread the Same Characters” in The Osaka Humor Press, November 1908

82

4.1. Number of banned books (1926–1944)

94

 

4.2. From June 1927 edition of Perverse Matters

110

5.1. Percentage of bestselling authors who were also censored

115

5.2. Percentage of novelists serialized in Asahi who were also censored

117

6.1. French postcard from Miyatake Gaikotsu’s collection

144

ix

6.2. Cover of Miyatake’s magazine Humor and Eccentricity, July 1927

144

6.3. Fuseji timeline

149

7.1. Passage from censor’s examination copy of Numajirimura with marginal notes

172

8.1. Sugiura Yukio’s “Omens of Censorship? The Elder Marx-Boy” in Chūō kōron, October 1956.

196

9.1. “OO Occupied Zone” in the September 1938 edition of the women’s magazine Girls Club

223

9.2. Squaring the X

244

10.1. Jenny Holzer’s “Right Hand” from The Redaction Paintings

258

10.2. A semiotic square

265

Table 2.1. List of lists

49

Acknowledgments

Over the course of more than a decade working on this project, I have received the generous assistance of many people and institutions. During my graduate work at Princeton, I was lucky to find support, stimulation, and encouragement from several advisors. Richard Okada and Christine Marran taught me to read anew. Eduardo Cadava and Michael Wood helped hone my argument and thinking. Sandra Bermann, April Alliston, and Tom Hare were all instrumental in the final push to defend the project at the dissertation stage. Much of the research for this project was carried out in Tokyo. I am grateful for the generosity of the Fulbright Hays, which supported my initial Japanese research in Tokyo in 2002–2003. At Tokyo University, Komori Yōichi supported my research and shared his time and ideas with me. I thank Andō Hiroshi for allowing me to audit his seminar at that time and for confirming my Dazai Osamu findings in 2009. On a trip to Nagasaki in 2008, I was very fortunate to be able to meet with Yokote Kazuhiko and benefited from his vast knowledge of Occupation and Imperial censorship when he visited the United States in 2009. I thank Itō Naoko and the entire Hirahara family for their hospitality. I was fortunate to benefit from a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. The continuing support of Carol Gluck has been invaluable and inspirational. I am grateful to Andrew Gordon and Theodore Gilman at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies for granting me the opportunity to complete a draft of the manuscript as a Postdoctoral Fellow there. I would also like to thank Jay Rubin, Karen Thornber, James Dorsey, Mellisa Wender, and especially Kirsten Cather for reading an early draft and participating in a writing workshop sponsored by the Center. Their critiques were quite literally  

xi

xii    /    Acknowledgments constructive, leading to the expansion of my fuseji chapter into the four chapters here. Many colleagues and friends at Princeton, Columbia, Tokyo University, Bowling Green, Penn State, and beyond have come to my aid. I thank Shion Kono, Jason Webb, Michael Hill, Eric Dinmore, Lisa Hosokawa, Stacy Nakamura, Julia Zarankin, Amanda Irwin Wilkins, Dirk (Max) Kramer, Beau Mount, Yoshikuni Hiroki, Sari Kawana, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Steven Clarke Ridgely, Jonathan Zwicker, and Kevin Tsai all of whom have helped since graduate school. Theodore Rippey and Edgar Landgraff led me to refine arguments about Area Studies. Sophia McClennan, Shuang Shen, Charlotte Eubanks, and Thomas O. Beebee helped in the final stages. Caroline Eckhardt gave me the necessary push to send out the manuscript. Reiko Tachibana and Eric Hayot have lent inspirational support through the process. Fleeting encounters with a handful of scholars, librarians, and hobby­ ists resulted in significant contributions to the book. I am in debt to Ueno Chizuko, Tōeda Hirokazu, Kōno Kensuke, Ōtaki Noritada, Sharon ­Domier, Yasuko Makino, Miwa Kai, Yoshiko Yoshimura, Okuizumi Eiza­buro, Gregory Kasza, Jō Ichirō, and Sasaki Hiroaki. Of all of my dealings with archives, none were so congenial as those with the Archive of Modern Literature of Kanagawa Prefecture. The curator and librarian Tanaka Yoshie was instrumental in helping me gain access to key manuscripts by Ōoka Shōhei, Yoshida Mitsuru, and others. I would like to thank Ōoka Harue for her permission to see and even photograph portions of Ōoka Shōhei’s manuscripts and Yoshida Yoshiko for permission to see and photograph a draft of Yoshida Mitsuru’s manuscript. I am also grateful to Chihara Kōichirō for lending me his transcription of the Yoshida manuscript. I could not have completed this manuscript research without my Japanese teachers at the Inter-University Center in Yokohama or the Blakemore Foundation Language Grant that allowed me to study there; special thanks are due to Ōtake Hiroko. I would also like to thank Dr. Alice L. Birney at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress and Sakaguchi Eiko at the Prange Collection of the University of Maryland. Tak Fujitani has been endlessly encouraging and helpful. Dan Rivero at Weatherhead and Mari Coates and Reed Malcolm at UC Press have been patient with my questions about the publishing process throughout. With the generous funding of the 2011 Weatherhead East Asian Institute First Book Prize, I benefited from the thoughtful editing of Susan Whitlock who tamed the manuscript, and Margaret Case who cracked the introduction.

Acknowledgments   /    xiii First familial thanks go to my mother, who took us in when I was writing the first draft in 2003. My son, Benjamin, was born into the project and has been its most welcome distraction, giving me much needed relief and joy. Last, I thank my wife, Jessamyn Reich Abel, who helped me and the project at every stage—from conception, through proposal, research, translation, editing, and formatting. Without her encouragement, love, generosity, and selflessness I would not have met a single deadline. If this book succeeds, it is the result of my work with all of these people and enabled by these grants and institutions. I, however, refuse to accept absolute responsibility for any failures, infelicities, or mistakes in this book, because if there is one thing I hope to clarify in the book it is that signification forces us all—reader, writer, editor, typesetter, and censor— to own up to our part of responsibility for producing meaning. I accept my part. You accept yours. Anything beyond that is on someone else.  

 

 

•        •        •

Early versions of parts of the book have been published elsewhere: “Archiving the Forbidden: War Responsibilities and Censored Literature,” in Hermeneutical Strategies: Methods of Interpretation in the Study of Japanese Literature (Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies) 5 (Summer 2004); “Canon and Censor: How War Wounds Bodies of ­Writing,” in Comparative Literature Studies, 42.1 (Winter 2005); “The Ero-Puro Sense: Declassifying Censored Literature from Interwar Japan,” in Japan Forum, 19.3 (2007).

Note on Translations

All translations are mine unless specifically noted otherwise. For reasons that will become apparent in chapters 6 through 9, I have chosen to represent redaction as faithfully as possible with both markings that point to the redaction and glosses that present authorized fillings-in. Because of the differing character counts in the English translation of Japanese, I generally use asterisks as an English-language translation of the Japanese fuseji, which took many forms, as discussed in chapters 6 through 9. When marks other than asterisks are used in translations, it is to present the number of Japanese characters originally deleted and for which translatable glosses are unknown.

xv

Introduction Archiving Censors

Censorship destroys texts, removes them from sight, places them beyond reach. Even worse, it can render entire avenues of thought off limits. The realms of discourse entirely obliterated by censorship can never be known; our only access to the deep havoc inflicted by censors is what remains after they have done their work. But what exactly does censorship leave behind? Where do we find its remnants? How can we measure these traces? What might they reveal about the censor? Is searching for the material behind the Xs and asterisks of censorship a treasure hunt or a futile quest? Censorship is perhaps the most thoroughly documented mode of modern literary reception in Japan. In the 1870s, modern press laws regulating expression were promulgated to control both sedition and obscenity. Over the ensuing years, the office of censorship grew gradually. Under the consultation system (内閲制度) of this period, publishers could meet with censors to discuss specific texts. But a sea change occurred a half century later following the devastation of the Tokyo earthquake and fires in 1923; in the wake of the fires that destroyed many libraries, technological innovations in binding and printing seemed to enable cheaper book production and the rapid replacement of lost cultural artifacts. Those in power quivered at the thought of this new mass culture carrying so much information to so many so quickly. Global events such as the Russian Revolution in 1917 had contributed to a rise of leftist activity in Japan, which in turn produced a conservative backlash against seditious behavior, as in the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which sought to defend the national polity (国体) from anarchists and communists. In this context, the censorship office doubled in size and budget in an attempt to keep pace with both the burgeoning publishing world and the narrowing political landscape. By 1927, the censors could no longer keep pace with the increased volume of 1

2    /    Introduction published material and canceled the consultation system, leaving publishers on their own to anticipate potential bans.1 In this new environment between 1927 and 1936, more books were banned by censors and more passages were redacted by editors than in any other period before or after. During the height of the Asia-Pacific War, censorship and redaction happened less frequently due to both a chilling effect on writers left over from this earlier period and a publishing downturn in the mid-1940s stemming from paper shortages. The public face of the Allied Occupation brought the ideal of freedom of the press to Japan even as secret offices of censorship and propaganda supporting the new regime and suppressing vestiges of the old one were established. Censorship under the newly imposed free press system stipulated that its existence be kept secret. But this often-mentioned contradiction of the occupied state is only paradoxical if we maintain a belief in the possibility of realizing complete freedom of the press. If freedom of the press is conceived not as an attainable reality but as a laudable goal that will always remain beyond reach, the presence of a vast censorship bureaucracy alongside the rhetoric of press freedom seems a more natural state of affairs. This tendency of censorship to censor its own archival trace is not unique to the Occupation period but part of the role of the modern censor. The prevailing history told and retold about the nature of censorship under the Occupation in Japan is that, in contrast to censorship under the imperial regime, which was generally known and understood (and was archived for the general public in the form of indexes, articles, and redaction marks), the Occupation-period censors acted under a shroud of secrecy. Typically, the two censorships are contrasted as follows: the bureaucratic imperial censorship of the prewar and wartime regime was known, explicit, and direct, while that of the postwar occupation was silent, implicit, and indirect.2 However, both regimes maintained internal and external mechanisms of control, and though the saliency of these effects certainly shifted, the shift corresponds more with the decade between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s than with 1945. Despite the desire to erase their own role, censors have continually failed to erase themselves from discourse and consequently from history. The extant archives of the Japanese imperial censor (1923–1945) and the archive of the Occupation censor (1945–1952) provide unique opportunities to explore how censorship has historically functioned and how we come to know what we know about it. Archives and censors share a curious relationship. Although they serve vastly different functions in theory and according to common sense (one preserves, the other destroys), in practice  

 

Archiving Censors    /    3 censors and archivists engage in many of the same activities. Despite their stated institutional responsibility to remove and destroy, censors historically have collected and preserved for posterity the very material deemed dangerous to society. Conversely, despite their overt purposes of collection and preservation, archivists have historically excluded, removed, and destroyed material deemed unworthy or unwieldy. Furthermore, as censors construct their own archives, collecting their bureaucratic records and the material they ban, their acts of suppression yield yet another archive, a body of documents about, against, and in favor of censorship. As censors in Japan removed specific genres, topics, and words from circulation, some authors and publishers used the suppression as incitement to rail against the authorities and to appeal to the prurient interests of their readers. They consciously risked bans by intentionally appropriating the censor’s categories. They wrote not only through censorship but also about censorship, archiving its violence for contemporary readers and for historical memory. Many Japanese writers converted their offensive rants to innocuous fluff after successive encounters with authorities, but others responded to censorship by pushing back within the limited means at their disposal: the high point of imperial censorship saw more indexes of banned books circulated, more essays on censorship published, more works of erotic and proletarian fiction produced, and more redaction marks printed than at any other time. One way to conceive of these products of censorship, then, is through archives, both real and metaphorical.3 Reframing censorship through the concept of the archive proposes that it is possible to track what we do not have through what we do. It provides a method for gauging the immeasurable damage done to discourse by censorship. The many archives of censorship, defined both literally and figuratively, can never tell the complete story. But they do provide the ground upon which understanding of the full extent of the censor’s effects may be built.

Archival Exemplars Censorship in Japan produced not only secret censor’s reports and examination copies held in the offices of the censors but also all sorts of publicly circulated material. Examples of material inspired by the imperial censor abound: an index of thousands of titles banned by the censors published in 1932, a cartoon of lascivious censors slobbering over illicit matter, special magazine issues dedicated to the topic of censorship, a book titled The Secret Tales of Criminal Arrests for Blind Passion (1939) banned for both

4    /    Introduction obscenity and sedition, a poem written in 1931 imagining the day when asterisks will cover over the imperial chrysanthemum insignia rather than the words of the laboring classes. These products and traces of censorship play with the modes of suppression in unexpected and often incongruous ways. Depending on the historical moment and the producers’ relations with the censor, this play can be manifest anywhere on the continuum from rancorous resistance to abject complicity. While censorship is a serious business, wrought in violence and linked to oppressive power, playful expression can, at its best, turn censorship against itself and bear witness to the absenting of genres, ideas, and words occasioned by suppression and to even the literary promise in censorship. The following case (neither the most nor least significant of the period) is but one of thousands that exemplify the productive capacities of censorship and the lingering archival marks that censorship leaves on a text even after the office of the censor has closed. On New Year’s Day in 1932, the first issue of the second volume of Proletarian Poetry was published. The volume was printed in a heavily redacted form in an attempt to evade censorship. At a time when writers and publishers were no longer readily allowed to consult with censors about which passages of text they should redact, writers and editors had begun nervously applying Xs to many more passages than may have been necessary; the result was a boom in the use of the redaction mark, or fuseji (伏字; literally, covering characters, characters of concealment or supplication), the Xs and Os used before and during part of the war to substitute for words that might irk the censors. Fuseji were controversial: they could sometimes successfully negotiate censorship and enable the publication of otherwise potentially objectionable material, but often readers could fill in precisely what had supposedly been removed by the Xs. In the case of one poem from the January 1932 issue of Proletarian Poetry, we have the record of at least one historical reader—the censor—doing exactly that. Taki Yōsaku’s poem “Prepare! It’s Time!” was the primary cause for the ban of the serial three weeks after its initial issue. The cover of the censor’s examination copy of Proletarian Poetry displays all the markings of state bureaucracies: telltale stamps mark the volume as banned by the Home Ministry for offenses against the maintenance of public order and security; another stamp testifies to the American seizure of the library of the imperial censor in 1946 and the subsequent acquisition of the volume by the Library of Congress. More stamps on the inside cover reveal the names of the censors (the office manager, the book librarian, and the reviewer) and proclaim that this journal, like the censor’s copies of all sub 

 

Archiving Censors    /    5

Figure 0.1  Examination Copy Cover of Proletarian Poetry

sequently banned books, should be “preserved in perpetuity” (永久保存).4 The censor’s comments and notes specify reasons for the ban, identifying specific page numbers. (See figures 0.1 and 0.2.) Of the four poems cited by the censor, “Prepare! It’s Time!” (which commemorates the explosions that began the Manchurian Incident of September 18, 1931) received the most attention, if we can judge by the accumulation of red pencil notes attempting to fill in the redacted words. In addition, “Prepare!” is the only

6    /    Introduction

Figure 0.2  Examination Copy of Proletarian Poetry Open

poem from the journal mentioned by that month’s printed Publishing Police Report (an internal publication intended to keep police appraised of decisions and developments in the censorship office), which states that the ban was issued for the poem’s “antimilitary” stance and agitation for a communist revolution. (See figures 0.3 and 0.4.) The passage from the poem reprinted at length in the report and meticulously worked over by the censor’s pencil in the examination copy reads as follows: bodies

bullet shells

You who put ****** before ******* ****** and know it superiors

Our ********* who order us every day muzzles

Red Army soldiers

To aim ******* at the * * * * * * * ******** mother Russia Oh, the workers and farmers of  * * * * * * ****** Shake establishments with the minds of the world fields of Listen! ’Tis the roar of the cannon that thunders agitation in the ****** ** Northern Manchuria

******** *********

militarized imperial Japan

It is the groan of the *********** ******** ***** in its last throes That one destroyed the finery of the League of Nations attack And before long the pigs will likely shake hands during the ****** of Soviets

the *******.5

Archiving Censors    /    7

Figure 0.3  Publishing Police Report on Proletarian Poetry (Shuppan keisatsuhō [Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1981], 41:14)

This record of a zealous reader of proletarian poetry—the censor— confirms what one might already suspect about readers at the time: some were very skilled at filling in the blanks left by publishers to avoid censorship. But even the most skilled reader could not always make sense of the blanks correctly. Yet, like a determined crossword puzzler, they could always make something fit. The police report quotes not the redacted version of the poem as it appeared in the examination copy, but a complete text consisting of the print from the examination copy supplemented by the censor’s decoding of these redactions, without any reference to the fact that the poem had suffered redaction at all. So the poem was, in a sense, recreated or at least reconstituted by the censor. A more authoritative (though less authoritarian) version of the text has now been published in the canonical Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature (1987). A comparison of the three versions (the text printed in Proletarian Poetry, the censor’s version excerpted in their internal report, and the current canonical version) shows us that the censor was very close to the (later) editors of the proletarian canon in filling in the blanks, but there are some slight variations. In some cases, the discrepancies are minor and hardly change the potential meanings of the poem. For instance, where the censor filled in two Xs with 満州 (Manchuria), the Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature fills them in with 北満 (Northern Manchuria). A more puzzling set of discrepancies occurs not between the censor’s version and the canonical version but between the original print version  

 

Figure 0.4  Marginal Notes of the Censor on Taki Yōsaku’s Poem “Prepare! It’s Time!” in the Examination Copy of Proletarian Poetry

Archiving Censors    /    9 and both the censor’s and the canonical versions. In one case, where the original poem as printed in the journal gives four Xs, presumably for four Red Army Soldiers

deleted characters (“To ×××× at the * * * * * * * ********.”), both the censor and the canon fill in with five characters 銃口の標的 (To aim the muzzles at). The consonance of the censor’s and the postwar anthology’s versions suggests at least two possibilities: (1) there was a simple misprint in the original issue of Proletarian Poetry, while both the censor and the latter-day editors either had access to another, unredacted copy or were in direct communication with the editors or the poet; or (2) the postwar editors made use of the police report. In this case, the first possibility is more likely, because the differing notation for the redacted areas in the canonical version suggests access to another version. But it is clear from this brief example that censorship forever transformed the way these texts were printed and received. No reception either historically or today is unfiltered by the ceaseless historical process of censorship, whether in the censor’s marked copy, which largely succeeded in filling in the gaps of the poem, or in the version carried in the Anthology today, which attempts fidelity to the history of the text yet fails to mention the ban and includes reference to only some of the redactions. Readers who confronted that text under censorship had to have read it differently from either the censors or the latter-day editors. How could they have known if their text lacked one X? Historical lay readers had to either come up with alternative possible readings or leave the four Xs as a simple reference to the notion that something had been deleted. Looking at the examination copy now held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., we can immediately see numerous layers in the way censorship was archived: first (though historically the last), the seizure and rearchivization of the censor’s archive by the occupying powers in 1946; second, the imperial censor’s decision to ban and simultaneously hold in perpetuity the contraband; third, the censor’s reports and pencil marks in the examination copy; and finally and most explicitly, the internalization of censorship “archived” in the Xs on the page by writers and editors. This last mode of archivization differs startlingly from the others. While the others involve literal archives—collections held by strong powers in secret—the Xs in the last mode are read as an archive in a metaphorical sense. The internalization of an explicit command to self-censor or at least self-redact left a public, visible, material marker of something removed: an archive of loss due to censorship. This book focuses primarily on this last form, the intentional public archivization of censorship, without losing sight of the fact that real encounters with external censors underpin self-censorship.  

 

10    /    Introduction

Preoccupations with Censorship Writing novels in . . . contemporary Japan is nothing other than writing novels in a linguistic space, dispossessed of geography and history, that both is and is not one’s own.  

—Etō Jun (1984)6

We seek each other out, but because our interior is always to some extent occupied and interrupted by others . . . we have developed a technique of speaking through the given, expressing things obliquely and, to my mind, so mysteriously as to puzzle even ourselves. —Edward W. Said (1999) 7

 

Though mainstream literary critics have focused on the suppression of modern Japanese literature by the prewar and wartime regime and described a flowering of literature in the immediate postwar period,8 Etō Jun (followed more recently by critics as varied in outlook as Katō Norihiro and Nishio Kanji)9 finds harsh ideological boundaries beginning in the Occupation and defined by the new censorship system. The common view posits that the imperial militarist regime suppressed individual self-­expression during the height of the war, as exemplified most starkly through the suppression of naturalist and social realist fiction. This view laments the literary losses in the 1930s and early 1940s due to bans, deletions, and redactions. On the other hand, Etō continually uses the term inbi (latent or obscure) to characterize Occupation censorship, which banned all references to the institution of censorship itself, in contrast to the overt and explicit imperial mode signified for him by the lasting marks of redaction, fuseji. He argues that the imported, “false” taboos of Occupation censorship imprisoned all postwar literature in a linguistic space closed off from true freedom, and that, therefore, Japanese democracy bears the taint of its undemocratic inception. This latter view represents a potentially rightwing move in Japan if it is not balanced with a critique of the ills of imperial censorship, but it is one seemingly justified by “radical” theoretical premises that canonize cultures of the oppressed and underprivileged.10 Etō’s concern—the lasting effect of postwar censorship on Japan—has much in common with that of another preeminent postwar literary figure, Edward Said, who argued that colonialism left lasting effects on both the colonizer and colonized. Both spent much of their later careers articulating the ways dominant cultures maintain their dominance and how this dominance affects both the dominators and the dominated. But ultimately they arrived at different conclusions. Whereas Etō reconceived the former oppressors as the newly oppressed and claimed imperial censorship to be  

 

Archiving Censors    /    11 less caustic to Japanese discourse than the censorship of the occupiers, Said emphasized that even the oppressed could become oppressors, as in the case of Israel’s violent control of Palestine. Etō blamed the occupiers of Japan for being uniquely responsible for the insidious censoring of all of postwar Japanese discourse even after the end of the Occupation in 1952; Said was more concerned about transcending the rhetoric and politics of blame and salvaging from the dominant Western culture a critique of the founding myths of its own imperial power. In the spirit of Said’s ethical call to move beyond blame, we can recognize the value of Etō’s critique without accepting his nostalgia for Japanese imperial rule. Although Etō persuasively argues that a taint of censorship is left behind after the passing of historical censors, his indictment of the Occupation forces alone for limiting postwar discursive space perpetrates a censorship of its own. Etō overlooks the possibility that the postwar environment continued to be haunted by prewar censorship. What would avoiding a politics of blame concerning wartime atrocities and occupation ills mean? Certainly, not a forgetting of those atrocities and ills, but perhaps rather a bracketing of those incendiary issues to examine what the Japanese and US empires shared and how their power, so seemingly different in rhetoric, culture, and history, was similarly structured, organized, and practiced. The potential for an implicit, internal self-censor came to be the defining policy of government censorship in the United States during the interwar period. The system of self-regulation seemed to solve the dilemma of the excesses of World War I censorship in the United States. By the 1940s, the policy was evident in many venues. In addition to the widely known “loose lips sink ships” propaganda campaign, Byron Price, the director of the Office of Censorship, suggested in closed-circuit broadcasts to radio producers and media moguls that self-censorship would be easiest on everyone. When Private Snafu, the dopey cartoon character in the Army-Navy Screen Magazine, sought to evade the postal censor and tell his sweetheart where he was stationed, he instantly found himself surrounded by enemy forces in the Pacific, which duly warned the soldiers watching and laughing at Snafu of the danger of talking too much. Whether by Price’s secret communiqués or by Snafu’s semipublic hijinks, the motto of the day was truly Snafu’s lesson: “every man his own censor.” 11 Clearly this policy of internalization explicitly pushed by those in charge characterized much of the system of censorship under the military in the United States. According to Etō Jun, freedom of the press in the United States was a pure fiction, and the policy of an implicit and internalized self-censorship

12    /    Introduction was designed to resolve the inherent conflict with the First Amendment to the Constitution. We might almost formulate a theorem: To the degree that “freedom” is sanctified in a country, so will censorship and information control be conceived as taboo. Consequently, even though the establishment of a U.S. Office of Censorship might be announced through the public medium of an executive order of the President, its existence and activities would have to be kept under thick wraps.12

Etō rightly identifies this hidden mode as characteristic of American censorship and even explicates how this would become more important in a moment of crisis, but in doing so, he denies the internal and invisible strain already present under a Japanese imperial censorship that presumably had little regard for “freedom of speech.” Etō sees Price’s policy of voluntary, hidden censorship as having been imported to Japan during the Occupation.13 The internalization of the external censor in Japan, however, had already long been underway. Japan was preoccupied with censorship before the Occupation. Writers saw themselves as exiled even at home long before the start of the AsiaPacific War, because they perceived that there was no escape from the censor. The often-banned Nagai Kafū enjoined fellow writers to avoid literary suicide by not offending the censors. In an essay written in 1922, Kafū suggested that writers leave the public world in silence or return to the classics for safe material as the best response to changing social circumstances: In Japan’s present situation, those who are unsatisfied can resist and fight to the end. Or, if they do not want to fight, I think they can simply retire from society. One cannot say that those who resist and fight the government to the end necessarily give birth to fine art; and similarly even among those artists who have retired from society, there are some who create great art. So if you are not satisfied with the way the government works, you may retire completely from society. . . . If good art is that which most realistically represents the true nature of society and humanity, then today’s art truly represents only one small part of the reality of society and the reality of humanity. The argument that points to this fact and says that society is thus being harmed is too narrow in its thinking.14

Arguing for an active internalization of the censor, Kafū noted the damage to both art and society done by such a turn away from public life, but also implied that nothing else could be done in the “present situation.” Moreover, as Japan’s empire began to be threatened, censorship policies became increasingly concerned with the effacement of its very practice,

Archiving Censors    /    13 the major characteristic Etō associates with Occupation censors. What the archives of Japanese censorship tell us again and again is that the highpoint for the explicit and visible work of state censors in Japan occurred between 1928 and 1936. After that peak, the offices did not have to work as diligently, because the mechanism had been internalized. And beginning in the later 1930s, cooperative measures outside what is generally considered to be the work of explicit censorship took on greater importance.15 For example, the advent of general meetings (kondankai) between Home Ministry and publishing world figures (from booksellers to publishers, editors, and major writers such as Kikuchi Kan, Yoshikawa Eiji, Ōya Sōichi, Kawabata Yasunari, Nakano Shigeharu, Shimaki Kensaku, and Miyamoto Yuriko) from 1934 to 1939 mitigated antagonisms after the days (from 1927 to 1936) when explicit bans on sales and distribution reigned.16 Indeed, the informal meetings between censors and publishers begun under the imperial Home Ministry censors were one of the means by which the “Press Code” was disseminated by the Occupation’s censors in September of 1945.17 So the notion that an internal, insidious, invisible censorship that promoted self-censorship as its explicit policy was an American export to Japan is both counter to the history of censorship in Japan in the twentieth century and to the structure of censorship, which is always necessarily split between external and internal, visible and invisible. In a way, the conservative Etō is too much of a liberal idealist; maintaining the belief in the possibility of realizing the ideal of freedom of the press, he is disappointed to find it does not exist either in the United States or Japan. But if we recognize the ubiquitous presence of censorship (even if incomplete and haphazard), we can see that the entirety of the Japanese discursive space (not limited to but certainly including the writers, editors, publishers, and readers) was preoccupied with censorship: the signs of censorship were a prominent concern well before, through, and beyond the Occupation. And when we consider the presence of repression and censorship at the scene of writing under any regime or condition, reified divisions between war and peace, independence and occupation, Japanese imperialism and US Occupation, and fascism and democracy become even less useful. This recognition of a perennial censorship does not displace the questions of justice and the necessity of judgment when confronted with instances of violence to texts. Rather, it foregrounds the ethical importance of reading the incompleteness of historical censorships in order to articulate possibilities for resistance. Said recognized the conundrum of responsibility when approaching historical violence, but nevertheless understood the responsibility of the critic and activist to transcend blame.

14    /    Introduction You can reconcile the history of the colonized and the history of the colonizer without an attempt to “be impartial,” because there’s always the question of justice. It’s simply unjust—I certainly don’t want to lose the force of that—it’s simply unjust for the colonizers to have done what they did. But, on the other hand, that doesn’t mean, then, that that entitles the colonized to wreak a whole system of injustices on a new set of victims.18  

 

While, of course, the differences between the specific cases to which Said was referring and those of Occupation-period Japan abound, we may usefully substitute the words “occupied” for “colonized” and “occupier” for “colonizer” in the above passage to begin to delineate a critique of censorship that does not fall into the rhetoric of blame. One might add that this is particularly true for the case of Japan, which went from colonizer to occupied in the course of a few months in 1945.

Censorship Is The argument that Occupation-period censorship was particularly secretive overvalues the historical and material existence of the deletion mark littering the pages of wartime discourse. This fetish for specific signs of redaction, which are all but absent in Occupation-period literature, is understandable, because the fuseji of imperial Japan both capitulate to the intentions of censorship and stand against it, marking the absenting of words from print. But because readers could see some redactions taking place before their very eyes on the page, critics tended to forget other deletions and unwritten swaths of text directly related to the external censorship system that occurred prior to publication and even prior to writing at some internal level. So the presence of censorship has multiple effects even before a reader’s encounter with the censored text. There are also aftereffects of the dual-layered structure of censorship that continue long after its historical passing. For instance, we may think that when the books that had been censored under one regime can finally be published, or when the deleted words can finally be reinserted, censorship will have ended. The restoration of texts to canons and words to texts, however, often commits another moment of historical excision that can be compared to censorship. Therefore, the implicit effects of the censor will have a spectral afterlife even after the censor and the censored have presumably passed. This is another way of saying censorship never dies. Once-censored books are brought into the canon, and before long their historical status as once-censored is forgotten. Formerly erased words or unwritten scenes are reinscribed in another time or place. This is the

Archiving Censors    /    15 promise of archival discovery and the promise of writing: that they can exceed a given historical moment of collection and reception, that they can overcome a given censor. But this is also where writing repeats the historical process of exclusion that is so bound up with censorship. For when a formerly censored text is simply found like a treasure buried in the archives of the censor and then brought out into the light through republication, whether its once-censored status continues to be remembered or is soon forgotten, the text remains tainted by censorship: if the text continues to bear the identity of a banned book, marginalia in the form of annotations, footnotes, and forewords will recall the historical ban so that reading the text outside of that historical moment of reception may be impossible; if the text is smoothly adopted into the canon irrespective of its history, then the forgetting of its censored past itself commits another moment of censoring, omitting the trace of its historical reception from a contemporary one and thus continuing the text’s tie to censorship. This effacement of the history of censorship after the passing of a particular censor has not meant a concomitant erasure of censorship. Censorship continues even when it is difficult to track, even when no offices of censorship exist. In a view consonant with Etō’s, Pierre Bourdieu claims that a censorship that censors its own trace is the most insidious form of social control.19 And Karatani Kōjin takes this position one step further when he argues that this censoring of censorship is, in fact, the essence of censorship.20 And yet, though Karatani’s is a good description of the intentions behind censorship, in practice censorship has continually failed to erase its trace; indeed, this failure is what allows censorship to be known and understood as such. Furthermore, our ability even to ascribe the term censorship to a particular reception of a text will always depend on the trace. So while we can imagine a censorship that leaves no trace and while we can talk about the shadow effects of the flames from burning books, our only understanding of the invisible repercussions will always come from the visible, tangible, archivable material. Whether such material will be seen as ashes in the dustbin or monuments to a vanished history depends on our vantage point. In Japan, the haphazard application and enforcement of laws meant that on occasion bans were issued days (or in some cases weeks, months, or years) after copies went on sale. The bureaucratic, day-to-day work of actual censors inevitably allowed some items to slip by though they were similar to those that were previously banned, and continually forbade others that by all accounts should have passed unscathed. This irrational,

16    /    Introduction visible, and tangible work of the censor is precisely what accounts for the growth of an internal censor. Self-censorship is the goal of all external censorships: to be so thorough that an office of censorship will not be required. Viewed in this light, the existence of a state censor is nothing more than a performance of cold rationality or totalitarianism that beckons everyone to self-censor. (It is a performance because in actual practice no system has been totalitarian in its day-to-day work, no system so rational that it renders every decision of the censor understandable and consistent.) And because of this performance, censorship can seem so arbitrary and powerful that writers merely capitulate. Slavoj Žižek writes of this mode of internalization: “we all know very well that bureaucracy is not all-powerful, but our ‘effective’ conduct in the presence of bureaucratic machinery is already regulated by the belief in its almightiness.” 21 In other words, the authority does not need a totalitarian system, completely uniform and rational, for us to conduct ourselves according to the censor’s rules and, in so doing, to help the censor become all the more totalizing. The writing that censors touch affects the unwritten that they can never touch, and in this way they seem to touch that as well. Most chillingly, the fear of censorship, which kills some ideas even before they are hatched, also makes the full effects of censorship ultimately unarchivable, unless we commit to reading the archives themselves as reminders and remainders of those unwritten texts. This is the limit and possibility of resistance to the censor’s long reach. For if the censor is not everywhere, there may be a chance for the survival of writing that would otherwise be deemed offensive; however, if the producers of cultural material cannot help but believe in the censor’s ubiquity or even in the devastating consequences of its random actions, then discourse may be already doomed. And yet, the recognition that censorship persists beyond the demise of a specific censor (or censorship system) should not detach or defuse a commitment to resistance to controls on expression. Edward Said’s reminder that “there are ascertainable changes stemming from who holds power and who dominates whom” is important for discussions of differing censorship regimes.22 Recognizing the always-present, internal, implicit effects of (self-)censorship reveals their inevitable relation to external, explicit, institutional, bureaucratic, state, and corporate censors that are real and nameable and that change over time and differ between places. Furthermore, the powers of these censors are hierarchical. The choice of which censors are to be challenged and which may be allowed to escape for now is the ethical issue at stake in any

Archiving Censors    /    17 historical or cultural comparison of more than one moment of censorship. And yet in the end, the problem will be solved neither in a simple way by labeling definitively one kind of censorship worse than another, nor in an irresolute way by declaring both blameworthy.

Toward a Transwar Approach to Censorship Michael Holquist writes, “If censorship is indeed . . . ineluctable, how will one know which of its effects to oppose, and on what grounds can one oppose them? Reading is an answer.” 23 Reading in this context of the omnipresence of the censor has the benefit of bracketing assumed differences between imperial and Occupation censorships. Rather than working with the assumption that censorship in Japan was more repressive during the war than after or the revisionist claims that the invisible censorship of the Occupation period was more insidious and therefore more repressive than even the imperial censorship, we at first do better to seek similarities.24 We can then think of the two regimes as together telling a larger story of how empires at war and in its aftermath seek to control thought through texts. By navigating “transwar” transformations and continuities, I hope to avoid such pitfalls as the overly rigid separation of prewar, wartime, and postwar periods. While some transwar narratives of Japanese history tend toward absolving the American incursion in Japan, my approach seeks to avoid both the uncomplicated denial of American imperial responsibilities and the overzealous incrimination of Japanese imperial responsibilities. In Japanese letters since at least the eighteenth century, when authors and publishers were first legally required to sign their names to their work, the responsibility for a text has been a key issue for the social place of all texts because of the perceived potential of texts to encode resistance to dominant social and juridical forces.25 But to begin a narrative of the effects of censorship in the twentieth century or these early modern moments would be to relegate to a lesser position the presence of censors at even earlier, premodern moments. Similarly, to race forward to the end of the nineteenth century, when the laws that had the most influence on the period were promulgated, would be to assume that laws alone define the borders of acceptability for the censors. In other words, to find origins in the Council of State (太政官) proclamations of 1868 and 1869 would be to value government censors over other social powers, such as writers, publishers, academics, and mass audiences.26 The term transwar itself gestures to a nonbounded periodization that

18    /    Introduction bleeds out from an event, and therefore to a mode of thinking that works against the rhetorical constraints underlying most uses of periodization. It makes no claims for either origin or terminus. Some Japanologists have reached back as far as the Chronicles of Japan (Nihon shoki, 720 ce) for the origins of the Asia-Pacific War, and others argue that Japan remains today in a postwar mode.27 By including both prewar and postwar discourses, the former with no clearly discernable beginning and the latter with no definite end, transwar refers to a periodization that evades the problematic assertions of radical change and of origins located at specifiable moments in history. If a transwar periodization obviates the question of when to begin, it also answers the question of how to begin. Rather than choosing a date or event at which to begin or end, I have chosen to organize this book according to the archival materials, each set of materials suggesting specific themes in support of the thesis that it is less the contents of the archives than their structures and processes that reveal truths about censorship. Three themes—implicit and explicit censorships, the seeming ubiquity of censorship, and the persistent inability of censors to erase their presence entirely—run through the chapters and rise to saliency in this transwar perspective on cultural production in Japan. The book is divided into three major parts. “Preservation” examines the way information about censorship is known through three sources: archives, indexes, and essays. “Production” delineates connections between censorship and the growth of three literary genres (proletarian, erotic, and war literature) directly effected by censorship. And “Redaction” focuses on the marks of deletion that are readable on the pages of censored literature. Although these labels specifically name particular aspects of the archival functioning of censorship, they need not be conceived of as mutually exclusive. “Preservation” begins with the formerly internal and historically invisible secret records and books collected by state censors. Its successive chapters proceed toward ever more visible and mainstream remnants of censorship. Indexes of banned works provided a safe medium through which bibliographers could publicize information that would otherwise have been unavailable to readers, the titles of banned books. Essays about censorship published in popular magazines during the high point of the banning of books preserved and publicized the system of suppression even as the quantity of books being banned increased. Humor disappeared from these mainstream nonfiction essays about censorship as World War II intensified, and the constant use of murder as a trope suggested the possibil 

 

Archiving Censors    /    19 ity of a new metaphor for censorship: the phrase “literary casualties” can name the violence to texts that censorship perpetrates on both the living and the dead. “Production” discusses how the productivity of censorship as both an impetus for and a control of literary endeavor can been seen in the rise of genres that were targets for censorship and in the active patrolling of images of war violence. The radical and risqué writer and editor Umehara Hokumei personifies how the two categories defined as illicit by the censors—sedition and obscenity—can be related through the rigidification of two genres—proletarian and erotic art. Realistic depictions of sex and class struggle cultivated by and eventually eradicated under censorship gave way to a canonical realism in depictions of war that left out key sympathetic elements when representing the wounded body of enemies. Transwar censorship thus played a key role in forming some canonical national images. “Redaction” shows how humorous play, absent from essays on censorship in Japan after the earthquake in 1923, appears in the practice of redaction employed by writers and editors seeking to evade and poke fun at censorship through the appropriation of various typographical signs. Deletion, the primary mode of censorship, was publicly marked between 1927 and 1936 in Japan. The history of the asterisk-like mark shows how, contrary to popular understanding, the marks disappeared long before the Occupation. This history reminds us that an insidious censorship that hides its own trace is not a foreign import but inherent in the practice of suppression. A case study of the use of the marks in Kaizō, one of the leading and most often banned popular magazines, gives a sense of the breadth of function and range of possible meanings, but also identifies one underlying meaning to all uses of deletion marks: all fuseji point to the process of deletion. In this sense, the history of fuseji is but one of many stories of nontypographic marks of redaction. For instance, umbrellas and parasols became the cover of choice for visual representations of kissing in Japan as the word kiss was being covered in Xs. The concluding chapter brings these issues of censorship into the present by reading mid-twentieth-century Japanese information restriction against contemporary neoliberal modes of control through the release and redaction of information. The concerted effort of this book is to make the process of internalization and the relationship between internal and external censors more visible. Yet there will always be a gap that separates what we have suppressed on the page and in the archive from the black box of repression. The  

 

 

20    /    Introduction positive value of the archival material is incontrovertible. Archives allow readers today to find things hidden from the historical reading public: explanations, contradictions, proofs, counterproofs, evidence, and falsified evidence. But with the power held by this information in archives comes not only the responsibility to continue their preservation and to respect the facts they document but also the ethical imperative to recall the history they fail to tell, the history they cannot tell. Along with respect for the value of archives, we need to cultivate a healthy skepticism about the positivist notions that archival preservation alone is enough or that the existence of this trace left by the censors can ever be enough to overcome censorship. Ample evidence from the archives disproves the quixotic nostalgia toward historical cases of censorship that misremembers art as always enduring censorship. The fact that censors create, preserve, and document the very material they seek to eradicate does not mitigate or excuse their violence to discourse. Similarly, the fact that writers can write about, through, or around censorship does not mean that censorship is ultimately ineffectual; rather, this writing itself testifies to its effectiveness. Identifying and recovering remainders of censorship leads again and again to the question: to what do these traces testify beyond the obvious, beyond the mere presence of books, passages, and words that were absent, for a time, from discourse? These archived and archivable materials recall the immaterial notions never made manifest in text form that were lost in the wake of censorship. The archives of censorship are monuments to the unarchivable aspects of censorship, the unwritten words, poems, essays, and novels that would never come into being because of the existence of censorship. If censorship marks a spot on textual material, the treasure marked by the spot is immaterial.28

Pa rt I

Preservation

1.  The Censor’s Archives and Beyond

Engraved in charcoal gray concrete above the book pickup desk at the National Diet Library (NDL) in Tokyo, an epigraph beckons to all whose eyes might wander while waiting for the vacuum tubes and conveyor belts of the archive to bring forth desired books: 真理が我らを自由にする; a translation, though nowhere attributed, of John 8:32: “Truth shall make us free.” The implication is clear: the archive preserves not just books but also access to truth. The NDL advertises in this slogan the imported postwar liberal principles upon which it was founded.1 This adopted Miltonic tradition reasons that, in the “free marketplace” of ideas or, in this version, with open access to books, “the truth” will rise to the surface. Assumptions abound in this seemingly simple motto of the Japanese national library: the information and knowledge contained in books lead to the truth, and truth is a universal good. The phrase memorializes an almost direct equating of the terms books, information, knowledge, and truth. Perhaps it would be desirable to have easily accessible truths housed in an institution and served up by conveyor belts, thus releasing us from our enslavement to misinformation, false ideals, half-truths, and lies. This desire is the often-proclaimed reason behind the mass digitization and internet publication of historical documents; it is imbedded in the very nature of research and discovery as defined since at least the Enlightenment; in it, there is a positivism of the most essential sort. But the dream of a library of all books, which seems closer with each new digitized book, also seems paradoxically like an illogical and, more importantly, impractical pipedream, because the bigger the archive and the more items it preserves, the more selection and exclusion are necessary to make sense of it. The dream of easy access to truth through its most distilled 23

24    /    Preservation source—books—is a laudable aspiration, but it masks a deep anxiety about the value and use of the modern archive in practice. In practice, the necessary archival and, lately, corporate control over not only the content but also the means of disseminating information has produced effects of regulation on expression similar to those archives aspire to eradicate. Indexing, cataloging, scanning, and posting constantly make more materials accessible today to readers around the world; and yet much is not included. The pages unscanned or misplaced, the books with mistaken catalog entries, or the materials that will never be scanned because they are the wrong size or shape: these seemingly benign, oftenunavoidable mishaps of technological transfer in archival preservation and circulation shape the reception of information, the production of knowledge, and the discovery of truths. In the inevitable archive fever and quest for treasures in the library, the Truth that is supposed to be setting us free may be relinquished for numerous examples providing only the singularity of mini-truths and petit réçits, material never attaining the heights of the paragon.2 And while the sort of haphazard, unintended control exercised by archival technologies shares little with the randomly enforced intentional bureaucratic forms of state censorship, its effect can be similar: cutting off access. Precisely because archives are thought to be authoritative, complete, and objective and yet are in practice incomplete, uneven, and devoid too often of information about the acquisition of their materials, archival materials and access to them is always circumscribed, often in ways that are unknown to users. Rather than setting us free, this archival control may, in fact, make us more subservient to the limited data garnered from our information providers. This means that the realization of the longings represented in that admirable NDL epigraph may reproduce the very means of repression once evinced by the state censors, albeit in comparatively less violent and more subtle ways. And in this, the recent modes of digital archival preservation and dissemination and older modes of government control and censorship are not far apart. The stakes of the NDL’s aspirations are readily apparent in the history of a collection of books it partially holds, books censored during another age and readily accessible today. The books collected by the imperial Home Ministry’s office of censorship (Naimushō keihokyoku) are available now to all readers who request them. These examination copies (nōhon) of the Publishing Police (Shuppan keisatsu, 1923–1945) represent the ideals embodied in the modern library and, indeed, the postwar Japanese constitution itself. The examination copies of the censors are now so readily  

 

 

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    25 accessible that the digital catalog indexing the books carries only a trace of their historical experience of having been banned. So in a seeming triumph for freedom of the press, readers today may access the once-censored books without even knowing that the copy they hold in their hands was first opened and read by the censors.3 This chapter traces the archivization of the censor’s collection to better understand what its contents might tell us and to reflect upon that which the books can never quite tell us.

An Incomplete Archive Divided The fascinating travelogue of the archive of the Home Ministry censor’s examination copies of books and serials is an important part of the meaning of the archive itself, its relation to censorship, and how we approach the materials preserved therein. The examination copies are not the thousands of volumes forcibly seized, pulped, or burned by the publishing police, but rather the books lawfully submitted by publishers for the review of the censors, the very books the censors read, marked, and saved.4 The censor’s first collection of examination copies of banned books burned to the ground in the Great Tokyo earthquake of 1923. In its place a new archive was constructed that would house copies of all books censored starting in 1923. As a result of the loss of the previous era’s banned books to flames, a policy for this new archive was started which dictated that two copies of books be submitted to the authorities, one to the Home Ministry for censorship review, and the other to the imperial library in Ueno for safekeeping.5 The changed policy recognized the practical, bureaucratic need to record meticulously the work done by censorship. The preservation of the books enabled censors to check, for instance, if a particular text had already been banned in a different form, as in the case of reprints, reissues, and revised editions.6 The policy change emphasizes the historical value of that which censors had removed from general circulation. When submitted books were subsequently banned by the Publishing Police branch of the Home Ministry, the Ueno library would be notified and those books would be removed from general circulation and placed on a private shelf as “viewing forbidden.” The line between these forbidden volumes and the general collection was more permeable than the designation alone might intimate; academics and freelance researchers had access. For example, in 1931, Umehara Hokumei (see chapter 4) received permission to read such materials in order to compile his collection of news articles banned in the Meiji period (1868–1912).7 Only later, in 1940, did the most restrictive rules on viewing forbidden and banned books in  

26    /    Preservation university libraries become formalized.8 The preservation of this material suggests that the policy of requiring examination copies was practiced for a limited readership of educated elite as well as for the benefit of the even more limited readership: the censors themselves. While the books at the Ueno library remained free of the marginalia of censors, those held by the Home Ministry preserved the traces of strict legalistic readings and classifications in stamps, pencil marks, and marginal notes, setting them apart from all other copies in existence. In rare cases, this censor’s archive preserves the only extant copy of a given text.9 Later, during the Occupation of Japan, at a time when a new archive of censorship was being formed under the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP), the entire imperial archive of examination copies from the Home Ministry censor—several thousand banned books—was shipped to the United States and held at the Washington Document Center (WDC). The thousands of volumes and documents seized as the spoils of war from the Manchurian Railway Company’s library, the Shōwa Research Society, the Japanese Imperial Navy Libraries, the Foreign Ministry Office, and the Home Ministry Office (in which censorship was housed) were kept at the WDC as evidence in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. In the decision to impound and store the books for evidence of wartime atrocities and lawlessness, we might sense the assumption that truths contained in the information within the books would help Japan and the world return to peace and freedom after the war. However, unused for that original purpose, the books and documents were turned over to the National Archives in Washington after the Central Intelligence Group (the forerunner to the CIA) reviewed them for a different kind of evidence: information about the wartime activities of potential communist insurgents in Cold War Japan.10 The books were then transferred to the Library of Congress (LOC), and the documents and other paper material were kept by the National Archives. During the early 1950s, librarians from many of the preeminent East Asian libraries in the United States were invited to Washington to help the LOC with cataloging under The Book Sorting Project, with the proviso that any triplicate volumes found could be shipped to the librarians’ home institutions. Research has exhumed Home Ministry examination copies of books that bear the marks of the censors at Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Berkeley, and Yale.11 Then, in the 1970s, scholars in Japan learned of the existence of the books that remained at the LOC and encouraged the NDL in Tokyo to enter a formal request for their return.12 Nearly half of the censor’s books then held at the LOC were returned to the NDL before  

 

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    27 the LOC changed its policy, leaving the archive divided among two major national archives and the libraries of no fewer than ten institutions of higher learning. So the known, cataloged archive of examination copies kept by the Home Ministry censors comprises the group of books returned from the LOC to the NDL to be held in special reserve; the portion left behind at the LOC, locked in a cage indefinitely awaiting microfilming; a group absorbed into the general collection at the LOC; a number of books randomly dispersed over ten East Asian collections at universities in the United States; and some recently found at the Chiyoda Public Library in Tokyo.13 Though it has been convenient to use the terms the archive and the collection, clearly the collection is not whole or singular. The collection does not dwell in one physical place; it is no longer a collection. As a slash suggests, the collection/s is multiple/are divided. The story of the archive’s movements is an integral part and clear example of the dynamic relationship between preservation and destruction and between absence and presence at the center of the ways censorship functions. The value of the archive extends beyond the materials contained in it: the archiving and rearchiving of books gives a clear picture of prewar, wartime, and postwar censorships and their relationships to the dispersal of discursive power. So the presence of the examination copies should serve as a reminder of what is not present in the archives, what cannot be contained in the archive. Any archive may hold material important for reconstructing histories, but its significance is measured only in relation to that which it does not contain. Due to their unmarked entry into general collections, these volumes are today requested, retrieved, and read simply as old books, often without knowledge of their checkered history. And while it would be good for readers of the volumes from the collection to understand their provenance (if only to know that the pencil marks in them were made not by some disrespectful reader at the library but by a state official doing their duty), it is also necessary not to overvalue their material role for the transformation of history. The largely silent absorption of books into larger collections is balanced by the degree to which (when the provenance is known) the texts are seen as treasures, a recovered lost discourse, or the outside of public wartime discourse, rather than as marginal literature on the threshold between public discourse and the unwritten. Before assessing where these archival traces might lead, we should recall that the texts are traces of that which could not be written, that which dwells in an exterior to the written and therefore to the archive.

28    /    Preservation

Accounting for Banned Books, Not Discounting Violence to Books The material contained within the archive is unique and valuable, a trove of untapped censored materials and materials produced by censors.14 And yet, we need to be wary of taking the archive to represent the sum total loss of books to society at the hands of the censor or of assuming that the collection represents all of the effects of the censoring of literature. In practice, any attempt to discuss the archive of imperial censorship in Japan as an archive, to arrive at some knowable censorship, requires transnational research into several archives. And even that kind of research does not resolve the issues a “pragmatic” researcher might set for him- or herself. For even if it were possible to account for and recover all the materials originally produced by the censor’s office, the archive would still be incomplete, and the traces of this incompleteness can be read everywhere within the archive, from the external statistical and historical data of the archive to the marks of the censors themselves. Understanding is not limited to any archive, and it continually demands this outward gaze. And even before considering the implicit, uncountable, unpublished books suggested by the numbers of books explicitly banned, the gaps in these “real” archives are too great to bridge without recourse to other archives exterior to the Home Ministry collection: first and most obviously to the police reports, now conveniently facsimiled and preserved in several important collections;15 then perhaps to other libraries holding books, magazines, and manuscripts that were banned; to archives of banned literature from other periods, such as the archive of the postwar Occupation censors; and to archives of banned literature at a more distant remove, to archives of other periods and nations. The very notion of archives suggests the problem of insides and outsides, of the material and the immaterial.16 This has been one of the most practical problems of archival collection, from the inception of the library at Alexandria to the launch of Google Books. When the archives in question are collections of banned books, the questions of inclusion and exclusion, of implicit and explicit, are especially pressing. The state of the Japanese censor’s archives reveals this dynamic relation in clear ways. Elements excluded by the archive abound. For instance, the NDL and the LOC collections themselves include mainly the examination copies of books and serials published after the earthquake in 1923, which were originally held by the Home Ministry’s Tokyo offices.17 As a result, materials banned nationally in the earlier period and the separate and regional varia-

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    29 tions of smaller-scale, more local police censorships are not represented. Materials from Osaka and other publishing centers outside of Tokyo are largely absent from the collection. But even when we restrict ourselves to books banned in Tokyo from 1923 to 1945, only about a sixth of those of which we are aware exist in the archives already mentioned. Of the 29,019 titles banned after the quake, only 5,046 were taken to the United States between 1946 and 1950.18 Pre­ sumably the rest were either destroyed in bombing raids (as in the example of a Home Ministry warehouse being bombed in Yoshimura), absorbed into the Ueno Imperial Library and, later, the Chiyoda Library collections, or lost in transit. Of the 5,046 books taken from the Home Ministry archives by the Occupation Forces, only 1,094 were returned to the NDL between 1976 and 1979. The LOC still holds 1,115 titles listed in their catalog as having come from the censor’s office. So at least 2,837 (5,046 minus 1,094 minus 1,115) titles have been “lost,” absorbed into the LOC collection or other East Asian libraries around the United States with no indication of their indexing that would allow borrowers today to understand their original place of acquisition.19 And this situation is repeated at the NDL. The Home Ministry examination copies of stand-alone books are held in a special collection at the NDL and bear marks that make identification easy for those trained to look for them. In addition to the 1,094 returned from the United States, that special collection holds 874 titles transferred originally from the Home Ministry office to the Ueno Imperial Library and not included in the books seized by the United States. And the NDL holds another 372 once-banned titles in its general collection. So 2,340 titles (1,094 plus 874 plus 372) are held at the NDL and cataloged with subject headings that indicate their banned status. Meanwhile, thousands of other banned volumes originally submitted to the Ueno Library as part of the system of double submission put in place after the earthquake now reside at the NDL. These other volumes carry a readable trace of their status as banned either in their current library catalog classification and indexing or in the censor’s stamps readable in the books themselves. There are also unknown titles and an unknown number of examination copies from the original archive that have been absorbed into the general collections at the NDL. Finding the exact number and titles from the archive absorbed into the general collections is impractical, because there is no way of doing so short of searching in the NDL or LOC general collections for each of the estimated 29,019 titles banned between 1923 and 1945 and then examining them for marks of the Home Ministry censors.20

30    /    Preservation This means that between those two libraries, only 3,455 titles (1,115 plus 2,340) of the 29,019 volumes which were once held in the censor’s archive have been cataloged with subject headings indicating that they were banned.21 This extant, labeled archive of banned books gives us only 11 percent of the imaginable total of the censor’s collection. Because the volumes have been absorbed into the general collections, researchers without the training to recognize the traces of censorship in their classifications or the censor’s stamps continue to request them unknowingly and to write histories of the period often based on notions of easy access to the books that were impossible for readers at the time to buy, books that simply were not part of public discourse. This relation between the visibility and the invisibility of the books, between the books as books and the books as rare books, is a continuing theme of censorship. This is not simply a problem of the archives of the imperial Japanese censor. Turning to the postwar period, the enormous Gordon Prange Collection at the University of Maryland holds the Occupation-period publications submitted for censorship to the occupiers in Japan (both those that were subsequently censored and those that were not) and shares many of the same problems. That collection is now unchartable in its entirety because its cataloging remains unfinished. And faced with the vast collection, we may have an urge to catalog, to wish the books of the postwar censors counted. Okuizumi Eizaburō’s catalog of Prange serials, the more recent Waseda University project to maintain an online database of the serialized articles in the collection, and the transportable microfilm archive of Occupation-period serials all point to this laudable desire to see what we have.22 And the literary scholar Yokote Kazuhiko has compiled a volume itemizing the banned serialized literature alone.23 So we can now know, for instance, that the postwar censors shared their predecessors’ concerns about literature insofar as the most often banned periodical during the Occupation was a right-wing poetry magazine, Fuji.24 But any future catalog, no matter how complete, cannot contain the full damage of the censor. The Prange does not hold films or audio recordings. Untold numbers of unreported, underground magazines (kasutori zasshi and limited run publications of small social and cultural groups) that hold a key importance for research of the Occupation period lie outside the direct purview of the censor and, therefore, beyond the scope of these postwar archives; yet as their limited print runs and curtailed circulations suggest, they were clearly not unaffected by the presence of censorship. Archives then are wonderful, useful, and necessary places to start, but never the end, if our quest is for understanding.25

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    31

The Implicit-Explicit Continuum Though counting banned materials is difficult, it is perhaps the simplest part of the picture to fill in regarding the effects of censorship. We must be wary of taking the number of banned items as the best indicator of censorship’s violence to discourse at any given historical moment. Doing so would be like assessing the total damage of war based on the body count alone, discounting the effect the absenting of those bodies has on the potential future generations resulting if those bodies had lived and on other living bodies. To account for other effects of censorship—the books not written or even not imagined—we must imagine an outside of discourse even as we recognize the impossibility of the “real” existence of such a tangible outside. Unthought and unwritten notions can be brought into existence only in this thought about them. If an outside of discourse were not at the very least held to be a worthwhile provisional notion here, the ultimate violence of censorship might be disregarded. We might think that once the censor’s archives are opened to the public and once-banned books can be freely read, the damage of the censorship is over. We might think that once we can fill in the gaps in the historical record that were the result of the violence of censorship to discourse, censorship ceases to function. While counting books once banned and returning them to public discourse are important steps in assessing and repairing the historical damage of censorship, such work should also account for the unreturnable and uncountable effects of censorship. At stake in a consideration of discursive exteriorities are the problematic and necessary distinctions between explicit and implicit censorships, the continuum between them, and the very terms upon which we view literature of the margin. Both in Japanese letters and more specifically in discussions of censorship, it has been difficult for critics to escape a stark dichotomy between explicit and implicit forms of censorship. As we have seen, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Etō Jun, drawing on his research at the Prange archives, claimed that where imperial censorship was known, obvious, and public, Occupation censorship had to hide its very existence, which made it all the more insidious. In response, Karatani Kōjin acknowledged Etō’s insight but observed:  

 

If we suppose the postwar Japan that was controlled by Occupation forces to be a “closed space,” it is not that those Occupying forces (the United States) as well as the individual censors stand in an “exterior,” but rather that they, too, are sealed within the “discursive space” that seems both exceedingly self-evident and natural. . . . A censorship that

32    /    Preservation seems to be already censored by the censors themselves, that seems to not appear by any means as censorship to the censors, this is, as I’ve said, really nothing more than the true nature of censorship.26

Karatani posits a larger framing exterior context to both the Japanese and the American discourses that will inevitably position them as sealed and cut off from some true freedom of speech that lies beyond their realms of possibility. Indeed, in this discussion of censorship from 1981, Karatani resituates what Etō characterizes as the latent, silent, and implicit (inbi sareteiru) censorship from the Occupation period to the 1890s; and this forcefully breaks down the strong prewar and postwar divide that Etō supports so forcefully. Karatani begins to deconstruct the singular division suggested by Etō’s work. But even as he displaces the surrender as a major turning point, he also reinscribes and strengthens the binarism between implicit and explicit censorship that Etō describes, locating it an earlier Meiji moment. Similarly, Judith Butler (for whom implicit repression is the worst kind because it masks its own tracks) lays bare the binary, but persistently maintains the distinction between an implicit and explicit censor (open state censorship): The operation of implicit and powerful forms of censorship suggests that the power of the censor is not exhausted by explicit state policy or regulation. Such implicit forms of censorship may be, in fact, more efficacious than explicit forms in enforcing a limit on speakability. Explicit forms of censorship are exposed to a certain vulnerability precisely through being more readily legible.27

Here Butler clings to a notion that there can be explicit forms of censorship removed from the more insidious implicit ones and that, further, the explicit ones are easier to resist. Yet, even though she maintains the divide, she concedes elsewhere that the very distinction between implicit and explicit may be difficult to determine: “Yet it may well be that explicit and implicit forms exist on a continuum in which the middle region consists of forms of censorship that are not rigorously distinguishable in this way.” 28 Rather than identifying origins or termini for the polar possibilities, we do better to elaborate this “middle region” and illustrate how the balance between explicit and implicit is manifest at particular moments in history. We do better to think of censorship as having a double-layer structure comprising both implicit and explicit forms. This is another way of saying there is never censorship without also self-censorship. An event of censorship, while most readily tangible in its explicit mode, is never

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    33 Banned Lit Books as % of Total Lit

Total Banned Books as % of Total Books Published

3

2.5

Percentage

2

1.5

1

0.5

0

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

1939

1940

1941

1942

1943

Year

Figure 1.1.  Number of Literary Books Banned

without implicit effects, and implicit self-censorship is always related to external stimuli. It is not simply that censorship represents an instance where what something says is taken to offend (incite violence, excite prurient interest, and so on), but rather that the saying (giving offense) and the doing (taking offense) are at times inseparably and indistinguishably bound.29 Similarly, anticipatory decisions by writers or editors not to publish, not to write, or to retract in an attempt to avoid censorship must be said to have already encountered censorship. To dismiss such behavior, which necessarily accompanies the existence and event of explicit censorship, is to dismiss the ultimate work of censorship, which is both tangible and intangible. The intangible results of censorship that accompany the tangible ones can be imagined through examination of the dataset consisting of the known censor’s archives. Figure 1.1 shows both banned books as a percentage of the total books published in Japan between 1922 and 1944 and, more specifically, banned literature (as defined by censors and the publishing industry) as a percentage of the total books published.30 The darker line shows that the percentage of the total books that are banned rises in the postearthquake period, hitting three peaks: during the Manchurian Incident (1931–1933) in 1932 at 1.2 percent; the February 26 attempted coup d’état in 1936 at 1 percent; and after a revision of the National Mobilization Law in 1941, at 3 percent. The latter two spikes are anomalies. For two  

34    /    Preservation months after the February 26 Incident, the number of books banned nearly doubled before returning to pre-Incident levels in May. The very large second spike in 1941 was the result of a single day’s work: on March 7, a retroactive ban was imposed on an unprecedented 558 books, consisting largely of titles published between 1929 and 1935 relating to socialist thought. These two spikes, while important resources for studying the effects of the particular events with which they are connected, are negligible when we look at censored books across the entire period. Ruling them out suggests that the so-called dark valley in cultural production created by explicit censorship (as opposed to paper shortages and other war-related curtailments on publishing) largely occurred before the Yokohama Incident of 1942, before the start of the Pacific War in 1941, and even before the China Incident in 1937. The average percentage of books banned during the Pacific War years (1941–1945) is only high (1.5 percent) because of the anomaly of that single day of censoring. If we remove the books banned on that day from our calculation, the average drops significantly to 0.8 percent, in contrast to the steady bans over the period between 1929 and 1933, which average 1 percent. While this difference of 0.2 percent may seem insignificant, it represents 1,111 books in the period between 1929 and 1934 and 579 books for the Pacific War period. These numbers and the fact that more than half of the 558 books banned on March 7, 1941, were published during this earlier period suggests that writers during the earlier period were either more willing to push the boundaries of censorship than in the later periods or that the boundaries themselves had become not only so limiting but also so internalized that the only things bannable under the new enforcement were books allowed in an earlier period. What is true for books in general is especially true for literature, as classified by the censors and the book publishing industry: namely, that the bleakest period for literature in percentage of literary books being banned is from 1927 to 1936. This could mean several different things: that the censors were most strict during this period, that the writers were most willing to be bold during this period, or both; that the censors slackened controls during the height of the Pacific War, typically considered a dark period because of its relative dearth of dissent; or that writers and publishers produced less offensive material during the war. This last view suggests that writers and publishers increasingly internalized the wishes, aims, and goals of the censors after having experienced the strict explicit censorship of an earlier period. The earlier period of a heightened number of banned books educated writers and publishers to know what would be considered offensive. The peak of the curve casts a shadow, adumbrating discourse in  

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    35 the period that follows. Comparison of this Japanese prewar shadow and the postwar American shadow described in Katō’s The American Shadow: Reconsidering the Postwar is not only possible, but also necessary if we desire to avoid crass generalizations about Japan’s postcolonial or postOccupation status.31 Franco Moretti’s explanation of graphs of the production of novels in the nineteenth century reveals some of the issues at stake: The reason behind the downturns seems to be always the same: politics: a direct, virulent censorship during the Kansei and Tempo periods, and an indirect influence in the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration, when there was no specific repression of the book trade, and the crisis was thus probably due to a more general dissonance between the rhythm of political crises and the writing of novels.32

This explanation does not account for other possibilities, such as that heightened controls on publication often coincided with nonpolitical though politicized events such as famine and earthquakes or that methods for evading censors while remaining publishable are common, methods such as expurgating reprints or finely tuning plots to avoid taboo.33 However, it does enable a kind of pragmatism to literary history. If we were to follow Moretti’s logic that censorship necessarily affects the number of books (here novels) produced when reading figure 1.2, we might even say that the effects of censorship on literary output from 1923 to 1945 were negligible.34 What figure 1.2 suggests is that neither censorship nor the grand publication booms of the era had a lasting impact on the number of literary books published during the period. Though it is true that immediately after the Great Kantō Earthquake, from 1923 to 1926, the relative amount of literature published doubled commensurately with the boom in general publications, the secondary boom of book production from 1932 to 1936 did not have a corresponding boom in literary production. And here Moretti’s argument may help, since these years correspond to the height of censorship. As shown in figure 1.3, the fact that levels of literary publication remained relatively steady during a moment of high total book production means a relative fall in literature coinciding precisely with the peak in banning of literature in figure 1.3.35 So while the argument about the correlation of a decline in published literature and a rise in censorship may make some sense, such counting fails to explain the later period from 1937 to 1945, when the number of literary books as a percentage of total books rises even amid paper shortages and the supposedly increased focus on serious issues of war. The period

36    /    Preservation Total Books Published

Total Lit. Books Published

35000

30000

Number of Books

25000

20000

15000

10000

5000

0

Year

Figure 1.2.  Total Number of Books and Literary Books Published

from 1937 through 1943 is characterized by relatively low censorship numbers and a relative rise in the amount of literary publications, as seen in figure 1.3. The low censorship numbers and relatively high level of literary production during the war do not reflect the entirety of the censorship story; nor does the rise of literature indicate a return of the repressed but rather a creation and flourishing amid the already repressed. If literature produced in the real world may work something like Freud’s dreams, as a potentially successful medium for evading psychic censorship, the rise might indicate the success with which writers had already internalized the codes of censorship. So the numbers of banned books in the archives may outline the contours of the uncountable, identifying that which is beyond measure, beyond identification. Our understanding of the numbers must account for the uncountable.36 Thus, Moretti’s positivist vision of a “more rational literary history,” though perhaps helpful in sketching the contours of the issues involved, can only be the opening to an inquiry into the damage done by censorship.37 To read the graph of the explicit quantities of banned books without contextualizing would be to disregard everything we know about the cultural descent into darkness during the wartime period, about the literature of conversion, about returns to Japan, and about the implicit censorships attendant with all explicit forms. The long shadow cast by the peak in

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    37 Literature as a % of Total Books Published

25

20

Percentage

15

10

5

0

Year

Figure 1.3.  Literary Books as a Percentage of Total Books Published

absolute numbers of banned books lasts beyond the period when the books were banned. The violence censors commit on a discursive field cannot be measured by accounting for countable traces of their censorship alone (e.g., solely by counting the number of explicitly banned books). Though the open aspects of state censorship tend to obfuscate apprehension of the implicit repression that coincides with and is enhanced by these explicit modes, they are rarely as clearly distinguishable from each other as it might appear from the quotation from Butler. At the moment when censorship seems entirely knowable, external, tangible, and therefore archivable, it is ethically imperative to imagine the archive as but a trace of what is beyond the archive, internal, unknowable, and intangible.

Beyond and Outside the Archive: Into Other Archives The archives of the prewar Japanese censors often preserve the only known copy of a text; but as we have seen, massive quantities of banned books are missing.38 The two collections of examination copies for which censorship information is indexed (those in the National Diet Library and the Library of Congress) contain only 11 percent of the titles censored between 1923

38    /    Preservation and 1945 (and significantly fewer of those censored between 1896 and 1923 as a result of losses due to the archive fire). The remaining 89 percent of banned titles are not forever lost. In the Japanese censorship system, the incompleteness manifested itself in a variety of ways. First, the banning of books was often retrospective (i.e., it occurred after publication), hence the phenomenon of the sold-out banned book. Second, the first half of the censor’s designation “banned from distribution and selling” (hatsubai kinshi) was often less enforced than the second, so that even books incurring prepublication bans or deletions were often distributed and circulated privately in unabridged format. So while there may be titles for which examination copies are in fact lost forever, in most cases other copies of a given banned title survive. For instance, the Modern Japanese Literature Archive in Tokyo houses copies of several first editions of banned books and magazines, such as Bungei shijō, Gurotesuku, and Hentai shiryō, that are missing from the extant censor’s archives. Similarly, some copies of famously banned books, such as the first edition of Kobayashi Takiji’s March 15, 1928, are conspicuously absent from the Home Ministry collections, but are relatively easy to find in private collections.39 So although the censor’s examination copies are extremely valuable for research on censorship, it is necessary to turn to archives beyond those that remain in the collections of the Home Ministry. In fact, recourse to other archives precedes the search for other banned books because the materials that are held within the Home Ministry collections are not self-evident. For instance, the graphs and statistics in the previous section were based on information from “exterior” archives: the closely related archive of the Publishing Police Records provided information necessary not only for calculating how many books are missing from the Home Ministry collection, but also for determining the titles of those books; statistics archived in the Publisher’s Yearbook provided numbers of books and literary books actually published. So it has been necessary from the beginning to move beyond the confines of one archive and into another. How far outside the censor’s archives of examination copies must one venture? The sense of a new beginning apparent in the surviving postearthquake archives of the Home Ministry’s examination copies is reinforced by other archival beginnings related to Japanese censorship in 1923. The destructive shocks of the quake led not only to a publishing boom—which was spurred on by the perceived need to replace the thousands of volumes destroyed, the “naturally burned books”—but also to a concomitant rise in the degree of censorship, legally, bureaucratically, and statistically.40  

 

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    39 Beyond the records of the publishing police, there are also various legal archives beginning at least with the promulgation in May 1925 of the Peace Preservation Act. The public statistical archives began in 1926 with the open publication of the number of materials censored in 1923, which was printed in the Publisher’s Yearbook, the publishing industry trade magazine. The myriad archives of publishers present modes of editorial self-censorship inspired, but not wholly controlled, by police action. The boom in publications of indexes of banned book titles is one such archive. The archive comprising essays on censorship published in major media outlets from 1926 to 1931 is a related trace of censorship. Finally, the rise and fall in use of fuseji provide another glimpse into how censorship was archived. In the following chapters, we will turn to some of these other archives outside (yet always suggested in and by) the Home Ministry collection. The necessity of such turns can be further elaborated by a further turn to other exterior archives, never entirely separate from modern Japanese censorship. As we journey beyond the ousiodic structures of a given archive, we might also cross the borders of a given Asiatic nation. One set of archives outside of those of the Home Ministry censors that would be relevant is the multiple archives of contemporaneous censors in other modern countries. Comparing the Japanese censorship from the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods with American censorship has been unavoidable for critics. Etō Jun implicitly compares wartime with Occupation censorship and Japanese with American when he calls Occupation censorship an aberration from democracy, symbolized, for him, by the United States. More recently, Katō Norihiro has pinpointed the Occupation as the birth, source, or origin of the “warped” space of postwar discourse in his readings of postwar Japanese literature. These critics focus on postwar literature to comment on the discursive conditions of the period, but, as the word postwar itself conveys, postwar is never entirely separate from its others, wartime and prewar. The implication of much of Katō’s work on the postwar is that things were different before 1945, that the postwar is “warped,” as opposed to an earlier flat, undistorted normalcy. Similarly, by culturally locating this literary shift in a particular nation-state (Japan), these critics implicitly seek to distinguish the shifts there from inherently related shifts elsewhere. In doing so, they tend to overstate their case. Comparing the incommensurable—that is, censorship under the centralized imperial regime of prewar Japan and the even more haphazard censorship of the United States in the same period—highlights some surprising global components of censorship while enabling an assessment of its historically  

 

40    /    Preservation and culturally contingent modes; for instance, by ignoring Japan’s participation in the League of Nations committee on obscenity or the widely shared international concern over proletarian uprisings after 1917, Etō and Katō presume a prewar Japanese censorship system hermetically sealed off from global events and an Occupation censorship system dominated by unnatural foreign concerns. Another necessary comparison is between the Home Ministry archives and the Prange collection of Occupation-period materials. And there was another related mode of suppression used by the Occupying forces in Japan, one which is only partially contained in the Prange archive and which would seem to cut against the notion that suppression and censorship are always archival, always leaving a trace. Books written before 1945 that were confiscated by General Headquarters (GHQ) have been the subject of a three-volume study by the reactionary historian Nishio Kanji. In his book Unsealing the Library of GHQ’s Burned Books (2008), Nishio makes the incendiary claim that the books seized and pulped by the Occupiers should be called “burned books.” 41 He argues that in addition to remembering Occupation-period censoring of works not yet published, we must remember the confiscation by Occupation Forces of over 7,000 books published under the previous regime. And while Nishio’s point contributes to our knowledge of the extent of US power over postwar Japanese discourse and appears to be a serious one for anyone grappling with the problem of assessing the total impact of censorship on transwar Japan, his equating confiscation with absence, his downplaying of the fact that the “burners” stipulated that books not be confiscated from “private homes or libraries,” and his conflation of seizures and pulping with burning reveal that his position is more political and polemical than historical. Nishio conveniently uses the rhetoric or epithet of “burned books” (funsho) to make the point that a certain strain of Japanese history has remained out of bounds for postwar thought. The confiscated books on which he focuses tell imperial stories about the causes of war, stories that Nishio claims were not only neutered but also rendered impossible due to the seizures and confiscations.42 It is true that these stories of war have not been the canonical explanations and justifications given since the war, but Nishio is wrong that they were rendered inaccessible or beyond the thinkable. In fact, his ability to make the argument for their absence is based on an overwhelming archival presence; he admits to being able to find over 80 percent of the confiscated titles at the National Diet Library alone. It is not clear whether the content of the absent 20 percent is similar to other books of the period that did not suffer confiscation, pulping, and burning. How

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    41 he arrives at the statistic is itself the result of an archival trace, a list of titles confiscated.43 And the documents upon which he bases his argument and which he even reprints in facsimile form specify the confiscations of propaganda materials “held in bulk” (with the exemption of “private homes and libraries”) and furthermore specify the means for marking the trace in a “periodic report” to be submitted on the fifteenth and last day of each month to GHQ beginning in March 1946. Nishio would be on better footing if the argument were launched purely in terms of the ideological manipulations attempted in the confiscations because some of the books seem to have been confiscated less for an overt rejection of American authority than for contrary ideas that lent indirect support to the war effort.44 Listed as book number 513 to be confiscated in 1946, Greater East Asian War Reports and Memoirs, a collection of stories published in 1943 as the reflections of famous writers and pundits who had recently visited the front, is obvious propaganda. One of the short tales by the Cultural War Criminal Ozaki Shirō, “MacArthur’s Boots,” gives a tangible sense of that which could not be allowed in the Occupation.45 “MacArthur’s Boots” was in the Occupation-period surely read as blasphemous bits of libel against the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, who in the fictitious story deserts the battlefield to run off with his Australian lover. It tells of a Japanese soldier being asked if he was a lieutenant general by an American prisoner of war at Luzon. Shocked, the Japanese private replies, “ ‘no, I’m only private; why do you ask such an impertinent question?’ ‘I know your rank by your boots,’ the prisoner replied.” The story then recounts how the character received the boots from those who seized MacArthur’s former residence in Manila on January 4. “A pair of boots that were not distinctive to Japanese eyes except that they were slightly different in style, distinctly gave the airs of a lieutenant general in the eyes of the Philippine troops. At a time when the name of MacArthur, who had fled to Australia, was all but eradicated from this earth, his boots alone on the feet of a private in the propaganda unit—Ozaki—preserved the memory of a lieutenant general. It was a heartening thought.” 46 The general scarcity of this kind of story during the Occupation may have gone a long way toward contributing to the generally uncritical reception of MacArthur after the war; yet, it is simply not true that the confiscation was the end of the story for postwar readers. The collection can still be found in libraries and in used bookstores today, and Ozaki’s story continues to circulate as part of a larger war reflection titled One Writer’s Confession and to be reproduced in various collections including his anthologized works.47 So at most, we  

 

42    /    Preservation can say the seizures may have played a propagandistic role during the Occupation alone. As book burnings, seizures, and other censorings can be both constative and performative acts—both removing books from circulation and announcing that such books should be removed from discourse48—and since Nishio’s appeal for us to remember the “book burnings” is itself a weak claim in terms of its actual destruction of the narratives at hand, we need to ask how Nishio’s notion of burning is performing. In contrast to his claims made elsewhere for Japanese textbooks to forget or omit the Japanese atrocities of the war and the violence to human bodies in China, Korea, and beyond, Nishio wants us to dwell on the violence to paper made by GHQ. Of course, not all of the books suffering the traumas of war and Occupation can be found and reconstructed. We cannot list all of the titles of the materials never written. And though the explicit archival traces provide a hint of the kind of books that would have been written, we have no certainty and can only rely on the traces. If what burned was not only the books but also the image of the burning of books in our minds, then the mass circulation of the notion of burned books behaves as censorship itself, a violence that haunts through residual, uncountable “internal” effects. Historically, state censors and those decrying censorship have both agreed that censorship removes or seeks to remove things from circulation either because those things are deemed to threaten the truth (as defined by the censors) or because they are said to contain the truth (as defined by the censored). Censorship is the process through which ideas have been treated as things with a direct relation to the truth, through which ideas have been manifest, solidified, and commodified as books, films, records, or any other kind of cultural material. In this view, censorship, like the archive, is a materialization, instantiation, and institutionalization of positivism. If we take Slavoj Žižek’s notion that fascism is defined by taking the ideational as material, then censorship and archives as institutions and practices are also fascism manifest.49 Since censorship takes ideas to be manifest in things—texts or people—it seems set to eradicate the world of particular ideas and truths. However, if ideas or truths are more than the paper on which they are printed and more than the writers who pen them, censorship will necessarily fail. But, censors are smarter than that. Though in practice they work on material, their true aim is always ideational. The chilling effect on the minds of writers in the wake of actual books being censored is intangible and immeasurable, and censors know this. So censorship targets books (things) to stop ideas, though its removal of things alone never quite succeeds. It does not have to for  

 

 

 

The Censor’s Archives and Beyond    /    43 the project to be a success. Censorship is always incomplete; yet the public act of removing books or even the existence of an office of censorship has the internalized effects of destroying ideas. The goal of the censor is to obviate the necessity of censorship, to have the censored do the work of censoring on their own.

2.  Indices of Censorship

The years after the Great Kantō Earthquake brought a rise both in the absolute number of bans on print material and in a particular mode of documenting censorship: the list or catalog of censored books. These two trends were not simply coincidental. The lists of banned books were a part of both the publishing boom and the related censorship boom of the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods. Bibliographers archived censorship for contemporary readers, repeating the primary method of secretly circulating censor’s reports that listed the titles of books banned.1 The character 秘 (secret or for internal use only) is stamped on every cover of the internal Publishing Police Report that listed bans for that month and their justifications. Although the reports clearly circulated within the Home Ministry headquarters in Tokyo and were sent to police stations in far-flung prefectures and colonies, they were generally not circulated within the publishing world. And over the course of the 1920s, censors increasingly cracked down on even mentioning the titles of banned books. In 1928, Saitō Shōzō, perhaps the most active of the bibliographers interested in banned books, published an article describing the secret Reports to the limited audience of his journal, Bibliography Exhibition. The article summed up the contents of a typical report in a matter-of-fact style with no prolonged commentary or interpretation. In his view, the report presented “useful material that could not possibly be seen in other magazines”; it was “for research, a truly inaccessible, precious source.” 2 Of course, for Saitō, who had already published one list of banned books and was working on another, this comment about the utility of the material is not surprising. But what would encourage Saitō to publish the article on the secret reports? What is the mode of resistance at work in the article or, indeed, in Saitō’s subsequent lists? What does cataloging and publishing the titles of the books deemed 44

Indices of Censorship    /    45 offensive by the state signify? Unlike chapter 1, which discussed “real” archives of banned books and presented information that was unavailable to the average citizen at the time of censorship, the remainder of this book considers how censorship was metaphorically archived for the reading public, especially during the material high point of censorship. As we have seen, the number of books published per year in Japan nearly tripled between 1923 and 1936, from 10,946 to 31,996.3 And these figures on books are commensurate with statistics on the publishing of magazines and other materials. Although the amount of publications classified as literature rose, other genres account for the majority of the publishing increases.4 Changes in the amount published parallel changes in the modes of dissemination, which had direct effects on the way literature was received and on the numbers of people that received it. The rise of cheap one-yen books, for instance, signaled a reading society on a scale previously unmatched. Increases in circulation in general heightened the chances that potentially offensive texts would land in the hands of the potentially offended. Thus, it is not surprising that peaks in bannings coincide with the flourishing of the mass market. In this moment of change, publishers deemed it natural to be interested in documenting and cataloging not only the infinitely archivable, creating record numbers of collected works, but also the patently unarchivable, that is, the explicitly banned. By one count, as many as thirty-two such lists were published between 1911 and 1932, thirty of which were published between 1920 and 1932, twenty between 1925 and 1932.5

Listing Lists While by no means the first instance of anyone tracking banned books, the publication of lists by independent scholars active in Japan from 1924 to 1965 brings into relief one mode of marking censorship, cataloging banned books for a limited audience at a time of strong state suppression. Of course, the organs of the Japanese publishing industry also periodically listed some recently banned books for their own limited audiences, but the contemporaneous lists published as books and pamphlets differed in their intended audience, scope, and presentation. Providing broad contexts by including historically banned books (most often from the recent past of the 1890s to the present of the 1920s or 1930s), the lists comprise a peripheral discourse on censored books that resides on the threshold of permissibility. Compilations by Saitō Shōzō and Odagiri Hideo, among others, attempted an earnest, database-like objectivity—the portrayal of facts untrammeled  

46    /    Preservation by personal opinion and whim—despite their awareness both of their own roles in selecting and of the tendencies of their banned book collections to narrate meanings. The lists had different meanings for the bibliographers and for the censors, and those meanings were clearly at odds. One significant difference between the published lists of the bibliographers and the secret lists of the censors is the importance placed on the listing of the publisher. That the legal responsibility lay jointly with the publisher and the author became much more clear in revisions to the Meiji-period publication laws. The censors therefore carefully noted this pertinent information. Independent compilers of indexes on the whole seemed unconcerned, only rarely listing publisher. They wanted to steer their readers not to those people or institutions responsible for the production of banned texts but toward the ideas, and they knew that the long lists could communicate something of the content lost because of censorship. For instance, a sample of titles taken from Saitō’s main list gives a sense of the keywords for banned discourse:  

(処女, virgins): Virgin Gates; Virgin Land; For Virgin’s Sake (自由, freedom): Freedom News; Establishment of a Free Society; Libertarians, Bread, Revolution, Liberty; A Tale of the Night, Liberty, Poetry (変態, perverse): Perverted Farces; Perverted Materials; Perverse Psyche (少女, young girls): 15 Girls; Friend of Girls; Bad Boys and Girls (愛, love): Love Marriage; Love Flowers; Love Light; Love People; Thought and Love; New Love Literature; Literature of Love; Love Literature; Love Letters; Self-Less Love; Love and Sexual Desire; Love and Sex (性, sex): Sex; Sex Education; Sex Research; Sexual Desire Research; Sex Review; Sexual Sensations; Sex and Love; Sex Literature (マルクス, Marx): Marxian; National Theories of Marxism; Under the Flag of Marxism (赤, red): Red Blood and Silver Knife; Red Bowl; Red Spirits; Red Desires; Red Heart; Red Morning; Red Train; Red Naked (Sekirara); Red Color Workers International; Red Light X; Red Streets (軍, military): Inscriptions of the Right (Imperial Military); Military Songs of the Russo Japanese War; Agricultural Military; Military Songs to Open the Eyes of Workers

Indices of Censorship    /    47 (労働, labor): Transformations of the Workers Movement; Workers Liberty; Worker Literature; Korean Workers (朝鮮, Chōsen/Korea): Young Koreans; Korean Passions; Manifesto for an Independent Korea (革命, revolution): The True Aims of The Taishō Revolution; The Age of the Revolutionary Movement for Boys and Girls; Two Revolutionaries; Russian Revolution and the Working Class (戦争, war): War Songs; Theory of the Decay of War; War against War; Russo-Japanese War and the Nikolai Church; Revolutionary War Postcards (共産, communist): The First Communist Manifesto; AnarchoCommunism; Communist Theory of the Anarchist Society; Intimidationism and Communism; The ABCs of Communism These keywords in the titles told their readers something about the content and quantity of titles being absented from discourse. One can even imagine the possibility of a statistical reading of the data in the lists that could be spun in a multitude of ways, for instance, counting and comparing instances of the word young girl to instances of virgin or prostitute, sex to anarchy, or kiss to Marx. And this statistical data analysis might be helpful if the lists were in fact as objective and complete as their own compilers desired. But in retrospect we can see how incomplete their data was.6 For the bibliographers at the time, the lists were not simply statistical data to be tallied but readable content that returned to the public something of what had been secreted away by censors. Before examining the leanings of the lists and the awareness of the bibliographers themselves about these tendencies, it will be useful to discuss some of the similarities and differences in the organization of the lists. Table 2.1 lists some of the inclinations and traits of Japanese lists of banned books and banned book collections. While such a chart necessarily omits other possible texts and categories—repeating on a small scale the tendencies of the lists themselves—it also provides a generic means of comparison, of reading, and of marking history.7 The lists share at least three characteristics: their titles all stress the ban as the defining criterion for inclusion in the compilation; their publication status was liminal (they were published in limited editions and had problems finding publishers); and they justified their existence (in their prefatory material and addenda) with a persistent stated belief in bringing to light things that had been obscured by shadows. The differences between  

 

48    /    Preservation them relate primarily to the mode of organization (alphabetical or chronological) and the range of contents. These various structures of organization suggest the bibliographers’ individual conceptions of intended audiences (readers) and their fears of suppression, which would necessarily affect the meanings, leanings, and listings of the lists. In no nominal sense, what was significant to all of these bibliographers about the texts whose titles are listed in their catalogs was the fact that they had been banned.8 All of the titles of the lists proclaim the ban as the primary category for consideration and suggest that the lists were collected because of the bans: A History of Literary Indictments in the Modern Arts (1924), History of Literary Indictments from 1868 to 1924 (1924), A Catalog of Banned Books (1927), The Great Bibliographic Chronology of Contemporary Literary Indictments (1932), An Index of Literary Indictments in the Arts from 1868 to 1935 (1935), Banned Works Collection (1948), The Shōwa Period Chronology of Banned Books, Magazines, and Newspapers (1965).9 The fact that all of the different catalogs of banned materials discussed here were originally published in limited or restricted editions speaks to the perception that there was a limited audience for the reception, the limited means of production, and an ever present potential for offense. While the circle of bibliographers and intended readers was small, the lists do not fall under the category of underground books (chikabon): most clearly adhere to legal means of publication by presenting the legally required information of author, publisher, printer, and place and date of publication. But many were published under convoluted provisos: “clandestine publication” (himitsu shuppan), “not for sale” (hibaihin), or “limited edition” (genteiban). The limited production of the lists suggests that their power to circulate, and therefore to offend, was curtailed. Without question, this mode of production flirted with the illicit, as the bans on other, more widely circulated works carrying the titles of banned books reveals. In October 1930, for instance, Ino Shōzō’s list of books published by the proletarian publishing company Senki was banned for including titles of books that had been banned.10 In April 1932, The Social Movement Dispatch was banned for advertising the banned Collected Works of Kobayashi Takiji.11 The censor’s comments on these two cases indicate that the title alone was considered an “advertisement” for a banned book and therefore censorable, which suggests that early in the 1930s censors were already concerned about the trace of censorship, already concerned that the way censorship was being archived for public consumption was drawing too much attention to the censorship system. In this context,

List with brief Historical preface essays with lists

Chronological Alphabetical

Author

Title

Publication Title if magazine

Classification

Order of List

First Field

Second Field

Third Field

Publication Limitations

Saitō Shōzō

Compiler

1935

Itō Chikusui

Author

Author

Limited edition 600 printed, 500 for sale of 500, not for sale 非売品

Law

Title

Odagiri Hideo

Hakkin sakuhinshū zoku

1957

Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō

Hakkinbon ōrai

 

 

 

Chronological

 

 

 

Chronological

Limited edition (number not given)

 

 

 

 

Author

Title

Chronological

List with brief prefaces

Saitō Shōzō Odagiri Hideo

1965

1960

essays Collection of Collection of formerly formerly banned works banned works previously previously unpublished unpublished

Odagiri Hideo

Hakkin sakuhinshū

1948, 1956 2nd edition

200 mimeographed 3,000 (according to GHQ from handcensorship etched plates office report)

Date

Author

Title

Chronological Alphabetical

List with brief List with brief prefaces addendum

Saitō Shōzō

Gendai hikka Meiji Taishō Shōwa bungei bunken dai hikka sakuin nenpyō

1932

Law (obscenity Title or sedition)

Akama Tōhō

Kindai bungei Kinshibon hikkashi shomoku

Title

1927

1924

Year

table 2.1.  List of Lists

50    /    Preservation publishing lists of banned titles was already a risky proposition by the time Saitō published his list in 1932. The status of these lists in general might be best contemplated by comparing Saitō’s liminal list of banned books published in 1932 (The Great Bibliographic Chronology of Contemporary Literary Indictments) and his mainstream Modern Japanese Literature Timeline (volume 63 of the popular Collected Works of Modern Japanese Literature, published by Kaizō in 1931, which was not concerned with banned literature per se). In contrast to the former, which was published at Saitō’s expense in a limited edition of 600 (100 of which were held presumably to be distributed by the compiler himself), the latter was part of a best-selling collection which was so lucrative that it enabled the Kaizō company to raise the salaries of all its employees.12 Saitō’s comment on the situation in the Kaizō volume is telling: “at the request of the Kaizō company, I previously completed the Nihon bungaku dai nenpyō [sic; The Great Timeline of Japanese Literature], but I myself was not entirely satisfied with the time and page space allotted.” 13 Notably, Saitō says that he was unable to include the information on banned material in the Kaizō volume not due to explicit censorship or even editorial restraint, but rather due to other practical considerations. In this comment, Saitō’s linking of the two works implies that the information on banning was deemed marginal but related to mainstream research. If, as the historian Carol Gluck claims of the world of encyclopedias, the world of The Modern Japanese Literature Timeline and The Collected Works of Modern Japanese Literature “is a relentlessly national one,” then the status of the banned list is peripheral, yet in relation to that national project it is a potentially subversive text.14 Another similarity between the lists of banned books is their stated reasons for existence. Some books are published to contribute to a dialogue with other books. Some are also published to be new or original, to fill certain gaps, or to present things that have not come before. More often these intentions are combined. What is curious about the prefatory material in the indexes is that the compilers consistently privilege the latter argument of presenting something new over contextualizing their work within historically contemporary events in censorship; and the compilers do this despite a deep awareness of contexts (indeed, presenting a list of titles of banned books as worthy of reading suggests their concern for context [title, publisher, date, place of publication] over content). Even Saitō, who had himself previously attempted lists of banned materials, proclaims each new list to be more complete and therefore more worthy than his previous efforts. It is as if the compilers’ being aware of the boom in these lists

Indices of Censorship    /    51 meant that they had to respond to a fear of merely repeating the work of some other compiler. But although the lists claimed to present something new, they also tended to reveal a desire to see the lists as a balance for a perceived discursive lack resulting from censorship. Underlining the value of its newness, Saitō’s longest list includes a foreword by historian, magistrate, and occasional editor Osatake Takeki. Comments by someone of Osatake’s stature may have acted as a kind of imprimatur shielding against potential problems with censors. The foreword served to legitimate the practice of listing banned books, while highlighting the particular importance of Saitō’s work. Lately, along with the flourishing of studies on Meiji culture, two or three works appeared in this vein. But one was limited to n ­ ewspapers, one to books and magazines, and one stopped only at aspects of philosophy; another was limited to social morals. There has yet to be a synthetic compilation of all these aspects. However, the unexpected release of this book compensates for this deficiency of the academic world and satisfies the longings of us scholars.15

The assertion of each list’s uniqueness appears to be a generic requirement for prefatory material. The preface to Akama Tōhō’s list also provides a justification for the existence of the present list by referring to other publications: “While around the Meiji 40s this kind of information was only tangentially dealt with in the bulletin of Waseda Literature and some other gazettes, nowadays I know of no journal for learning about such things.” 16 The preface to the postwar Odagiri collection of previously banned stories is perhaps the most bold in justifying its existence: “The intent of this volume is to bring to light aspects hidden until now by the controlling authorities of Modern Japanese Literature and, therefore, to be useful for new developments in literary research.” 17 In all of these cases, the justification for the existence of these lists that archive banned materials is that they divulge something hitherto hidden or unavailable. Though the lists of banned books are formally similar in their titles, modes of circulation, and stated raison d’être, there are differences among them. Differences in the mode of organization (either alphabetical or chronological) reflect the bibliographers’ concerns about and conceptions of their intended audiences, which then affect the meanings of the lists. The alphabetical mode tended to be seen as more useful as a reference for certain audiences than the chronological; booksellers, for instance, might have found the alphabetical list of more use as a resource, because it would help them avoid selling prohibited books.

52    /    Preservation The Akama collection is prefaced by the following statement offering just such a justification: “this list of books banned from selling and distribution contains what antiquarian booksellers should know, but cannot.” 18 Akama may have had a less altruistic reason to say his list was for the benefit of booksellers; his claim, made during a time of increased bans, bespeaks a fear that the list might be (mis-)taken by the Publishing Police or others as a guidebook for collectors rather than a book of caution. Whether Akama’s claim to be compiling for booksellers justifies the list or merely provides an excuse in the face of censors who might see the list as a kind of manual or guide is beside the point. What is interesting is that the list could be used in both ways. Like the Roman Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, a list might as easily serve high-minded figures commanding social respect as it would erotomaniacal, subversive collectors of rarities.19 The Itō Chikusui list of 1935, also alphabetically ordered, echoes this anxiety about ambiguous use in its addendum, which delineates an intended audience in its claim to exist for the purpose of being used as “a reference for researchers of the thorough study of books and magazines.” 20 While potential readers other than the stated addressees certainly existed for both alphabetical and chronological lists, the question of the intended audience is more overtly referenced in these alphabetical cases. The chronologically ordered catalogs, by contrast, are prefaced by bibliographers ruminating abstractly on the benefits of the lists for the good citizens of society and for scholars of culture. Though the specific lessons that the lists were supposed to have taught remain largely unclear, that many writers attributed to the lists the power to teach lessons is beyond doubt. The retired censor, film critic, education theorist, and crime fiction writer Takahiro Tachibana writes one of three forewords to Saitō’s lengthiest prewar list: Simply by examining the things banned item by item, I find there are no cases whatsoever where I have trouble discovering the reasons for the ban. And, when we consider it with an eye toward period and continuity, we can discover the silhouette of each period in the eye of the censor. Just as it is said that there is no literature separate from its age, there is no censorship completely disconnected from its age. More than having the job of opposing society, it is possible to analyze changes over time through the prism called censorship. As for this Chronologic Bibliography of Bans in Modern Times, I think I want it to be used not as a guide for hunting for used books, not even as a reference for dilettantes, but culturally for those meanings that I previously mentioned.21

Indices of Censorship    /    53 Here Tachibana presents an alternative reception for the lists. By mentioning and dismissing unintended though by no means impossible readers— dilettantes and collectors—he promotes the use of the work as a way of reading history for the benefit of society. Saitō himself echoes the view that the list can provide a sense of shifts in historical period: “When we look at this consistently from the beginning, we can come to know the transitions in a period’s taste, a period’s trends, a period’s crimes.” 22 Osatake Takeki’s foreword to Saitō’s longest list, written before the war and already referred to, also emphasizes the benefits of the list for a generalized readership:  

 

This history of literary indictments [hikka, literally, “evils of the pen”] is the history of thought expressed most frankly period by period. This is why the history of literary indictments in cultural history occupies such an important place. The roughly sixty years from Meiji through Taishō have been a period of extremely prosperous cultural progress and many literary indictments. Consequently, to know the history of Meiji and Taishō it is exceedingly vital to know the history of literary indictments; but in spite of this, there has yet to be such an adequate book.23

That the list tells us something of history is not to be doubted according to Osatake, but the anxiety of saying so under certain censors may be reflected in his multiple uses of motto mo (translated alternatively as “most,” “such an,” “extremely,” “many,” and “exceedingly” in the quotation). While the fact that each sentence in the quotation contains at least one use of the phrase may indicate Osatake’s lack of creativity or the difficult position of having to take the prefatory stance of praising what is to come, it may also reflect his concern about what exactly the message implied by such a list might be. The use of motto mo stresses that there is really, definitely, surely, without a doubt an importance to the history of banned books and, therefore, to the list that “frankly” expresses it, but nowhere is this importance clearly defined. Osatake expresses certainty that the list is not subjective or whimsical but rather “factual data,” a database for its own sake.

Completely Incomplete Lists Perhaps more than other lists of literature, indexes of censored books necessitate a self-consciousness among their creators of what they exclude. Many of the compilers had encountered censorship firsthand in various

54    /    Preservation ways and were committed to the long, hard work of archiving censorship. Their writing displays both an awareness of their roles as editors and compilers and their fears about the aspect of the job that necessarily involved exclusion, the same potentially violent mode of the censor. In prefaces and addenda, they tend to draw attention to the issue of completeness.24 While attitudes vary about the importance of omissions and the politics of exclusion, disclaimers are part of the genre of lists of banned books. Akama writes, “In this sundry catalog, there are many mistakes and omissions.” 25 Writing in the preface to his list published in 1932, Saitō recalls with embarrassment his earlier efforts, History of Calamities of the Pen in the Contemporary Arts and Supplement to the History of the Calamities of the Pen, and recognizes the incompleteness of even this new list of over 8,000 entries. Having finished compiling this manuscript, I now look over my pre­ viously published History of Art Calamities, the Supplement to History of Art Calamities published ten years later, and some two or three other things I wrote and am embarrassed that they were all mere fragmentary and general examinations. So this time around, I expected completeness, but, sure enough, I don’t know whether this is conclusive or not. . . . I still regret the spottiness of coverage of a year or two in the area of magazines and newspapers, but it was unavoidable; for this I apologize to researchers. However, I believe everything else will more or less serve.26

Perhaps a little haughty in his humility, Saitō is clearly frustrated that the dream of a complete list continues to elude him. And Saitō’s gaps are Itō’s treasures: When editing I found unknown discoveries and omissions and made a number of revisions and additions. Yamada Bimyō’s “Great Shame” and countless unknown others, for instance, were not included in the Kotensha Index of Banned Books, Saitō-sensei’s History Of Banned Art, or his great chronology. But, because I have these in my own library, they are presented here.27

Itō’s limited-edition, handwritten, mimeographed, self-published list might seem to present an opportunity to include all, in a realm where the censor is entirely absent. Itō, who chastises Saitō’s list as incomplete, however, does not include all the banned titles of which he himself is aware. He seems to suggest that compilers, too, have a sense of decorum: “I beg your understanding for having largely avoided extremely left-leaning things and extremely sexual things.” 28 Odagiri, too, is a victim of this anxiety of incompleteness. In the addendum to the second volume of his postwar

Indices of Censorship    /    55 anthology of banned literature he writes, “This volume collects banned works from 1921 to 1941, but it is not the case that all of the major banned works are collected here.” 29 Regardless of whether they are excuses for not producing complete lists, these myriad admissions of omissions reveal a concern about the power of the compilers, echoing their concern for the power of external authorities.30

Database Politics: Interpreters of Fate and the Time of Collection The work of record keeping and bibliography has been integral to all modern states and particularly to massive empires, and the work of collecting and itemizing lists of banned books is certainly not unrelated to ultranationalist modes of control and imperial pursuits of capital. 31 Discussing more recent modes of production than extant in prewar Japan, Jean Baudrillard writes, “What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.” 32 To no small degree, the compilers of indexes of banned books that were produced in a moment of both increasing production and a record number of bans fetishistically sought to replace what the results of imperial overproduction had denied: the banned books shunted away from the mainstream. But were these bibliographers mere book fetishists caught in the ebb and flow of market capitalism? Usually published in limited editions, catalogs of banned books tend to chronicle censorship as a series of titles and dates.33 On the surface, the compilers of these lists seem less concerned with the content of the books listed than were their police counterparts, who kept relatively meticulous records quoting the offenses contained in each book. The titles contained in the lists were seen by the compilers and commentators at the time not as information for its own sake but rather as material upon which grand narratives might someday be constructed. The compilers of these lists and the lists themselves attest to the necessarily apolitical and objective surface stance and the necessarily political and subjective inner nature of the task of the compiler. One thing is for certain: The lists were fated to become the key access point for future historians, bibliographers, and critics working on banned books. Walter Benjamin viewed the figure of the modern collector as a point of access connecting the fetishization of the historical object to the historical aura surrounding it in order to better understand the function and symptom that the collector represented. The collector as portrayed

56    /    Preservation by Benjamin holds the objects in his collection in awe while he preserves them for posterity.34 If bibliographers differ from collectors in any significant way, it is that they might also hold an interest in the content of that which they catalog and list. If in the list they were to some extent capitulating to the censor’s desire to remove content from circulation, in the publication of the titles they seem to have imagined themselves as returning something of substance back to the public sphere. The bibliographers thus assured themselves a role as “interpreters of the fate” of the objects, the very role censors typically imagine themselves providing.

(En-)countering the Censor Significantly, the two most active compilers of the transwar period, Saitō and Odagiri, both had personal experiences with the censor before their compilations.35 Saitō encountered censorship as early as 1916 and was continually aware of the presence of the censor in his writings through at least 1958, two years before he died. Recollecting his early Taishō experience of trying to republish banned works in an anthology, and drawing a direct connection to Odagiri’s postwar collection of banned materials, Saitō recalls the censor’s intrusion. While we may think that banned works will eventually have their day and be published, he explains, this is not necessarily always the case: “The collection of works that I planned was the 1916 Meiji bungei sokumenshō;36 and I got as far as the fifth volume of the planned twenty volumes; but in the end banned works are, of course, ‘banned,’ so suspension was unavoidable.” 37 Saitō says that his failure to republish the works themselves led to his project of archiving the titles of banned books, which eventually resulted in his list published in 1932. So the lists themselves were seen as a way to carry on the project of publishing the unpublishable, presenting the absent; and in this way, the nature of the lists as inhabiting a state of quasi permissibility is best understood. Similarly to Saitō, Odagiri used the occasion of the publishing of his postwar collection of banned prewar works to mention his encounters with earlier censors: I too had personal experience of the censor. At the end of 1942 I wrote “On Disguised Characters” at the suggestion of Narasaki Tsutomu of the editorial board of Shinchō; it had gone so far as to make it to the galley and proof stage when it was deemed hazardous and was not published. . . . And still when I published the essay “The Source of National Learning” in the April 1943 issue of Chūō kōron, the editorial board

Indices of Censorship    /    57 was called to the Metropolitan Police Headquarters and were threatened that, “publishing this kind of essay is sheer impertinence.” 38

And in his later multivolume list of titles based on actual police reports, Odagiri goes on to recount his difficulty in obtaining a copy of Kobayashi Takiji’s novel March 15, 1928; once he finally acquired it in 1932, Odagiri recalls his secret reading of the story in one dark, sweaty sitting.39 That Odagiri prefaces both his collection of banned materials and his multivolume list with recollections of his own experiences of writing and reading under censorship suggests that the genre of collecting banned materials itself obliges one to recall these experiences. The compilers’ fears and concerns regarding censorship were confirmed by the real obstacles each encountered. Significantly, Akama acknowledges not only the precarious position of his list, but also the issue of responsibility that the publication of the list itself implied: “a book like this, in which I have tried to treat books that were banned, mixes up the morals of the beautiful state and the national moral fiber; so it bears no light responsibility.” 40 In the preface to his longest list, however, Saitō downplays the impact of the authorities in the publishing world. On the kinds of materials censored in the recent past, Saitō writes: “Since we have no feeling of danger now, we deal with these things in retrospect; and already we have completely resurrected some of these in three or four zenshū. I believe that it is not insignificant to lump together these as a cross section of the old bibliographies (documents) that built today’s Shōwa.” 41 That Saitō could be so optimistic in 1932 is not surprising. Osatake’s claim that “young people are so removed from that period that they don’t believe that Marx was forbidden to be imported for a long time” intimates a widespread lack of explicit awareness about the rise in the severity of censorship from the late 1920s.42 It seems that, though there was some implicit sense of the severity reflected in these statements to the opposite effect and in the publication of these lists, there was no explicit connection made at the time. Because of the haphazard application of the laws, for example, writers could easily mistake the publication of the Marukusu Engerusu zenshū (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, published by Kaizō from 1928 to 1935) as the harbinger of a relatively free press, even though it lacked “The Communist Manifesto” and the percentage of total books published that were banned peaked during this same period.43 In short, writers at the time did not have access to these statistics and the impact on discourse was somewhat delayed. But from today’s distant critical standpoint, we can see the sampling error of overvaluing the publication of a few individual texts. Furthermore, the

58    /    Preservation scholar Miriam Silverberg’s significant caveat to the first publication in the world of the “complete” works of Marx and Engels that the editors worked “within the broadest possible limits in Japan at the present time” should make us wary of taking the publication alone to mean that censorship had lessened in this period;44 the publication should remind us of the existence of internalized components of a strong external censorship at the time and after.45 (The fact that both Saitō and Osatake mention with apparent glee the recent publication of Marx also gives us reason to suspect that things were not so rosy; in a utopian discursive system of free speech, such a statement would be entirely without grounds for celebration.) Oblique references to the state of publishing during a state of emergency provide one indication of the contemporary censorship preserved by the lists. Itō’s comments in the addendum to his prewar list also make mention of the current censor. Since Shōwa began, indictments of art decreased even more and erotic books came to the fore; however, lately even the books of sexual desire have been all but swept away, and other indicted books also seem to have become extremely few and far between. Needless to say, it is truly amazing that the readerly world that rises in the state of emergency in Japan has naturally awakened.46

Befitting the genre of the list preface, Itō’s comments place the presence of contemporary censors at the forefront. In his postwar collection of banned literature, Odagiri makes some generalizations about censorship in the Meiji-period imperial discursive space that one cannot help but read as a reference to his own postwar moment under neocolonial GHQ censors: “From the wounds of prosecution and bans on selling, authors and editors have been made to learn that everywhere authors appear, authorities may stand in their way.” 47 Insisting that authorities impede authors “everywhere” appears to be a not-so-subtle reference to Occupation censors. In the introduction to his postwar anthology of banned stories, Odagiri attempts a lofty explanation of its purpose, presenting the stories as a sort of chrestomathy for learning the lost language of banned books: At what point do authors, as they step forward in their literary pursuits, get pounced on by the controlling authorities? When the authorities do pounce, how do they bare their dark essence? Just how far does Japanese literature possess freedom of expression? To make this bibliographically clear, to concretely clarify from which point things are strictly sealed off from bans on selling, and, above all, to give readers the chance to read the masterpieces unfairly hidden by the dark controlling authorities: these are the aims of this volume.48

Indices of Censorship    /    59 Though he nowhere explicitly mentions the Occupation-period censorship to which he was subject, Odagiri raises the issue of an unjust prewar censorship. The mention of Occupation censorship was banned by GHQ, so this nonmention may have been an effect of censorship, and it may also be read as one of the only methods for commenting on the otherwise hidden GHQ discursive incursions at the time.49 The lofty explanation for the existence of his collection may even be read as a defense against possible attacks by the GHQ censor who might otherwise infer that this was about current-day censorship. In the several-page SCAP censorship report on the publication of Oda­ giri’s Collection of Banned Works (Hakkin sakuhinshū, 1946), which was not, in the end, banned by the Occupation authorities, we find evidence of what the occupying censors and the Meiji imperial censors shared. The report states, “There were two minro [sic] disapprovals of anti-capitalistic propaganda and one flagrant violation of the paragraph attacking American Christian missionaries.” 50 That the banned texts of the mid-to-late Meiji period collected by Odagiri should still offend even under vastly different authorities is not contradictory. Despite regime change, authorities continued to protect themselves in similar ways. And furthermore, the report itself attests to the sensitivity of the Occupation forces to the very subject of censorship. But the stipulations of Occupation-period censorship cannot account for the gradual disappearance of privately published and widely circulated lists of banned Japanese materials. In the period from 1935 to 1948, the number of privately published lists seems to have been on the wane. On the one hand, this could easily be explained by changes having nothing to do with censorship (the end of a general publishing boom of which the lists were a part, the oversaturation of a topic that was no longer trendy, and so on), especially when considered along with the phasing out of lists published in industry trade magazines such as Publisher’s Annual (Shuppan nenkan), which published some lists of banned books until 1937.51 On the other hand, reasons that have a direct connection with censorship may be more persuasive here. As we have already seen, there were cases where censors banned some print materials for merely mentioning other banned titles. But given the system of private publications and small print runs, it is highly unlikely such bans could have been the sole reason for the fading of the boom. A more likely explanation is that the vanishing of these lists coincided with a decrease in the number of books censored. When the actual number of banned books decreased from 1938 through 1945, no major work listing or collecting banned materials was published. That

60    /    Preservation these traces of banned books coincide with peak moments of explicit censorship is not coincidental; the numerous bans had made the lists important reminders of contemporary trends. The passing of these archives of censorship hints that more implicit ramifications of the censor’s violence had become salient. That the proliferation of lists of banned books in Japan coincided with sweeping changes in legal and practical limitations on allowable discourse and with some of the major publishing booms of the period is only surprising if we expect, as Etō Jun and others do, that the more oppressive the system of censorship, the less prevalent is its trace.52 What the relative prevalence of the trace of the censor in prewar Japan suggests, rather, is that lists and other archives, be they examination copies, police reports, indexes, essays, literary works, or marks of deletion, connote just the opposite: that when censorship is deadly and violent to texts and authors, the trace is more prominent. However (and here we have perhaps the most trying caveat), often this trace is only apprehensible after the fact. The ebbing of the tide of explicit censorship in the mid-1930s of course would suggest only to the most crass of positivists that censorship was easing. The indices of censorship are multiple, but knowing where to look and how to find them is not always obvious.

3.  Essaying the Censors The Deaths of Humor and Writing I think many people are asking what has happened to the jokers (jōkā wa doko ni iru ka)? At least two or three satirical poets are being held in custody. —Tosak a Jun 1

 

When is the censor no longer a laughing matter? Who imagines the death of the censor? Why write that censors kill texts? The rhetorical strategies of essays documenting the phenomenon of censorship reflect, recast, and occasionally resist the modes of suppression they target. Throughout the twentieth century in Japan, writers expressed contempt for their censors. Their scorn manifested itself in a variety of rhetorical registers and drew on a number of metaphors connected to identifiable, historically contingent modes of censorship. Most strikingly, a humorous tone prevalent in essays on censorship in the early part of the century fades in the climate of increased activity by the office of censorship following the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923. But one trope remains constant, one that places censorship and censors on par with death and killing. If humor is one of the main differences between early essays on modern Japanese censorship and later ones, the metaphor of death as it relates to censorship is certainly one of the continuities. Reading this metaphor of death against these historicizations of humor reveals what is at stake in the relationship between humor and censorship preserved in these essays: the ubiquitous possibility of complicity. While earlier essays on censorship written in the Meiji period often use scathing humor to portray the censor and the work of censorship, by the mid-1920s this kind of attack on censorship was largely replaced with more serious tones. The change seems on the surface to reflect concern about transformations in the activity of the state censor, which expanded its office, purview, and severity after 1923.2 The literary world responded to the increased activity of the censor with a flood of essays; this boom in 61

62    /    Preservation discussions of censorship is visible in special editions of magazines and in essay collections in newspapers dedicated to the topic beginning in 1926.3 But by the early 1930s, essays on censorship are more difficult to find. And this vanishing of essays may have been due, in turn, to the censor’s increasing sensitivity to the ways in which the essays could reinject banned material into public discourse. Whether due to a direct crackdown by the censors, to the internalization of the censor’s standards, or to the inevitable fading of newsworthy attention, only a handful of essays dealing directly with the topic of censorship in Japan date from 1936 to 1945.4 And those published during the Occupation deal almost exclusively with wartime censorship, ignoring contemporary censorship largely because of the postwar censor’s stipulation against making reference to the SCAP censorship. Understanding the history of the relative disappearance of humor as a precursor to the fading of the discourse itself is a necessary and pragmatic first move in reading the essays on censorship. However, this simple history may lead to hasty conclusions, for instance, that the presence of humor in some periods means that censorship was less oppressive than at others when humor was relatively absent. We should at least recognize the possibility that when censorship is a laughing matter, it may be more repressive than, or at least as repressive as, when it is not. Further, “disappearance” never really means total absence. As humor vanishes from contemporary essays at the end of Taishō, it remains in the trace form of the earlier essays from the Meiji period and in some contemporary fictionalizations of censorship. Similarly, the dwindling of essays on censorship in the late 1930s and 1940s does not mean there are no living remnants of unpublished, unwritten, or unthought critiques from that time; the boom in humorless essays on censorship left a trace of discourse on the imperial censor present into the later period during the 1930s and early 1940s when new essays were not being penned as often. From this historical outline we might sketch a provisional theoretical model: in moments when the censor is more imagined in private than experienced in public, critical attack through a rhetoric of humor that scoffs universally at all forms of censorship is possible. The expression of scorn for the censor stated in serious tones also corresponds to a specific kind of censorship, characterized by bureaucratic and external controls that are strong and explicit. In the implicit wake of an explicit regime of censorship, a wake whose violence to texts is uncountable, public discourse on the censor itself dies.

Essaying the Censors    /    63

Laughing Matters: The Censor Is Irrational I eventually came to learn the everyday language used by Kappa. Likewise I came to digest the morals and customs of the Kappa. In all, the most puzzling thing was that Kappa laugh at what we human beings think serious. At the same time, they consider serious what we  human beings consider laughable. . . . In short, their notions of humor have entirely different standards from our notions of humor.5 “Isn’t this censorship wanton?” “Huh? It’s more progressive than the censorship of any other ­country. . . .” 6

With a satirical derangement on par with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s novella Kappa (1927)—about travels to a land of mythical creatures recalled by a man incarcerated in an asylum—raises the issue of the cultural relativism of both humor and censorship. It is a given that what is funny—or legally offensive—for one culture may not be so for another; the same things are not always funny or censorable in different historical periods. Akutagawa’s satire caricatures the local nature of humor and censorship within a “single” nation, society, or culture over time. His fantasy world acknowledges neither the “multiple cultures” of humor within “one culture” at a given time nor the changes in the sense of humor over time in “one culture.” Of course, we need not expect cultural or historical sensitivity in a depiction of a fantasy world, but we can note in Akutagawa’s Kappa a view of the national and cultural relativity of humor and censorship. In Kappaland, what was once censored is always censored, and what one Kappa laughs at all Kappanese find humorous. There is no marked space for small communities of humor or censorship, no time limit on when something is funny or taboo. The historical and spatial specificity of censorship to humor is an essential part of the modern philosophical understandings of both that is evidenced in work on the topics from Marx to Freud, from Slavoj Žižek to Lenny Bruce.7 In Akutagawa’s vision, however, humor is culturally locatable, but not infinitely so. Although a kind of humor is connected to one land or another, the text resists extending the process to the level of subcultures or even individuals, because to historicize either humor or censorship to the point of the private individual would be madness, as the speaking position of Akutagawa’s narrator in an asylum attests. Several questions arise from this glimpse of another place: What constitutes a laughing matter? When and where is something not a laughing matter? Does laughing matter? And what is the matter with laughing at  

 

 

 

64    /    Preservation something serious? When censorship is the matter under consideration, the stakes of laughter are high, since they involve nothing less than freedom of speech. Before turning to the seriousness of essays in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it will help to examine a more humorous counterpoint on the subject from an earlier time, such as, for example, Uchida Roan’s article, written in 1908, on the banning of his story “The Broken Fence.” 8 In that essay, “The Problem of Banning Works of Art,” Uchida jokingly thanks the censor for giving him literary fame. He further exposes the absurdity of censorship by equating the inclinations of the censor to a joke: “This is like the joke where the virgin breaks the mirror to forget her own ugliness.” 9 In other words, the truth is that there are ugly things about society, but the censor’s breaking of the mirror (by banning naturalist or socially realistic art that reveals naked ugliness) eliminates only its image or representation and not the facts reflected in the art.10 And Uchida underlines the (il-)logic of censorship with comic flare by pointing to the censor’s hypocrisy: Don’t the recent assemblies advocating the cause of moral reform really have empty goals? Furthermore, every day the embodiment of the bacteria that produces scandalous filth while establishing colonies proclaims moral reform all the more and, thereby, deceives the world. Those with worldly rank still happily deceive public opinion, take advantage of the lack of the pitiful society’s power to resist, and wantonly take it upon themselves to challenge immorality and depravity. Moreover, among wives celebrated for feminine virtue and civilization, aren’t there some that do not even influence their own husbands? In this way, households supervised by wise women present a phenomenon truly on par with that of the impure red light districts. If these strange phenomena did not exist, I would be happy and you could accuse me of mistaken lies. However, while pillaging the upper-bred society, Prime Minister Syphilis, Cabinet Member Lust, Sir Gamble, and the rest of the gathering gentlemen bring about lewd manners and filthy customs that reach even the ear of a hermit who hides deep in the mountains. Even children and servants know that so-called gentlemen indulge themselves wholly in carnal pleasures and toxic power, trampling on morals, disrupting humanity, engaging in heavy drinking in broad daylight, decaying manners, breaking customs, philandering, and gambling. In today’s world, “of society” means frivolous, sly, ­sycophantic, ­corrupt; and “gentlemanly” means nothing more than villainous, ­disgraceful, obscene, obsequious, buffoonish, libertinistic, and roguish. And furthermore, “manly” has the meaning of bold injustice and immorality; and as “justice” and “integrity” are labels for dysfunctional, they are met with nothing more than scornful laughs.11

Essaying the Censors    /    65 While it is evident from this passage that Uchida did not take censorship lightly, his clearly mocking tone is evidenced in his acerbic invectives and his stepping into the rhetoric of the censors. Unlike the Freudian notion of jokes and humor, where the parent is able to laugh at what is deemed of serious import to children, here even the children (citizens) know that censors (parents) are hypocrites.12 By laughing at the “morality” of the censor, Uchida transforms his readership into the knowing parents who laugh at the childlike censor. At first glance, some later essays on censorship share some of the characteristics of Uchida’s work, but a closer look reveals the differences. For instance, in November 1926, the scholar and translator of Russian literature Nobori Shomu thanks the censor for his courtesy and “gift of leniency” in letting his work pass with only one page excised. But while Uchida’s sarcasm may not be entirely absent from Nobori’s later essay, published in an issue of the magazine Arts Market (文芸市場) dedicated to the problem of censorship, we do get the sense that Nobori is in fact grateful for having been able to get a difficult work with leftist leanings published. And in this moment of a more active bureaucratic censor, the proletarian playwright and novelist Fujimori Seikichi claimed that censorship was ridiculous and a joke because of its illogical practice. In the special censorship edition of Kaizō published in 1926, he writes: “Isn’t it a joke that there is not even the right to an administrative trial in the case of bans on selling and distribution or bans on performance and the like? They say, ‘We have freedom of speech and expression. However, if it is forbidden, you have no right to speak.’ This is an all-too-obvious logical flaw. It would not be unfair to call this puerile.” 13 Fujimori, like Uchida, had suffered bans on his work and was intimately familiar with the censorship process. But for him, the irrationality of censorship is a joke with the logic of an “infantile trick” (子供欺し). Less satirical than Uchida, Fujimori builds his argument with staid rhetoric; referring to censorship as a joke and as ridiculous is significantly different than treating it with humor. Even outright mockery of the censor in the later period lacks Uchidastyle humor. In the same special issue of Arts Market, the critic Nii Itaru uses the technique of recounting an interrogation: Trials for incidents of indictments of writings are strange affairs. And of course that is because they question what is obvious. Q: And what’s this “Epigonen”? A: It’s German! Q: What does it mean!?

66    /    Preservation A: It means a follower. Q: And what is “a follower”? A: (In blank surprise) Can’t we say a follower is a subordinate? Q: I get it. OK. This kind of questioning requires complete perseverance, and you inevitably become disgusted with it.14

Yet while the interrogation scene could easily have been made humorous, Nii’s comment immediately following suggests that laughter is impossible. Though the censor is ludicrous, the writer can only endure his illogical interrogation. In the last line, Nii makes clear all that had changed since Uchida’s article mocking the censor in 1908. No longer is the censor a naïve virgin who breaks her own mirror because she cannot bear her own shortcomings; instead, the censor is merely a stupid, immutable annoyance of life that must be endured. The ambivalence of moderate critiques of the censor tends to center on this recognition of the inevitability of the existence of the censor. The introductory essay to the September 1926 Kaizō special issue on censorship calls the current censorship system “outdated” and “irrational,” as does the preface to a collection of essays published by the Asahi News in 1929. (The word fugōri [不合理], “irrational,” “unreasonable,” or “absurd,” appears repeatedly in the essays of the mid-to-late 1920s.)15 One of the essays in the Asahi collection dedicated to the problem of censorship, written by the critic, translator, bibliophile, and collector Ōya Sōichi, does even more than most to critique the censor using the issue of rationality: Surveying today’s society anyone can feel that more often irrational things are oppressing and destroying rational ones. This can be very well understood by only looking at one sheet of the newspapers pub­lished every day. . . . [M]oreover, when irrationality destroys rationality, it is backed by violence. It is thought that the word violence is an extremely dangerous word, but in short violence is the strategy used when irrationality destroys and suppresses rationality. . . . Moreover, the most irrational thing, to the extent that anyone who looks at it would think that there is nothing more irrational, is today’s censorship system.16

Ōya’s emphasis on the violence of an illogical censorship over its nonsense and absurdity begs his readers to take his statement of illogicality seriously. But his attack on the censor is not the complete rejection of all censorship that this quotation alone might lead us to believe. Ōya ultimately argues for the reform of the censorship system. As part of his critique, Ōya goes on to list the ways in which the censorship system is irrational:

Essaying the Censors    /    67 there is no opportunity to appeal a decision of the censor; decisions can be local rather than national and therefore geographically uneven (some things banned in Yokohama are permitted in Tokyo); and the standards seem to be set case-by-case. In short, the standards for censorship are not applied uniformly.17 By exposing the irrationality of a censorship that is not uniform and complete, Japanese critics of the 1920s and 1930s left open the possibility that their arguments could just as easily be used in the opposing vein: that the censorship system needed to grow more restrictive to be logical.18 By contrast, in the United States, where most of the legal censorship took place within the judicial court in the public view rather than the executive arm of government (as they were in Japan, where the secret machinations of Home Ministry censors could only be conjectured through traces), critiques of the American censor from the 1890s all the way through the early 1940s consistently equated any censorship with nonsense (e.g., employing the somewhat silly rhetoric of “nonsenseorship”).19 By definition, any censor was nonsensical: giving the censor sense or logic was impossible. The introduction to Nonsenseorship, a collection of essays protesting censorship, deems the censor to be so without logic that his voice is unnecessary and, indeed, censorable: “The prohibitionists and censors are not represented. They require, in a levititious literary escapade like this, no spokesman. Their viewpoint already is amply set forth. Moreover, likely they would not be amusing.” 20 As in Japan at an earlier period, in the United States the censors were to be laughed at, though their own voices were not considered amusing. In Japan, from the mid-1920s the censors were neither to be laughed at nor found amusing, no matter how ludicrous and unfair their practices were deemed, though they were occasionally referred to as “a joke” or as “ridiculous” (滑稽). The retreat from a thorough rejection of censorship that we see in Ōya’s critique persists through the period. In “Responsibilities of/for Censorship” (1940), the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi writes, “If we must investigate the issue of their [the writers’] responsibility, shouldn’t we similarly investigate the issue of the responsibility of the censoring authority that hitherto gave permission to publish? Isn’t it one-sided to investigate writers and publishers and leave the responsibility of government officials unquestioned?” 21 At first glance, this seems a variation of Marx’s radical argument that if it is wrong to prescribe the temperaments and tendencies of censors, then it is also wrong to proscribe the temperaments and tendencies of writers.22 But while Miki’s critique may seem to be aimed at the existence of the censor—to be making the claim that no censor could ever be entirely responsible and that, therefore, censorship should not exist—in  

 

68    /    Preservation the end he transforms his argument for the responsibilities of the censor into one for the delineation of immutable standards for censorship so that writers could always know what they faced. By 1940, there was little hope for reform let alone repeal of censorship. The problem of having standards that were logically enforced and that treated subjects equally before the law was of widespread concern and was expressed in the boom of essays in the late 1920s and early 1930s. But critiques of the censor on the grounds of the mysterious, unknowable, haphazard enforcement of laws in some ways echo the very paradoxical logic of the censor they sought to undermine.23 Consider, for instance, the summation of the liberal poet Shiratori Seigo (aka Shōgo) in a postcard editorial published in an issue of Bungei Shijō on November 26: “In short, the standards for bans on sales and distribution are not particularly determined; rather, it seems that there are cases when bans are decided on the basis of the sentiment in a book’s title or the censor’s mood.” 24 Shiratori implies that if the standards were decided and explicit, and if the decisions were based on content and fact instead of surface issues of title and tone (i.e., style or form), then he would have no objections. The argument on the issue of standards becomes even more complex than this; for instance, we find, on the one hand, calls for strictly defined and applied standards so that artists and publishers could avoid the expense of being censored and, on the other hand, demands that the standards change with the times.25 Humor allowed Meiji critics like Uchida to explicitly attack censorship more completely and fundamentally, but ultimately their attacks were ineffectual at stopping the machine of state bureaucracy; the later, serious engagement with the censor implies more ambivalence toward the practice of censorship, and yet such criticisms had a practical policy effect. After the phasing out of the one-on-one consultations offered under the consultation system (内閲制度), writers made many more critiques of the system as irrational, underlining that less contact with the censor meant more misunderstandings. And the numerous publications lamenting this irrationality led to the stopgap measure of convening more group meetings between publishers and censors (懇談会) as a substitute, albeit an inadequate one, for the one-on-one consultations.

Ineluctable Censorship: Whether to Laugh or Cry Writing on the censorship of writing flirts with taboo. Such writing itself risks incurring censorship. In most Japanese articles on censorship from

Essaying the Censors    /    69 Meiji through Taishō, writers allude to their own contact with the censor and in some cases they even summarize banned works. For the essayists (as was the case for the compilers of lists discussed in the previous chapter), the experience of being censored is a badge of honor that confers a right to speak on the topic. Therefore, their essays often include narratives of personal encounters with censors. At the same time, these writers state a concern for a growing self-censorship that results from these experiences with external censors and subsequent efforts to avoid them. Calling protests against censorship “appropriate and fitting” (当たり前), Masamune Hakuchō notes in the 1926 special edition of Kaizō that he is not as concerned about the explicit banning of books as he is about more submerged, subtle, and insidious kinds of censorship, including the growing use of redaction marks by authors and editors anticipating the external censors. Ōya Sōichi also emphasizes the “hidden” violence of censorship. He writes, “We know that much violence is hidden in various things today. Of course, of that, a large part is violence that the police crack down on, but we must think about the fact that there are also many other kinds of violence.” 26 He later elaborates: There is something behind the censorship system today. Everyone reads newspapers and magazines, and sometimes there appears incom­ prehensible Japanese like ○○, △△, and ××; or it often happens lately when you go to see a play that the actors gesture with their hands and feet in an excessive pantomime and remain silent. When you see these things, think about the fact that, behind it there is something so powerful that it closes our eyes, covers our ears, and shuts our mouths.27

Ōya and Masamune object to the use of deletion marks to cover intended signification; this mode of self-censorship transforms the public into monkeys that cover their eyes, ears, and mouths so that they will not see, hear, or speak any evil. Essays archiving censorship highlight an internal censorship process that is concomitant with the external one. Other essayists also point to the perceptible and internal collateral violence of censorship to discourse. Miki Kiyoshi provides an example of the effect of the implicit censorship to which Ōya and Masamune refer when he notes that censorship as of late has grown worse even for “a certain unnamed person known as a right-winger.” 28 By leaving the writer unnamed, Miki suggests that the name itself is now unmentionable. He goes on to state that he agrees with neither right-wing thinking nor liberal views that there should be unlimited freedom for the public presentation of research. For Miki, it is only “natural” (当然) that writers publicly pre-

70    /    Preservation senting their views be held accountable. He is aware, however, of both the necessity of and the problems with an internalized censorship that function in his own essay. He writes that if censorship continues in this direction (i.e., in having internalized side effects) without reform, “scholars that only prostitute learning and truckle to the public will increase. Won’t that result, on the contrary, in exerting a bad influence on the thought of the people? My hope is for the censoring authorities to lay hold of firm standards from their true sense of responsibility regarding the elevation of everlasting national culture.” 29 And so at the moment of arguing against a certain kind of censorship and recognizing the damage it will do—and has done—to discourse, Miki calls for transhistorical standards so that censorship will not seem so capricious. Whether the latter is a turn in his thinking or a logical conclusion from the former depends on whether we think Miki himself is a prostitute of learning, a pimp of propaganda, and a truckler to the times. Others most certainly did truckle on the issue of censorship; this is clear from an editorial comment in a May 1930 special edition of Shinkō eiga devoted to censorship. Following standard practice for magazines publishing on a timely issue, editors had sent out a postcard questionnaire (enquête) asking noteworthy writers to comment on recent censorship restrictions. In the introduction to the publishing of the responses, the editors wrote:  

 

The editorial board invited responses from many people about this [recent censorship increase], but we only received the responses carried here. Overall we asked producers, critics, writers affiliated with NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio), company people, movie theater people, and censors, but many answers were unreturned because of diffidence toward the censors.30

The editorial comment here, that critiquing the censor was assumed to be censorable, indicates the degree to which writers were conscious of the external censor. Though no laws at this time specifically designated articles on censorship illegal, as explicit censoring regulations would during the Occupation, the increased numbers of books being banned (in what Tsuboi Shigeji called “the recent fascisization of censorship”) and the seemingly random applications of standards would have contributed to this fear.31 The laws against disturbing the public order, for instance, could have been invoked to censor such writings about the censor if they were deemed disruptive enough. And as discussed in the previous chapter, even the mention of a title of a banned book was occasionally cause for offense.

Essaying the Censors    /    71 The views of censorship elaborated in essays on censorship that describe the haphazard application of laws as irrational and point to a direct connection between external and self-censorships are also exposed in the caricatures of censors found in cartoons, poetry, and fiction. Despite the seriousness of nonfiction essays in reaction to the censor during the 1920s, humor about the censor was not completely lacking in these cartoon and fictional depictions. Lampoons of the censor in the creative arts exist,32 but even they seem only to display the darkest humors clouded by fear and predicated on violence. In a visual critique appearing in February 1928 in the “Against Unfair Censorship” (Futō ken’etsu hantai) special edition of Proletarian Arts (Puroretaria geijutsu), a lyrical portrayal of the censors is given. Suzuki Kenji’s caricature “The Censors’ Saliva” launches the frequent critique that offense is in the eye of the beholder (figure 3.1). In this case, the censors appear all too eager to take offense. As if ready to be improperly stimulated, one censor leans forward on his chair with slobber drooling down his face and “just as I thought, it’s all contraband” springing from his forehead. The other two censors sit erect, fully engrossed with what meets their gaze, in this case the eyes of us readers of the proletarian journal itself. So the cartoon interpellates the reader as something bannable or, as Adachi Gen puts it, “The sensational ‘contraband’ that causes the drool is not portrayed, but those who look at this cartoon are made to recall what is between them and just in front of the view of the three censors,” the magazine itself.33 What is ultimately “unfair” about the censorship is, according to the cartoon, that censors are allowed to read and salivate over precisely the same thing that they forbid others to read. The image is so striking because it clearly emphasizes that the very object in the hands of the reader at that moment could be the whetter of the censor’s appetite. This public moment (like so many other archival traces reacting to censorship) marks a verifiable event occurring on the cusp between external power and self-patrolling. An even more biting political cartoon had appeared the previous month in the January 1928 issue of Liberation (Kaihō) (figure 3.2). While critiquing visually the violence of the censorship system controlled by puppeteer militarists, the cartoon calls for reform (and not abolition) of the censorship system in the accompanying caption.34 Although there may be black humor at work in the cartoon, there is nothing uproariously funny. While “freedom of speech” may suggest a radical critique seeking to overthrow the censor, the very next sentence’s “revise” (改正) shows the limitations understood in this notion of free speech. Although the call for free speech is significant in its seeming rejection of censorship, the reform of censorship

Figure 3.1.  Suzuki Kenji’s “The Censors’ Saliva” from the February 1928 Special Edition of Proletarian Arts

Figure 3.2.  Shimizu Keimokurō, “Improve the Censorship System!” from the January 1928 Issue of Liberation, which reads: Under the frenzied rule of the saber [the military] we will be deprived of freedom of speech, assembly, association, and press. Give us freedom of speech, projection, and press! Revise the present censorship system!35

74    /    Preservation is the only option considered. This suggests an internalization of changing external factors of censorship. Censorship is assumed to be unavoidable. The jaded, ambivalent attitudes of the Japanese cartoonists and critics who saw censorship as irrational, though unavoidable, during the 1920s and 1930s have much in common with poststructuralist notions that “censorship is.” 36 The vast majority of Japanese critics in this era were not so naïve that they thought they could overthrow the censorship system, so they rather fought for reform. From this perspective we could argue that earlier critics, who risked downplaying the censor through humor, may have shown a complicity with their own already sealed discursive space; that is, their humorous essays may reveal that what was truly barred for them was taking censorship seriously, both its omnipresence and the impossibility of the freedom of speech they purported to hold in high esteem. We might even entertain the thought that their humor itself was the sign of a censorship so successful at hiding its own trace—a censorship so latent, implicit, private, and internalized—that it makes another censorship which is explicit (in the form of bureaucratic institutions of censorship such as the Home Ministry) seem to be the only existing censorship and a laughable one at that. However, clearly something was lost when humor disappeared. In Freudian terms, wit is that which short-circuits the separated layers of consciousness, the borders of which are normally insulated and patrolled by censorship.37 So the loss of wit or humor might represent the ultimate loss of ability to skirt the censor at all and jump not only from the unconscious to the conscious but from the unwritten to the published. In an attempt to elaborate the humor in Marx and the radicality of Freud, Karatani Kōjin sees the potential for liberation stemming directly from Freud’s filial view of humor. He writes:  

 

In Freud’s idea, humor is something that incites the superego (parent) to say “that is nothing” to the pain of the ego (child). That is, it is looking down on oneself from a metalevel. However, it is the opposite of irony, which haughtily points to the metaself that can exist by means of the contempt for self which is in real pain or within pain— at times risking death (as in the case of Mishima Yukio). This is because humor—as opposed to irony, which is unpleasant for the other—somehow liberates the other. Actually Freud, too, humorously transcends psychoanalytical analysis and discovers a noble “mental posture.” 38  

 

 

Here the potential for a radicalization of humor is clear. And while we can imagine that the writers of essays on censorship from the period after the

Essaying the Censors    /    75 earthquake may also have laughed to themselves about the ridiculousness of the censors, the fact that they were not publishing about it means they did not build a community of laughers. Though Karatani goes on to argue that humor in the end can be for the benefit of the self alone, it is unclear that such solitary humor would have the same radical potential for change. The absence not only of humor but also of the publication of humor for a wider readership is intimately related to its degree of radicality. Furthermore, the humor of the earlier essayists also maintained the dream of a freedom from censorship. And this possibility of dreaming of an outside to censorship is repressed in the nearly humorless later essays and in many formulations of the “censorship is” argument. The maintenance of the dream in the stark face of harsh realities is unthinkable, unspeakable. So to give up even the dream of freedom is to relinquish idealism for the recognition of self-censorship. The earlier essays tend to account only for the external, bureaucratic, suppressing censor in their dreams of an end to censorship, whereas the later essays recognize the connections between the external, historical censors and omnipresent, internal ones in their calls for reform. While opposition to a real external censor is clear in their mocking, ironic publications aimed at advocating incremental change in specifiable policies, their failure to continue to maintain a community of like-minded laughers signifies a deep ambivalence. To surrender the dream of freedom even as a dream is to risk being complicit with a harsher, more total, more uniform censorship. It is no wonder that in the later, very real context of violence to texts that could easily end in violence to bodies through torture and incarceration, censorship was no longer a laughing matter.

The Deaths of Censorship Under today’s censorship system . . . the victims have no place to bring action for their victimization. So when a publication is met with a ban by the censor, it is the equivalent of a death sentence for that publication. Furthermore, if that death sentence is wrongful, there is no place where one can appeal. —Ōya SŌichi 39

 

In elaborating the differences across time in Japanese rhetoric about the censor, we should note that the grounds for argumentation (e.g., the irrationality of the censor) are often shared even when arguments and rhetoric widely differ. Significantly, there is also one common rhetorical point shared by discussions of censorship across the modern period and across

76    /    Preservation censorship systems as diverse as those in the United States and Japan: the trope of the death of texts. Implied in our discussion of the absence of humor in Japanese discourse from the 1920s was that something was changed, that humor was absented by something. If humor about censorship dies, what kills it may well be imagining the censor as executioner. Common to many discussions of censors and banned books is a trope which suggests that censorship kills texts. When an essay testifies to censored words, language, or texts, it rewrites something of those losses, but never completely. Recounting something of the seized, burned, unpublished, or unwritten, such testimony mourns the death of censored texts. A trace of the disappeared other is preserved, but the obituary cannot equal the lost text. The obituary is not the other, it is not itself alone, and it is not alone. At the same time, though the mournful text is dispossessed of the dead text, it is also occupied by the dead text. But perhaps this does not go far enough, since even before a text is censored and even before the obituary testifies and mourns its loss, we might say that they are both already preoccupied with the potential for death, preoccupied by the presence of censorship. When texts are said to be killed by censorship, it is always more than censorship alone that has killed them. In addition to the censor, it is the personification of writing that makes a text “live” and, therefore, also gives writing its “death.” 40 This personification, like the practice of labeling an event “censorship” itself, is both descriptive and ascriptive; it is used both to elaborate the disappearance of certain modes of discourse and to call texts dead, not to kill them (through the performative of pronouncing death), but rather to name the murderer, laying responsibility on the censor.41 Like the death of texts, the death of censors has been imagined in literature, despite the apparent difficulties of killing the exclusionary power of dominant censors: along with the obituary for lost texts, another less common form of protest against censorship was the morbid, vitriolic text blaming and wishing ill upon the censor. So the metaphor of death is employed by critics of censorship both to refer to the disappearance of texts affected by censorship and to call for the end of a specific censor or censorship system. We might call this double function “the deaths of censorship.” This rhetoric of the deaths of censorship is another name for a concern for freedom from censorship.42 Published concern for the death of discourse may be another way of naming or calling for the death of censorship. Consider two death sentence poems that wish for a painful death of the censor:

Essaying the Censors    /    77 May the purple Tigris fevers Come upon him one by one And scale his skin with the prickles Of the whores of Ajalon; When he sees his joy may he stumble, May his eyes refuse to look, Whose seeing is such a reproach to The sacredness of the book. May his teeth fall into his belly, And his belly throw back all food, For the whole of creation aware is Of the foul ingratitude. May all which is hard in him soften And all which is soft in him rot: The fires are banked for the burning And the cool winds know him not.  

— Samuel Roth (1931) 43

. . . idiots! if your scissors cut this song we will torture you to death you bunch of fat dogs we starve, shiver at the cold trembling at agony, we breathe, but you scum bark and plot wars that gnaw to the point of this anguish! more than a fat dog, the bubbling bulging of your skin flayed bones will hang we will mock you to the same painful extent that your police tortured us  

— Onchi Terutake (1931) 44

The virulent call for the death of the censor repeats the methods of the suppressor; the suppressor’s conventions are internalized. The fierceness of these poems evokes the force of the specific censors they target. In such a way, censorship and the violence it commits are recorded and can be traced in the literature on censorship, even during periods when writing is most heavily suppressed. Although the two examples of wishing violence upon different censors may seem commensurate with the violence to discourse committed by those censors, neither transcends the text to injure its target because both were published for a limited readership and not intended for the eyes of the censor. Both poets adopt the modes of their oppressors—violence itself—against them. Samuel Roth’s language finds its register in a religious zeal (the  

 

78    /    Preservation “sacredness of the book”) on par with that of the puritan preacher John Sumner (the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice) against whom he rails. Onchi Terutake fixates on torturing the censors, the same punishment wrought upon the most unfortunate of Japanese proletarian writers. While Roth’s biblical epithets and his appeal to God emphasize his individual relationship with a specific censor, Onchi’s continual use of the pejorative and combative “you” (貴様) and the haughty and manly “we” (おれたち) conveys the sense that there is a community for recasting violent impulses. The methods of the censor have, to some degree, been internalized by these authors and appropriated at least at the level of writing.45 But what does this writing, appropriation, or internalization suggest about any notion of censorship as solely external and public? Or about the effects of distinctions between implicit and explicit forms of censorship? If the censor’s methods can be appropriated, does this signify the insidiousness of the power of the censor or the incompleteness of censorship and its powerlessness toward resistance?

Discursive Suicidal Tendencies: The Prosopopoeia of (Self-)Censoring Censure While some writing dies naturally by acts of god or untimely authorial deaths, not all births and deaths of writing (humorous or otherwise) are natural. For instance, some writing is born unintentionally, prematurely induced, or half-formed. Similarly, some writing is killed by an external censor, though the texts of course live on as ghosts that haunt. If murder is intimately linked to the external and explicit suppression of all writing that offends because writing that may offend begs to be murdered, then suicide is intimately linked to an internal suppression of all writing that may offend because writing that is self-censored anticipates its potential offense-giving and self-induced death. Murder is always a public affair insofar as it requires more than one participant, though of course it tends to have serious internal repercussions on the private lives of those involved. Suicide, by contrast, deceptively seems a solitary affair; it only takes one and may require no external help. But the public discourse on suicide makes the acts what they are, either when stigmatized, as by the Church, or valorized, as in the case of seppuku. Societies make suicides public, drawing them out, analyzing them, throwing them in the hospital, damning them, inscribing their names in the books of life as in the legendary case of Masada, enshrining them at the militarist Yasukuni, and so on. Suicides may be announced and made public. But unlike real

Essaying the Censors    /    79 human suicides, discursive suicide is always already public and readable. As such, the lines between discursive suicides and murders are mysterious. Two cases of the explicit censorship of humor, one in the United States and one in Japan, illustrate the ambiguous boundary between discursive suicide and murder. They also go a long way toward filling in—and complicating—our understanding of how, at least in Japan, humor about censorship from the earlier period “died” and yet survived. Commentaries on the demise of two periodicals—The Masses (1917) and Humor Press (1908)—epitomize the internalized effects of an external censor both at the level of the rhetoric of death and the censorship of humor.46 Writings about the deaths of these two suppressed magazines give a sense of how public external and private internal censors meet in humorous, deathly, and important ways. Even in the last throes of death brought on by the July postal suppression of its August 1917 edition, The Masses, “a Magazine with a sense of Humor and no respect for the Respectable,” 47 “continued its policy of unremitting protest” in its war against war.48 The metonymy of magazine for the editors and writers of the magazine is a common one, and a continued external assault on the magazine itself almost requires that it be spoken of using this device: the magazine suffered a setback, the magazine continued its struggle, the magazine finally could bear the financial burden of first-class mail no longer. The corporate treatment of the editors and writers who compose the magazine stems, of course, from its legal status as a corporation.49 But just as the law must imagine a corporate entity to grant the institution individual rights, writers imagine it as an individual to launch a critique of the law. In the September issue of that year, Art Young’s cartoon “O Sorry Plight!” satirizing the censor, in this case Postmaster General Albert Burle­ son, lashes out at the man responsible for the revocation of the magazine’s second-class mail status, a change that eventually caused financial repercussions so significant that they killed the magazine. Bearing a banner reading, “Death to all newspapers and magazines that haven’t ‘the right spirit,’ ” Burleson is exhausted from the sheer effort of having slain so many publications opposing the war. Published after the ban on the August issue of The Masses, the cartoon not only mocks the censor but also represents the futility of his actions the gathering anthropomorphic newspapers rallying in protest behind him. The “sorry plight” specified in the caption is not only that of the newspapers who have been quashed beneath the censor’s feet, but also that of the censor himself, whose position as postmaster general requires the exhausting enforcement of the Espionage Act.  

 

 

 

80    /    Preservation While this cartoon asserts that external censorship murders writing, the continuation of antiwar (particularly, anti-conscription) radicalism by Eastman, Young, and others in the same issue, which directly followed the banned issue, suggests a suicidal tendency on the part of the magazine. By continuing publication in the face of having been censored, the magazine’s death drive became increasingly clear with each new issue. Eastman’s essay, “The Post Office Censorship,” taken from his speech at the Free Press Conference called by the Civil Liberties Committee in New York City on July 18, makes clear why the magazine would stay its course. Comparing the stated purposes of America’s involvement in the war with the censorship of antiwar sentiment, Eastman writes: There is danger that the whole body of the American people may be led off on a grand tilt against German militarism in the name of democracy, and when they get back they will find German militarism on their own backs and nothing but the name of democracy left. We are not going to let this happen if we can help it, and, as I understand it that is why we are here. For if we cannot rescue from the military bureaucracy this one basic right to express our opinion both of the foreign policy of the U.S. and of the laws that have been passed by Congress, then we can do nothing at all. We might as well move into the cyclone cellars and start writing the memoirs of the republic.50

Though words may not make a difference, Eastman implies, the danger of complicity is far too great to give up without a fight. Unlike a stunned or stubborn child who cannot foresee the consequences of continuing to hold a water pistol even in the face of police commands to “drop it,” the writers were wittingly suicidal, continuing to push the bounds of acceptability even as those borders closed in around them.51 And to check the rhetoric of death against reality, it is significant to note that The Masses lived on beyond its own suicide, or was reborn after it, as The New Masses. This ghostly survival perhaps lacked the force of the earlier iteration but nevertheless carried something of its intention. In the case of Miyatake Gaikotsu’s satirical Humor Press (滑稽新聞, Kokkei shinbun), the magazine’s offense-giving led to fines and bans, until finally Gaikotsu as editor in chief decided to have the paper commit suicide in 1908. With its socialist credo—“crushing the strong, helping the weak, opposing the bad, we are an ally to the good”—the jesting paper, with a circulation as high as 80,000, mocked politicians, judges, and censors alike.52 Banned as many as twenty times, variously on the grounds of both obscenity and sedition, the paper had also been the victim of libel cases  

 

Essaying the Censors    /    81 and fines as great as 200 yen. In its seven-year publication run, members of the staff had been arrested five times. After the August 20, 1908 article “There Are Many Scoundrels among the Prosecutors” was banned, the October issue announced the folding of the paper.53 In Gaikotsu’s typically sardonic style, the issue was called the “suicide edition” (自殺号) and included a suicide note, which read in part, “It is said that there is shame if, when a person should die, they don’t die and, thereby, cheat death, but newspapers or magazines that are organisms with exclusives are the same as people who have the shame of beating death when they who should die don’t.” 54 Therefore, to not extend the life of the paper beyond the point of acceptability, the article went on, the magazine would hereby commit suicide. With that (and a 500 yen fine for that month), Humor Press was no more. Here the suicide is clearly stated; yet just as clearly, the internal censorship that resulted in the magazine’s death was linked to the explicit, external censorship. But Gaikotsu was far from finished in his humorous endeavors. In the first issue of The Osaka Humor Press (大阪滑稽 新聞), published in November 1908, Gaikotsu joked about the death of Humor Press. In a corner of page 8 titled “Parasitic Rare Words,” readers confronted a box of text with eight humorous aphorisms (figure 3.3). The corner, however, was cut on a 45-degree angle, so that half of the words printed were being read from the next page and half from page 8. When readers turned from the severed page to page 9, they would reveal alternative endings to the same aphorisms that were hidden by page 8 (figure 3.4). In another box titled “Reread the Same Characters,” the play of the satire with the censor can be felt. The play between the versions of each of the aphorisms is great, but it is the final line where this play on words describes a censorship that both is and is not destructive. Certainly the old Humor Press is no more. But The Osaka Humor Press now exists. The shift from Humor Press to The Osaka Humor Press represented a change—an end and a beginning—and also a continuity. Though the new paper lived, every subsequent issue of The Osaka Humor Press carried the sobriquet “suicide edition,” suggesting to readers the volatility of the humor within and implying that at any moment the paper could self-destruct and cease publication as the earlier publication had. These suicidal tendencies of The Osaka Humor Press reflect something of banned literature transhistorically. Authors who know well the possibilities of giving offense often continue despite or, in fact, because of the  

 

82    /    Preservation

Figure 3.3.  “Parasitic Rare Words” in The Osaka Humor Press, November 1908

Figure 3.4.  “Reread the Same Characters” in The Osaka Humor Press, November 1908

par asitic r are words

reread the same char acters

Saké is the best medicine for sweeping away melancholy.

Saké is the best poison for destroying one’s body.

“Hee hee” [the sound of a baboon] is the animal of Naturalism.

“Hee hee” is the sobriquet of Itō Hakubun [Hirobumi].

Katsura Tarō is the Prime Minister.

Katsura Tarō is the kingpin of stockjobbers.

“Serve the nation forever” are the words of Kusunoki Masashige.

“Serve the nation forever” is the motto of this magazine.

Suma no ura is the place of note in the land of Hishi.

Suma no ura is the secret language of princesses.

If it is mine alone, even a snowladen umbrella is light.

If it is mine alone, even a wife’s ass is light.

Osaka magistrates are scholars of the law.

Osaka magistrates are errand-boys of the law.

The Honorable Humor Newspaper commits suicide.

The Honorable Humor Newspaper commits suicide, not.

taboos. Banned texts tend to commit a ritual suicide or seppuku, a publicly known, ceremonial, self-inflicted, honorable death. And we can read the markers of these tendencies in the literature itself, whether in the guise of the Xs, blank spaces, and euphemisms that abound in banned texts or in the handling of the offense-giving in the bodies of literature themselves.

Essaying the Censors    /    83

Literary Casualties The metaphor of death is powerful because of its double function that recalls the censored as it resists the censor, positing both the death of discourse and the death of censors. But its engagement with the historical facts of censorship is unsatisfactory in many ways. When texts are said to die at the hand of the censor, something of the dead text is recounted, giving it an afterlife. So in dying, the censored and the censor live on. Moreover, we find cases when texts and censors were only presumed dead or were revitalized by the pronouncements of their deaths (e.g., the two magazines discussed in the previous section). Indeed, many of the essays cited in this chapter include brief summaries of banned stories and plays. And so the metaphor does not do justice to the incompleteness of so many historical censorships, under which censored texts could simultaneously be bestsellers, could circulate from hand to hand, could be republished at a later date, could be published in a different place, and so on. Though the process of exclusion is unavoidable for critics as well as censors, we can begin to mitigate temporarily the violence of critique by using the metaphor in a distorted way, by turning the trope. If the trope of death is to continue to do its ascriptive work of naming the responsibility of censors even after the recognition of both the incompleteness of censorship and its inescapability, even after a recognition of the comparative critical violence to texts, it needs to take another turn, to be bent in a slightly different direction. The phrase “literary casualties” opens several possibilities foreclosed by the metaphor of death alone. It refers both to literature wounded, killed, and missing in action and to the literary images and representations of those people wounded, killed, and missing in action in the violence of war waged by religious societies, police, judges, and the law. Literary casualties must also include texts sacrificed and mutilated in friendly fire from other writers, critics, editors, and publishers. This is why Hemingway could speak of his novel risking “emasculation” for the change of the word “balls” to cojones and Japanese critics could refer to redaction marks (fuseji) as “scabies” that need to be scratched.55 If the rhetoric of death historically has been used to militate against readily identifiable, external censors, “literary casualties” takes into account the concomitant problem of internal, implicit, and latent censorships. The phrase places in proximity avoidable casualties and unavoidable casualties, not to obfuscate the distinctions (since the possibilities of resistance dictate the necessity of judging, demarcating, and attacking the cause of avoidable pernicious casualties), but to reveal the two as intertwined, yet distinguishable.

84    /    Preservation This concern for violence done to texts is not meant to displace a concern for violence done to living bodies in war. Rather, this concern for the historical violence to texts could present an entry in a larger “encyclopedia of violence” that would include the violence not only to texts but also to bodies, minds, decorum, property, and rights.56 A beginning to such an archive of violence might be read in Raymond Williams’s multiple definitions of violence. He writes of violence variously as “physical assault,” “the use of force,” “the dramatic portrayal of such events,” “threat,” and “unruly behaviour.” Violence “is then clearly a word that needs early specific definition, if it is not . . . to be done violence to—to be wrenched from its meaning or significance.” 57 It is this final specific definition to which “the violence to texts” most strongly adheres, though all of his definitions may apply in a given historical instance. Consider, for instance, the physical violence and torture wreaked on proletarian writers in Japan in the early 1930s. Violence to texts is never simply about violence to texts. Historically, it has been connected to other forms of violence: censorships have been imposed in conjunction with seizures of property, interrogations, trials, incarcerations, tortures, and murders, as well as moral suasion campaigns, media blitzes, and lofty rhetoric. And, in no narrow sense, violence to texts is a kind of violence to bodies because, through the inevitable internalization of censorship, violence to texts invades, penetrates, and violates bodies, torturing or wounding them from within. In principle, there is no wounding of texts without also wounds to bodies. This violation is what it means to live under censorship. It is also what it means to internalize censorship or to self-censor. When we think beyond death alone to the wounding incorporated within “literary casualties,” we can draw another analogy: torture. One way to imagine censorship is to think of it through Foucault’s notions of torture:  

Censorship

censored

“[Torture] must mark the victim: it is intended, either by the scar it leaves



text

censored

on the body, or by the spectacle that accompanies it, to brand the victim with infamy.” 58 When the censored/victim is disappeared, the physical scars on the text/body of the censored/victim are not on display, but the spectacle surrounding the disappearance may leave a trace in discourse/ public.59 Unlike Foucault’s signs of torture, these scars of censorship, whether appearing in censored texts or in the form of detritus left behind by the act of censoring, are routinely forgotten. Once-censored books are brought into the canon and before long their historical status as once censored is forgotten. Formerly erased words or unwritten scenes are filled in at another time or in another place. This may be the promise of writ-

Essaying the Censors    /    85 ing: that it can exceed a given historical reception, that it can overcome a given censor. But this is also writing’s repetition of the historical process of exclusion that is so bound up with censorship. Like the recovered, oncewounded veteran who will not discuss his war experience or has had plastic surgery to hide the scars, the elision of the history of a once-censored and now-restored text commits or is victim of yet another act of violence. Yet this effacement of the scars of censorship has not meant a concomitant erasure of censorship. Censorship continues even when it is difficult to track. Like indexes and archives, essays on censorship preserve something of the nature of censorship in the 1920s and 1930s, which was both humorless and deadly. Consider the differences and similarities between the two Japanese words shōsatsu (笑殺; to laugh off, from the characters for “laugh” and “kill”) and mokusatsu (黙殺; to ignore, from the characters for “silence” and “kill”). There are times when killing with laughter is more effective than killing with silence, and other times when killing with silence is the only option beyond abject complicity. This may explain the relative disappearance of tones of humor in articles on Japanese censorship and the subsequent vanishing of articles on the topic of censorship by the late 1930s. But whether writing about the death of a mode of discourse (humorous or otherwise) or the death of a particular censorship regime, such discursively produced deaths are never complete or final, because they are memorialized in the very writing that declares them dead. And this is why the killing of discourse or censors needs to be measured against the potential for the slaughter to give birth to that which it sought to eradicate. The following part of this book looks squarely at the question of censorship’s productive capacity.

Pa rt I I

Production

4.  Seditious Obscenities

If censors wrote, what kind of fiction would they produce? In protest against the unfairness of censorship, writers have long entertained this thought experiment. Would the work of the censor be clean, innocuous, pure, and legally sanctioned, or maybe tantalizingly salacious, or perhaps boldly seditious? In February 1931, during the height of bans on literature in Japan, the former censor Tachibana Takahiro published a story in one of the genres that his office tended to suppress: crime fiction. The short story, appearing in the niche magazine Criminal Sciences under the title “The Ring in the Drawer,” is a tale of an affair in the exotic far reaches of the empire. Over drinks, the narrator, referred to as simply sensei, spins a yarn for his young student about how on his recent travels he was made the “toy” of a young, beautiful femme fatale. The two strangers met on a train. Both were traveling alone. Since they both would be taking the boat to Dairen anyway, she wondered if he would mind accompanying her. Lightheartedly they agreed to take on the guise of a married couple. The bewitched narrator could not believe his luck: “What a delight to be a hastily formed couple on a trip through Manchuria during this age of speed.” 1 The overstimulated student listening to the tale begs to hear if the relationship was merely platonic. The sensei will only hint at a consummation: “So sensei are you telling me nothing at all out of the ordinary happened while you were on the boat?!” “Nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever. The two of us just stayed in a four passenger room.” . . . “Sensei I’m not asking you for a logbook of your voyage! I requested to hear of the life aboard ship.”

89

90    /    Production “Oh, aboard ship we lived 100 percent as husband and wife.” “How succinct!” “You can say succinct, but the fact is that there is not anything else to say!” “No, I won’t admit to the need to pursue ‘anything else.’ Sensei, can I have another round? Please, another round.” 2

So the “anything else” remains shrouded in sexual tension and mystery. But the sensei’s sexual escapades are the least of the story’s mysteries. The woman is the central enigma driving the narrative. Several aspects of her behavior are peculiar. She is traveling alone with more luggage than any one woman could possibly need. She claims it is her first time in Dairen but seems already to know it well. She insists on registering as a couple, but then quickly contrives to move into a separate room in the hotel. From her room window, sensei spies packages wrapped in newspaper being tossed out to strange men who wait below in the empty lot beside the hotel. Then sensei sees the woman, dressed in Chinese clothes, driving a getaway car. He knows he is being taken advantage of, but nothing of his has gone missing, and he cannot fathom how or why she is using him. The hook is set early in this page-turner, but the story never quite delivers on its early promise. As it turns out, the young lady is using the older man as a cover in her opium trafficking. Six months after he returns to Japan alone, sensei still is puzzled by his only memento of the affair, a ring from the beautiful young lady. Then, he receives a letter postmarked from Qiqihar containing only a newspaper clipping with the headline “The Strange Beauty, and Opium’s Great Secret Ring” and a likeness of his former object of desire. He takes the ring from his desk drawer, has it appraised, and realizes the ways he has been deceived. The financial profit seems to be his since the ring is valuable (it is worth 600 yen), but he still feels duped. Nevertheless, like many passive masochistic protagonists of Japanese literature at the time, he does not regret having played the toy for the beauty. In Tachibana’s memoirs of his time as a censor, published the following year as Everything Else Is Banned: The Memoirs of a Censor, he notes the prevalence of this sort of narrative in a section titled “Crimes Related to Smoking Opium.” He then explains the difference between the stories that are banned and those that ease past the censor. Crime procedurals are interesting, Tachibana tells his readers, because they give a window into an underworld that is seldom described and understood. But, as such, they risk bans for potentially revealing how to commit crimes without get-

Seditious Obscenities    /    91 ting caught. Chase stories, on the other hand, are innocuous because they dazzle with hooks but never really give enough detail to inspire copycat crimes.3 And indeed, his short story in the end is a sort of chase story in which sensei follows the mystery woman (and readers follow sensei following the mystery woman). Unlike a crime procedural, “The Ring in the Drawer” never reveals precisely how or where the drug trafficking is taking place, who is buying, or who is selling. In fact, the contents of the packages wrapped in newspaper remain unknown until the last two pages as the chase and narrative wind down. Though it flirts with bannable subject matter (such as the erotic, the grotesque, and the nonsensical, all three of which taboo buzzwords of the day are explicitly mentioned in the framing narrative), the story is presented in a form that will not be censored. Tachibana’s story shows how a censor could be the ultimate titillating writer: knowing the secret specific stipulations of the office of censorship and understanding the inner thought processes of a censor, he could write just up to the line of acceptability and steer clear of the triple threat of bans, fines, and jail sentences. As a censor, it was Tachibana’s duty to ban literature that might be deemed to disturb the masses, but as an author he produced crime fiction that piqued prurient interest on par with the masters he had banned. Tachibana was a censor who felt the productive urge and who wrote in a genre often targeted by his office (Criminal Sciences was an object of the censor’s wrath the following year for the article “ ’Merican, Eros, Madam: Erotic Services Forced on a ‘Jap’ Male Ser­vant”). This suggests something disturbing to our commonsense understanding of the censor as the polar opposite of the author.4 Writers are supposed to produce literature. Censors are supposed to destroy it. The thought experiment about what a censor might write revolves around an underlying assumption that censors are buffoons who will never write and thus are impractical and uncompromising in their work with creators of art. But this simple opposition is an abstraction that obscures the reality of the many productive effects of suppression. As the first part of this book uncovered an implicit censorship by considering explicit discursive traces of the censor, this part shifts focus to the ways in which censored writers and publishers internalized specific categories of external constraints and used them to further cultural production. The crossings, overlaps, and symbiotic relationships between two of the censor’s main categories for determining deletions and bans—sedition and obscenity—reveal a method for reading the literary suppressions of the post-quake period as not only detrimental to but also productive of discourses and, more specifically, literary genres. Not insignificantly, it is  

 

92    /    Production the years where the amounts of material banned for sedition and obscenity crisscross and overlap that the publication of erotic texts and proletarian literature flourished. This productive power of censorship does not mitigate its violence to discourse or absolve it of responsibility for that violence. But it calls into question notions of an absolute, totalizing censorship wholly responsible for killing certain modes of discourse by revealing how even as it thoroughly, insidiously, and deeply wounds discourse, censorship can at the same time provide one of the myriad conditions for growth in new areas of literary endeavor. This chapter is divided into three sections. First, an examination of the interlinking of the two supposedly separate categories for legal offense at a broad discursive level shows that both the censors and the censored were well aware of the intersections of the categories. Second, consideration of Umehara Hokumei, a key figure of the literary underworld, brings these connections into relief, offering a way to begin a consideration of how the censor’s categories affected literary productivity and a significant example of how authors and publishers both overcame and succumbed to disparate forms of censorships. Third, this inquiry into how these categories for suppression affected literary discourses across the war enables an understanding of the decriminalization of representations of violence.

Crossing Categories In industrialized countries shaken by war and by the threat perceived in the Russian Revolution, the subjects of sex and politics were linked both by explicit government decrees and social ideologies attempting to maintain security and by the published work of an international intelligentsia responding to new controls on cultural production. Many writers coupled transgressions against sexual mores with subversions of political conservatism. In France, the librarian and lay-philosopher Georges Bataille employed the Marxist rhetoric of “use value” to discuss the work of the Marquis de Sade; in the United States, the socialist critic V. F. Calverton wrote of the inextricable relations of sexual and class liberation; and in Japan, the social critic Koike Mubō coined the phrase “the symphony of sexual desire and the left-wing” (sayoku to seiyoku no kōkyōgaku), signaling a deeper connection between the phonetically similar Japanese words seiyoku (sexual desire) and sayoku (left-wing).5 Fears of subversion, by sedition or obscenity, had been categorically defined in Japan by the mid-Meiji Publishing Laws in the 1890s. They were exacerbated later by the tragedy of the Great Kantō Earthquake

Seditious Obscenities    /    93 in 1923 and the adoptions of the Comintern Theses by the Japanese Communist movements in 1927 and 1932, and later by the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the attempted coup of 1936, and the escalation of war in China in the late 1930s, as well as by the beginning of the Pacific War in 1941, the implementation of various policies to increase the population over the 1920s and 1930s, the enactment of the Law for the Prevention of Venereal Diseases in 1927, and the revisions to the Eugenics Law between 1936 and 1940; these events are representative of mounting fears attested to not only in continual expansion of the duties and purview of the censor, but also—seemingly paradoxically—in temporary booms of the two kinds of literature most likely to be banned. But this connection is, of course, no contradiction: from a publisher’s standpoint, topics defined as risqué by the censors were potentially big sellers and, for a time, could be deemed worth the risk of fines, bans, or seizures. Though the breaking point for the publication of these products would come, risky and risqué publications flourished, in comparative terms, for nearly a decade after the earthquake, the same period that is marked by the highest number of book bans in Japan. Yet despite the clear cultural connections between obscenity and sedition, in the twenty-three years of the extant Publishing Police Reports (1923–1945), which record several thousand volumes censored in Japan, fewer than ten items were banned for reasons of both morals and politics.6 At least some readers—the censors in the Home Ministry—purported to be able to distinguish between the two categories. Figure 4.1 is a graph of their handiwork, charting the banned domestically published books for which we have a record. Perhaps predictably, except for slight bumps in books banned for immorality or obscenity (fūzoku kairan) in 1928 and 1936, most of the drastic changes in book banning over the period occurred in the category of bans for sedition or disrupting public order (annei chitsujo bōgai). This is not surprising if we consider the political nature of the turbulence of the Manchurian Incident (1931–1933), the failed coup of the February 26 Incident (1936), and the instantiation of full national mobilization (1938, revised 1941). If we were to accept sex and politics as the two entirely separate legal categories that the censor suggested, we might take the difference between the line for sedition and the line for obscenity in the graph as a tangible measure of the level of the censor’s fear associated with these historical (largely political) events. But we know that at least one censor located a link between leftism and eroticism. In his memoirs, Tachibana Takahiro included a chapter titled “Eroticism, the Proletariat, and Censorship,” in which he writes:  

 

 

 

 

 

94    /    Production Subtotal Domestic Books

Domestic Books Banned for Obscenity

Domestic Books Banned for Sedition

800

Number of Books Banned

700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

1939

1940

1941

1942

1943

1944

Year

Figure 4.1.  Number of Banned Books (1926–1944)  

It seems that the raison d’être of the censor is to protect against the publication of seditious propaganda, which is rooted in Sovietism, and the products of eroticism (the so-called ero-publications), which are influenced by Americanism. In his short essay “Modernity,” F. L. Wheeler states that the characteristics of modernism are, as a result of war, the demand for freedom in actions and morality and a desire for the moment’s pleasure and physical enjoyment; and in that sense, we can the say that the censor’s work confronts modernism directly.7

For Tachibana, censorship wages a front-line battle against seditious (Sovietist) and erotic (Americanist) publications. The logic evident here is that modernism is both Sovietism and Americanism, and therefore that to fight against modernism we must fight against both of their representatives. This neatly shows how sedition and obscenity were connected by an enforcer of the single two-pronged Japanese law. It also shows how in its rejection of full frontal modernism, state censorship was in some ways consonant with cutting edge intellectual movements such as “overcoming modernity.” As this censor had done, other cultural producers also recognized and commented on the connections. The preface to the Dictionary of Modern Terminology (1930) characterizes contemporary times as follows: “It is said that the present day is particularly a period of the three Ss; at the same time, we can say it is a period of the three ROs. The ‘three Ss’ are speed, sports, and screen, while the ‘three ROs’ points to eRO [erotic], guRO [grotesque], and puRO [proletarian].” 8 The significance of the statement

Seditious Obscenities    /    95 lies in the fact that while the three Ss represented some kind of ubiquitous mainstream culture, the three ROs (referring to the erotic, grotesque, and proletarian) represented a tangible but less visible back-alley culture.9 Here the “puro” element is added to what is typically remembered as solely erotic and grotesque. The “puro” entries in this dictionary and other contemporary dictionaries of modern terminology give several possibilities besides puroretaria (proletariat), including puropoganda (propaganda) and purosutechuto (prostitute), remarking the connections between the body politic and the body erotic.10 Significantly, the years from roughly 1926 to 1930, when the numerical levels of books banned for obscenity and sedition overlapped and crossed, coincide with this period characterized by the three ROs. What is still remembered as merely “ero-guro” even in our day was in fact occasionally already recognized as “ero-puro” (as in the case of the censor Tachibana) or, at least, as “ero-guro-puro” (as in the case of the terminology dictionary). Though these connections may have been marginalized at the time and since, they are by no means of marginal importance; they provide key junctures where state force and the power of cultural production, discourses on the public and private, and the political and the sexual intersect.

Shades of Pink: The Radical Obscenities of Umehara Hokumei Jay Gertzman has used the sociological concepts of “pariah capitalism” and “middleman minority” to describe a group of American immigrant booksellers and publishers dedicated to erotic publications who were active during the interwar period.11 In Gertzman’s description, pariah capitalists worked outside the bounds of both mainstream culture and capitalism, where they were uniquely positioned to thrive by bending and exaggerating accepted business practices. The same characteristics apply to underground booksellers and publishers in Japan during this time. They used the techniques of the regular publishing world to sell materials mainstream writers and publishers specifically avoided or simply could not sell. Their publications often circulated outside the bounds of legality and mainstream commerce. And the discourse they produced existed both in spite of and because of censorship pressures. Theirs was a period when the publication of the erotic itself was seen to have radical social import and, furthermore, was linked to radical leftist publication. Those producers of culture who believed in the radicality of sexual expression drew on a sig-

96    /    Production nificant internalization of and sensitivity to the taboos of the mainstream as well as on newly defined left-wing concerns.

Purveyor of Porn and Politics The story of novelist, translator, editor, and publisher Umehara Hokumei (1901–1946) and his creations tells not only of the varying yet related censorships in the late Taishō and early Shōwa literary periods, but also about the degree to which an offender of sensibilities (an offense-giver) can ever be said to be entirely outside or insensitive to the mores and breaking points of the offense-takers. Hokumei illustrates the nuanced understanding those censored often have of their censors: to push the limits of acceptability, one must first know very well what those limits are. Hokumei’s career and works thus reveal the inadequacy of rashly concluding that the censored were either entirely subversive or wholly complicit. Hokumei reached the height of his literary activity amid the fears following the Russian Revolution when offenses for immorality in Japan equaled and, at times, exceeded offenses for sedition. As the cultural critic Tanizawa Eiichi comments, “[Hokumei’s] mysterious intermingling of socialist, neoperceptualist, and pornographer could only have appeared in this brief period.” 12 He often skirted and occasionally offended the censors, managing to sell volume upon volume and to get banned for both obscenity and sedition. One strain of thought about Hokumei considers him an outsider to the publishing world, part of a liminal underground. The cultural anthropologist Yamaguchi Masao focuses his critical attention on Hokumei’s escape from Japan to Shanghai following the successive banning of several of his works. For Yamaguchi, Hokumei’s literal position outside of Japan during these months in Shanghai is of utmost importance in explaining Hoku­mei’s role in early Shōwa discourse.13 This narrative of an exiled, renegade rogue of the publishing world depicts Hokumei as firmly against or opposed to censorship. But as in Gertzman’s model of pariah capitalism, Hokumei’s subversions required the censor and the mainstream in numerous ways. Moreover, Hokumei was not as wholly outside the Japanese elite as Yamaguchi’s narrative would suggest. On the contrary, he held an aristocratic pedigree, descended from the Toyama clan of samurai. Hokumei, like so many upper-class Meiji and Taishō intellectuals, left home for school in the big city while still a youth. His sword-maker father supported his study for entrance to medical school. But Hokumei derailed his career by studying literature, squandering the money his father sent for medical textbooks on  

Seditious Obscenities    /    97 literature by Chekhov. So although he dropped out of school and, to some extent, the mainstream economy, Hokumei was very much a product of those important bourgeois institutions of modern Japan. Moreover, the list of subscribers to his own often-banned magazines included high-ranking military and government officials, attesting to the fact that his readers were not solely subversives living on the fringes of social acceptability. Hokumei ended his career by writing stories for the widely popular wartime magazines Shinseinen and Kōdan kurabu.14 In short, Hokumei’s relationship with mainstream middlebrow culture was deep, extending back to his childhood and through the end of his life. These connections to the mainstream should remind us that one need not have been a member of a marginalized minority or an exile to take part in “middleman minority” markets. Hokumei, having dropped out of the mainstream economy, created publications that could not long remain within mainstream discourse, but his publications and his livelihood relied on the trends and taboos of that central market. By a combination of financial necessity and a self-righteous sense of freedom, he used the categories defined by the censor to sell books. Hokumei is perhaps most often remembered as the only translator to have successfully skirted the censors and published Boccaccio’s Decameron. Though this work, published in 1925, was not the first translation of the Decameron in Japan, it was the first not to be banned, largely because Hokumei anticipated the potential for censorship.15 On the occasion of the publication of his translation, Hokumei threw a huge party in Asakusa in honor of the five-hundredth anniversary of Boccaccio and cleverly invited the Italian ambassador. The event had the effect of making it seem like a national affront against Italy if the Japanese government banned the translation, so it was published without a hitch. Hokumei was even reportedly presented with a cultural award by the ambassador, which, in a drunken stupor, he gave to a café waitress.16 One month after the successful release of the first volume of his Decam­ eron, Hokumei published his translation of Albert Rhys Williams’s Through the Russian Revolution, which was promptly banned for seditious content. Since Williams himself had been forbidden to return to the United States via Japan after his field research for the book, it was undoubtedly clear to Hokumei that Williams’s reportage would be offensive to the Japanese authorities.17 His decision to publish seems to have relied on the attractiveness of potentially censorable materials. This theory is further supported by the final page of Hokumei’s translation, Roshia daikakumeishi (The history of the Russian Revolution, 1925), which is an advertisement

98    /    Production for his Decameron. The inclusion of this page might simply be the case of a translator publicizing his other work, but the ad seems to presume that readers of the overtly politically charged reportage and the ribald tales of Europe might be the same. It reads, “Only Mr. Umehara Hokumei’s Decameron: The Complete Translation passed the sharp EYES OF THE CENSOR without incident.” 18 An extra-large font for the phrase “eyes of the censor” draws attention at once to the potential taboo of the content. This appeal to the readers of the class-conscious history through the sensational allure of the potentially censorable sexually explicit tales draws attention to commonalities between prurient interest and political dissent as selling points. The ad appeals to the same mode of desire for the transgressive. Similarly, in 1930 Hokumei connected the two taboos of obscenity and sedition when the cover to a pamphlet advertising his collection Dankikan hisshi (The hidden history of the pavilion of bizarre tales) redescribed the titular volume as “Sayokuha ero no kaidendō” (the strange sanctuary of leftist erotica).19 Thus, like Gertzman’s pariah capitalists, Hokumei depended on the standards of the censors to increase the appeal of his works and earn money.

Skirting the Censor To maintain his ability to publish and sell despite his proclivities toward working with material that would offend, Hokumei had to devise intricate schemes to avoid fines and incarceration. Though he was very much in a business that would taunt censorship, Hokumei navigated the line between the offensive and the acceptable so closely that he occasionally advertised more than he provided readers. Successive encounters with the censors led Hokumei to invent several methods for avoiding bans, such as the banquet in honor of Boccaccio. An article on Mirabeau in the January 1928 issue of his magazine Gurotesuku ended abruptly by beseeching interested readers to send more money for a book-length study of which “only three hundred are being printed.” 20 Direct mailings and private publications were far more difficult for the censors to track than widely distributed and sold publications. Between 1929 and 1932, Hokumei edited several book-length compilations of banned Meiji-period newspaper articles, some of which were themselves banned. In the preface to one of the compilations, Kindai sesō zenshi (1931), he describes the process of obtaining the permission of the Minister of Education to use the materials held in the Ueno library because they were etsuran kinshi, “forbidden from viewing.” This preface, like the Boccaccio party, functioned as a way to avoid censorship, seemingly saying to would-be censors “I have

Seditious Obscenities    /    99 permission, so had you better not censor me.” Similarly, when launching the magazine Hentai shiryō (Perverse Matters) in September 1926, Hokumei claimed to have subscribers as diverse as businessmen, university professors, high-ranking military men, and public prosecutors. One of the reasons he was able to return to publishing again after successive bans was the grand power of his subscribers. For instance, the Dongxiang field marshal Ogasawara Naganari was an ardent fan, and Hokumei apparently used his name to escape from a few compromising situations.21 But Hokumei’s schemes for evading the censors were not always successful, and successive bans took serious tolls. Hentai shiryō, which pandered to the growing market for sexological studies, had seven consecutive issues banned in 1926 and 1927, leading Hokumei to dedicate the June 1927 issue to discussions of hikka, “troubles of the pen.” 22 In 1927, every issue from June to October of Bungei shijō (Arts Market), an “antiauthoritarian and radical” magazine he edited, was also banned. And that magazine also dedicated an issue to the topic of censorship. In 1932, after having been jailed, banned, and fined for an issue of Gurotesuku deemed particularly offensive, Hokumei escaped to Osaka with the thought police hot on his trail. In Osaka, he worked briefly as a teacher of English. He moved back to Tokyo in 1933 and through acquaintances secured a job compiling a social history of the Yasukuni Shrine, infamous today for its association with the height of nationalism and militarism because it enshrines the spirits of the war dead. From 1938 to 1940, he published under the pseudonym Azuma Tairiku in the popular magazines Shinseinen (New Youth) and Kōdan kurabu (Story Club) to avoid raising the ire of the censors.23 During the height of the Pacific War, he joined the war effort by participating in the Society for the Promotion of Science and Technology, an officially sanctioned society that specialized in pirating and translating technical books from English on engineering and medicine. Hokumei died of typhus soon after the war’s end in May 1946. Overall, he suffered more fines, bans, and jail time than his Meijiperiod forefather in radical and erotic publishing, Miyatake Gaikotsu.24

Receptions Whether as an editor or writer, for profit or out of ideological concerns, Hokumei pushed the envelope of allowable discourse. In so doing, he sometimes reaped profits and at other times suffered monetary and personal loss. Hokumei seems to have adhered to the modernist school of thought, which the historian of Japanese sexuality Ueno Chizuko has summed up succinctly as believing that “the ‘radicality’ of sexual expression depends

100    /    Production upon the level of how revealing it is.” 25 And if we think about the simultaneous offenses given by particular strains of realism, naturalism, and later social realism in Japan, which sought to continually reveal more, we can see that Hokumei was not alone in using that which was openly declared most taboo to his benefit and at great risk. From Shimazaki Tōson and Tayama Katai through Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Nagai Kafū to Kobayashi Takiji and Itō Sei, other major personae who have figured more prominently in literary history both benefited and lost from their encounters with censorship. However, while literary history has viewed these writers as cutting edge or idiosyncratic geniuses, it has not been so kind to Hokumei. The reception of Hokumei, both in his day and since, has been mixed at best. While this may have much to do with the quality and quantity of his own personal literary output, it is certainly not unrelated to his hybrid existence at the crossroads of several discourses. Nakano Masato, a proletarian writer who worked with him on Arts Market, identified the key issue, writing that “Umehara himself did not think of his standpoint as either bourgeois or proletarian, so he comfortably associated with them all. He wanted to take the good and the bad together, but among the proletarian authors he was condemned as a flunky.” 26 This description squares with the accounts of Hokumei standing out in a sea of overalls at a workers’ protest rally by wearing a tuxedo.27 Others have been kinder in their appraisals of Hokumei’s leftist credentials. Kaneko Yōbun, his coeditor at Arts Market, saw his work as genuinely proletarian, citing, for instance, Hokumei’s June 1927 article in Arts Market, which discussed the history of the Takebashi incident, the first army insurrection in modern Japanese history, as evidence of Hokumei’s radical inclinations.28 Hokumei’s son, Umehara Masaki also claims that Hokumei at first was using his jaunts into the erotic world as a way to finance the proletarian magazine.29 Jō Ichirō wants to have it both ways. First, he argues that Hokumei was a political activist, not merely a pornographer. Second, he claims that Hoku­ mei was a shrewd businessman. In fact, he uses the shrewd businessman argument to say that Hokumei was not just a pornographer.30 All of these examples reveal the desire to judge Hokumei on the basis of an assumption about the possibility of purely erotic or of unadulterated proletarian discourses. These contesting accounts, then, ignore the fact that the erotic and the political were connected methods of both offense-giving and offense-taking, that very few figures in literary history produced wholly in one mode or the other over the course of their careers, and, therefore, that this period should be evaluated less on the essential ideological and

Seditious Obscenities    /    101 radical purity of the key players than on the way in which they freely appropriated and mixed modernist tropes, be they proletarian, erotic, or any of the myriad other possible thematic choices. The renowned cultural critic Ōya Sōichi suggests that modernism on the whole was always already compromised: “Modernism is that which lies between the bourgeois and the proletarian and is rooted in the nihilism particular to the middle class, which has lost its hopes for the future through its life philosophy and the guiding principle of consumerism.” 31 And if we agree with Ōya, we might categorize nearly every writing intellectual of the time as a middle-class flunky of one kind or another, including those who, like Kuroshima Denji, were held up as exemplars of the working-class artist.32 So if this can be recognized as the case for many of the discourses subsumed under the rubric of modernism (whether described as radical proletarian or avant-garde Dadaist), why does the issue of complicity continue to plague critics of Japanese culture? The historical outcome of the war and the succeeding Cold War left Japanese critics from Nakano Shigeharu to Karatani Kōjin questioning the efficacy of the prewar Japanese left. Knowing that even some of the most radical intellectuals were in fact complicit to some degree with mainstream ideologies, why have critics of Japanese culture persisted in their desires for unadulterated radical intentions and texts from that period? One root of this fetishization of the pure proletarian in the Japanese case may be the famed postwar critical debate among three major literary figures, Hirano Ken, Ara Masahito, and Nakano Shigeharu, a debate that centered on the seeming contradiction between the prewar proletarian literary movement’s political call to arms and its naïveté about issues of gender relations. Using as evidence the novel Tō seikatsusha (Lifetime party member) written by the proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji in 1932, Hirano Ken launched the first volley of this debate in his article from 1946 claiming that the treatment of the male protagonist’s girlfriend betrayed the problems with the prewar proletarian movement. The modern girl, Kasahara, for instance, financially supported her leftist boyfriend Sasaki’s ability to pass out leaflets at the factory. Sasaki, we should note, reads bourgeois detective fiction in Shinseinen and not the more openly subversive proletarian fiction. And if we were to follow the logic of this argument, we might indict Hokumei’s radicality on similar grounds. For after all, as Sasaki relied on his girlfriend’s financial support, Hokumei financed his proletarian endeavors with capital earned through a reliance on sexual desire and prurient interests.33 This is no paradox; the work of Kobayashi and Hokumei does not aim for essences of either ero or puro. Rather than

102    /    Production holding texts of the period to standards seldom achieved and perhaps impossible to attain, we might do better to embrace the hybrid possibilities of the fluid genres within which they worked.34 What is forgotten in the Cold War nostalgia for prewar literature on the part of leftist activists and by critics of sexology is how close the explicit ties had been between sexual liberation and expression, on the one hand, and political movement and revolution, on the other. The initial postwar desire to divorce the two was sustained by both incremental shifts in policies by the Cold War censors and the willingness of intellectuals to disregard these links. In short, while the tendency among postwar leftists was to forget the prevalence of erotica in the 1920s and 1930s and its connections to anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and antiwar discourses, postwar eroticists and pornographers tended to elide the party politics involved. Certainly, from the bare viewpoint of proletarian ideology, Hokumei was a flunky, interested in pandering to faddish tastes in order to earn money. Through the lens of gender critique, we may see him as yet another male eroticist continuing phallocentric oppression by appealing to typical modes of bourgeois desire. But what Gertzman writes of the sexual transgressions of pariah capitalists and the erotic literature they produced can hold for proletarian literature as well: “In reality, they were themselves a form of repression—and a safety valve providing fantasies whose satisfaction allowed people to tolerate, not rebel against conventional ideas of decency.” 35 The eroticism was an aspect of modernism as much as proletarian leanings were.36 Merely to turn the equation “modernism equals liberation” into “modernism equals repression,” however, is to be insensitive to the historical intentions (failed in practice as they may have been) and to the moment in which Hokumei was working, moments when erotic and proletarian literature (were) crossed.  

Transcendental Conversions: The Fictional Turns of Hokumei Even those critics who have read the literary works of Hokumei do not offer extended interpretations. Yamaguchi, for instance, relies on summaries of the contents alone to explain how the texts work within the contexts of the author’s career. In this way, critics parallel censors, assuming that the censored works are monologic in tone. And while the parallels between censors and critics are, perhaps, unavoidable, extended treatment of some of the works may allow us to answer larger questions. A comparison of early works in Hokumei’s career with works written after his multiple brushes with censors reveals a sustained interest in offense-giving, one that gradually diminishes but never disappears. While Hokumei’s overtly

Seditious Obscenities    /    103 political and erotic aesthetics fade in his later fictions, these fictions can still be read as radical and obscene within the context of war. In 1924, Hokumei published his first novel, Murder Incorporated: The Heyday of Diabolism, a grotesque story loaded with erotic and proletarian content and banned upon its release for disrupting public morals. He published the novel under the sobriquet Hokumei, which comes from the characters meaning the “north” and “bright.” As such, the name was intended to evoke images of looking toward the Russian Revolution with hope. The novel opens with a framing story that features an author who is frustrated in his attempts to come up with a story worth writing. Fortuitously, an old school acquaintance, Santarō, who has been in America for five years, turns up with fantastic tales of his foreign escapades. The episodic novel revolves around Santarō’s involvement with the F Murder Joint Stock Company, or FMJC, a corporation that makes a business out of assassination and murder. The corporation has a sideline of canning and selling human flesh. With a drugstore as the front, the company is able to operate in the middle of the banking district in San Francisco. The nonchalance with which Santarō relates his exploits as a company man shocks and intrigues the narrator, so he continues to listen to the stories through the night. Ranging from the white slave trade and necrophilia to assassinations of leaders of black rights movements and anti-Japanese movements and the lynching of Jews, the Murder Company’s exploits appeal to the narrator with their grotesqueries. Santarō tells the narrator that the company is unlike run-of-the-mill cult groups who just sit around and philosophize. Instead, the Murder Company does things; the company is productive both socially and economically, which is the perfect social unit in capitalism. The final chapters of the novel recount Santarō’s story of his discovery of another secret society that starkly contrasts with the Murder Company, the Suicide Club (jisatsu kurabu). Unlike the formal capitalist structure of the Murder Company, the Suicide Club is based on friendship. Removed from the financial districts of San Francisco, the Suicide Club takes place in a peripheral, seedy part of town. Santarō is led there by a regular whom he finds in a Prohibition-era underground bar where scoundrels, sailors, gentlemen, and ladies alike would gather. But before he goes into the club, he witnesses a scene through a keyhole of one of the doors of the bar upstairs. The scene features a gentleman role-playing with a prostitute. For the benefit of the man, the prostitute puts on airs, calling him her “dear master Duke,” while he, “the Duke,” refers to her as his “Marquise.” 37 Then, at just the right moment, the “boy” from the bar downstairs (who, Santarō presumes, was paid ten dollars to play his role) bursts in and throws the

104    /    Production Duke out of a presumably low window. The Duke is happy. His fantasy of engaging in sexual intrigue with a woman of an unattainable social status and the masochistic pleasure of defenestration for his “crime” are fulfilled. This scene of class fetishism precedes Santarō’s being led to a “dark, dank, long, and narrow underground room” where the Suicide Club meets and ensures that class is in the reader’s mind for the scene to come.38 Unlike the positive, hardworking men of the Murder Company, the members of the Suicide Club are a destitute and distraught group with nothing left to live for; neither the thrill of killing nor the power of wealth tempts them to stay alive. The foppish group meets wearing tuxedos, and they play cards to the accompaniment of violins, in “a decisive battle betting their life existence.” 39 It is the duty of the winner to kill the loser. The loser is blindfolded. As a scantily clad woman dances to the violins, the winner shoots the loser. On the night Santarō visits, the scene is particularly pathetic, because the winner whimpers that all he wants is to be as fortunate as the loser: he wants to die. The twist comes when Santarō is asked if he himself (as an obviously depraved man) is ready to join and become a member of the suicide club: “Can you bear to die easily for no purpose?” 40 In the end, even Santarō, who is immune to most of the morals of the world, finds this group repulsive and escapes the club headquarters, presumably making it back to Japan to tell his tales soon thereafter. Though this novel has been characterized by one reader as teetering between anarchism and nihilism, the contrast between the Suicide Club, built for individual gratification beyond the normalized realms of commerce, and the capitalist Murder Company, cultivated as a social service and for mutual gratification, tells a different story.41 Though no reducible sexual politics surface in the novel, what is most clear is Hokumei’s incessant disruption of Japanese literary norms and social mores, or what Yamaguchi Masao called in another context his “anti-authoritarian radicality.” As Jō mentions, this is no ordinary Taishō novel and is, in fact, making fun of the one-time revolutionary Abe Jirō’s novel Santarō no nikki (Santarō’s diary, 1914) in the naming of its protagonist. By 1924, Abe’s philosophical novel of the awakening of the individual spirit on the order of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals had become passé, bourgeois fluff for the overly pedantic, while Hokumei’s story seemed cutting edge and risqué. Although in 1924 Murder Incorporated challenged ideological, sexual, and literary norms and was banned for transgressions against public morals (obscenity), by 1938 Hokumei was publishing unctuous teen literature in mainstream magazines under a pseudonym. What was going on?

Seditious Obscenities    /    105 Was this some kind of informal conversion (tenkō) or truckling to the times? Or did Hokumei still retain his anti-authoritarian leanings? As we approach these questions, it is important to remember that, unlike Kobayashi Takiji, Hokumei pushed the censors and lived to write again, and his successive encounters with censors surely changed his literary output in tangible ways. Critics who debate Hokumei’s complicity with the national ideological agendas of wartime understandably pay little attention to these later works from the late 1930s and early 1940s. Jō Ichirō seems to ignore entirely this period of Hokumei’s production because none of the stories were deemed obscene by the censors, as if the effects of censorship are only to be seen in works actually censored. The anthropologist Yamaguchi Masao is more interested in interrogating the rhetoric of “frustration” or “despair” (zasetsu) in early Shōwa than in proposing a way to read the late 1920s and early 1930s without recourse to a narrative of “failure” and “lost hopes.” And for Yamaguchi, the fact that a “centrifugal force” pulled Hokumei out of Japan to Shanghai and later out of Tokyo to Osaka is of overdetermined significance.42 But there was an entire battalion of writers outside of Japan who were simply products of the empire, the “embedded writers” called the Pen Brigade who wrote promilitary reports about the war from the front in China. So the fact of having left of the metropolis is not inherently representative of radicality. Yamaguchi’s structuralist approach does not get us beyond the limits of the rhetoric of failure in early Shōwa that he himself so thoroughly details. A look at the wartime material of Hokumei needs to recognize the earnestness of his irreverent efforts at liberation even while acknowledging the problem of finding actual revolutionary work under the repressiveness of war. Instead of focusing on historical and biographical detail, we may do better by turning our attention to Hokumei’s later literary production for evidence of the degree to which he retained his radical inclinations during the war or the degree to which any tenkō (conversion) may be said to have been complete. Though there may not be a way out of the monolith of wartime discourse, perhaps there is a way through it, a subversive and transgressive (though never entirely revolutionary) way given within the monolith itself. Though Japanese readers had been trained to read between the lines by the prevalence of covering devices like fuseji and euphemism appearing in fringe publications such as Communist party organs, it was not always clear that they would do so, particularly in mainstream publications. How­ ever, Hokumei’s theoretical writings about the function of writing itself

106    /    Production reveal that he at least hoped that writing between the lines could have some success. As early as 1926, Hokumei anticipated the problems of a continuing censorship and some of what would become the major issues in debates about writing with an ideological slant. In the short essay “The Pickled-Overnight Revolutionary” published in Arts Market on New Years Day, Hokumei argues that publishing in a party organ was not necessarily the most effective way of transmitting proletarian ideas to the masses. Here he criticizes the intellectuals who seemed to have just read Marx the night before and whose works blatantly touted leftist ideology. The implication of Hokumei’s critique is that there were more subtle ways of conveying the Marxist line to a reader, ways that went beyond those of pseudo radicals who were merely “pickled overnight” (an idiomatic phrase referring to cramming for an exam) in the brine of Marxism. Critical of the trendy Marx-boy types who clutched proletarian books as a fashion statement on their strolls through town, he wrote: Most works that cheat by advertising to members of society their inherent sense of purpose are not particularly effective. For instance, rather than giving a militant short story to a propaganda journal, publishing a literary work that skillfully adopts a socialist awareness in Kōdan Club is far and away more socially effective. . . . But, in short, walking around smugly thinking that we are obviously social revolutionaries because we carry about these works is ridiculous.43

Years after the demise of his openly proletarian and erotic magazines, Hokumei published under the pseudonym Azuma Tairiku a number of adventure stories in popular venues. The January 1939 Kōdan Club collection of “patriotic, valiant, detective, mystery, and true story masterpieces” featured Azuma Tairiku’s “The Beckoning Spirit and the Scout.” 44 The story drips with sappy sentiment from the beginning. The plot is simple: two main characters, Yae and Kazuo, are lovers fated to be separated by class, war, and death. With the war looming, Kazuo gets permission from his father to marry Yae. Yae and Kazuo are ecstatic. The next day the gobetween comes to Yae’s house to give the mother and daughter permission to begin purchasing wedding clothes on the family’s tab. For that purpose, they travel to Tokyo and purchase what they think is a stylish and modern gown embroidered with plums, bamboo, and cranes. They are pleased to find such a great bargain on the purchase. On their return, they learn that Kazuo has been called up for war, so they rush to make arrangements. Later at a meeting of the two families, they take out the gown only to realize that they have been swindled. The golden thread is not real gold. What

Seditious Obscenities    /    107 they assumed was a new gown is in fact used. Embarrassment and tears ensue, and Kazuo’s father cancels the wedding. The next day, as Kazuo is about to set off with the troops, Yae comes to give him a thousand-stitch belt, a garment given to soldiers leaving for the front to protect them. She begs his forgiveness and tells him that she will wait for him for years or even decades if he only forgives her. Kazuo holds back both his tears and his words. She takes this to mean he is done with her. He goes off to war. She drowns herself. Then, when he is lost behind enemy lines in China, her ghost comes to him and leads him back to safe Japanese territory where he delivers his report and is made a hero. He admits he owes everything to Yae. Eternal (unconsummated) love and the nation are preserved. Gone are the explicit sexual liaisons of the episodic Murder Incorporated, written in 1924. Gone are references to Marxist ideology. If ever a story seemed to fit the words patriotic and valiant in the title of the collection in which it was published, this was it. But if we take “The ­Pickled-­Overnight Revolutionary” to be significant with its denigration of explicitly ideological novels and proposal for reaching more mainstream publishing venues like Kōdan Club, our reading of this and other insipid stories published by Hokumei in Kōdan Club might change. Following his logic, the degree to which a story is subsumed in the standard tropes and ideologies in the mainstream is not only the degree to which the text is potentially complicit, but also the degree to which it might be subversive. It is the very ability of the text to remain within mainstream discourse, its very complicity, that may provide the opportunity for radicality. To read the story along these lines is to downplay the previous plot summary in favor of other themes. For instance, we might focus on the way the meaning of the poem that opens “The Beckoning Spirit” is subverted by that which follows: Minanogawa, every man and woman’s river, flows from the shadows atop the twin peaks of Mount Tsukuba and gathers like love into a swelling pool.45

Yozeiin’s famed love poem (written around the ninth century) from the Hyakunin isshu bespeaks a burgeoning love that runs a natural course. But Hokumei’s appropriation of the poem underlines the double meanings of fuchi—a deep pool and an impassable abyss—which he brings out by following the love poem with a sharp contrast: war. The poem about the river naturally flowing from Mount Tsukuba is directly followed by this descriptive prose: “And at the foot of those two peaks of Tsukuba mountain  

 

108    /    Production in T. Village, a rising sun flag fluttered in the crisp autumn wind. In this village, today, the famed soldier named OO was sent off with cheers.” 46 The poem’s evocation of nature is shattered by the prose that follows. Here we are completely within the realm of the human, nation, and war. The first few lines, both poetry and prose, foreshadow all that is to come. Rather than running a natural course into a “deep pool,” the burgeoning love in this story is always on a treacherous precipice, the edge of an abyss: it is a passionate love that can overflow to disastrous consequences. The problem of class inequality is central to this story of ill-fated love. Kazuo’s father is the wealthy landowner and mayor of the town. Yae and her mother are essentially sharecroppers on Kazuo’s father’s land. So when Kazuo’s father deigns to permit the wedding, he is transgressing traditional family and class norms. The concern for class divisions is further reiterated when Yae and her mother, country bumpkin field hands, go to the big city and are swindled by the clerk in the wedding store. Their gaffe is the mistake of low-class farmers, people presumably devoid of middleclass taste or a sense of decorum. This fact alone explains Kazuo’s father’s rage, the termination of the wedding, and the sudden class consciousness of the son at the end of the story. His individual realization both of his error in not resisting his father’s decision and of the value of Yae’s life is enabled by their class difference. Hokumei uses a popular and acceptable plot line to surreptitiously convey the notion that class divisions are artificial, the source of tragedy, and even the root of troubles in war.

Criminalized Sex, Glorified Violence, and Banned Wounds We are faced in our culture by the insurmountable schizophrenic contradiction that sex, which is legal in fact, is a crime on paper, while murder—a crime in fact—is, on paper, the best seller of all time.47  

 

Make love not war.48 We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.49

Recognizing the connection between the erotic and the proletarian can begin to explain the subsequent mass canonization of violent representation through war narrative. What is left after the vanishing of this eropuro connection? If the erotic and proletarian are suppressed, where might we find their traces, their return in mainstream publications during the war? War narratives that are neither sexually nor politically radical but that are nevertheless titillating and escapist represent the displacement of

Seditious Obscenities    /    109 what was sought after in the suppressed erotic and proletarian fiction: ever more realistic and bald depictions of taboo subjects.50 The ero-puro sense provides the basis for a rereading of the decriminalization of representations of violence in wartime cultures. What we have neglected in the standard ero-guro characterization thus far is the grotesque itself. Though violent and sexual stories considered grotesque also experienced a boom, the amount of banned grotesque fiction—whether noir or bizarre (ryōki), detective (tantei), or mystery (suiri) fiction—extant in the archives of the Home Ministry in Japan between 1923 and 1937 is particularly low when compared to other genres.51 This does not mean that censorship had no effect whatsoever on the more grotesque genres. Major figures like Edogawa Ranpo did suffer the occasional ban and eventually moved to different genres (though, as Sari Kawana points out, these moves may have been more voluntary than the result of censorial coercion).52 But bans on detective fiction were statistically insignificant compared to those on erotic and proletarian genres. Discussing actual cases of state violence and not the representations of such violence, Ueno Chizuko argues persuasively that the one kind of violence universally decriminalized is state violence.53 If we take Ueno’s point to be that violence in the name of the state is routinely justified (if rarely justifiable), what of the representations of violence in the name of country, nation, emperor, or democracy? Are these representations of war to be less targeted than others? 54 What kind of images of state violence are deemed offensive? What images of violence at the national level are criminalized? Who decides? The June 1927 issue of Hokumei’s magazine Hentai shiryō (Perverse Matters) carried a series of five photographs under the title “Sensō ni tai suru sensō” (The war against war). These disturbing images of the ravages of war were reproduced from Ernst Frederich’s German book Krieg dem Krieg (The war against war, 1924). The Japanese caption for figure 4.2 reads, “Even with this, he lives!” and below, “This is a sacrifice of the German Army in the European War.” Ernst Frederich’s caption from the original reads: “Die ‘Badekur’ der Proleten: Fast das ganze Gesicht weggeschossen” (The ‘health resort’ of the proletarian: Almost the whole face blown away).55 In the context of Japan in the late 1920s, it is understandable that the Japanese caption does not translate the overtly Marxist overtones of the original caption. The combination of the two Japanese captions wavers between appealing to morbid curiosity at the grotesque image and to the pacifist message of the German original minus the overt connection to proletarian ideology.56  

 

110    /    Production

Figure 4.2.  From June 1927 Edition of Perverse Matters

Significantly, this collection of photographs was published in Perverse Matters, not Arts Market or Gurotesuku, Hokumei’s other magazines. Interwar “perversion” and erotics had a further political reach than we might expect. The influence of this kind of antiwar sentiment, published in the seemingly liminal Perverse Matters, was deep.57 In the year after this series of five photos was first published, its title, Sensō ni tai suru sensō

Seditious Obscenities    /    111 (The war against war), was borrowed for the first collection of antiwar short stories ever published in Japan. Most of the writers assembled in the collection were renowned proletarian writers; wartime rape is a feature of several of the stories. Writers in the collection included Eguchi Kan, Hayashi Fusao, Kaneko Yōbun, Kuroshima Denji, Maedakō Hiroichirō, Murayama Tomoyoshi, Takeda Rintarō, and Tsuboi Shigeji.58 As raw portrayals of the experience of war devoid of prolonged philosophical reflection, these antiwar stories were the stylistic forerunners of even the most jingoistic of canonical war literature.59 The sense of Foucault’s caution that “we must not think that in saying yes to sex, we are saying no to power” has been ignored historically by a number of radicals from the 1920s through the 1970s. Yet, in light of the demise of the ero-puro moment in prewar Japan, the possibilities entailed in such a saying yes to sex and leftism need to be well heeded. Foucault’s “microphysics of power” does not suggest a specific path for resistance to censorship or the power censorship seeks to consolidate. The recognition that “cultural forms are hybrid, mixed, impure and the time has come in cultural analysis to reconnect their analysis with their actuality” can begin to delineate a path to understanding minute moments of historical resistance, both their failures and successes.60 And while bodies and pleasures may be one useful starting place for interrogating the idea of a monolithic wartime discourse, a look at bodies in pain during war may be more helpful for examining the rise in literatures of violence.

5.  Literary Casualties of War What the violent whirlwind of “war time” does, among other things, is to disrupt all clear relations and distinctions, in what seems to be an unprecedented manner. —Samuel Weber 1

 

Discussion of war is always accompanied by a certain kind of hesitation. This is not merely due to the danger involved in sticking one’s neck out into such a stifling matter—a matter from which one would feel such relief if only they could do without talking about it. Nor is it because to talk about something is to affirm it, and however you talk about war, somewhere, the flames of war blast. No—despite the fact that discussion is the exact opposite of war, by discussing it people fall prey to the illusion that they are coming into contact with it, even though in reality they could not be further from the truth of war.  

 

—Nishitani Osamu 2

 

There is no absolute boundary between wartime and peacetime, no special mode of wartime censorship that is not already, in some sense, preemptively deployed in the peacetime economy. However, war has the effect of making itself appear wholly unprecedented, bringing to the surface that which may have gone unnoticed or been long submerged. The states of emergency associated with war emphasize and make explicit already pervasive but implicit fears about controlling the hearts and minds of the people. This chapter turns our focus to a cultural phenomenon that exists outside of wartime but is all the more clear during war: the relationship of censorship and canonization. Because censors cannot help but shape what will be published, censorship is necessarily a component in the process of canonization. Even more than that, though, censors in their deep concern over circulation focus on precisely the major factor in modern canon formation. In fact, one of the salient continuities between the two censorship systems in transwar Japan is this concern over circulation relative to offense. And if mass circulation comes to equal cultural value in modernity, then the censorship of canonical authors is no paradox, but a logical means of patrolling important ideas and images. So on the one hand, a work’s popularity might make it all the more a target of censorship; on 112

Literary Casualties of War    /    113 the other hand, the degree to which the same work adheres to the bounds of censorship as previously understood might be the degree to which it is allowed to be widely published. Although in some sense any genre from any modern period could serve as an exemplar of the role of the censor in producing a canon and of the role of canonization in leading to censorship, concentrating on narratives of war and their historical receptions reveals the violence done to texts explicitly because such narratives tend to deal directly with intense, sometimes gory encounters with a supposedly new, foreign, and incomprehensible enemies and, as such, must define and negotiate strict national taboos. Nishitani Osamu’s comment in the epigraph suggests that wartime is something opposed to words and discussion; and yet, to argue this Nishi­ tani requires the word war, which itself may be too disruptive of understanding to address all that it seeks to name. War at once is too vague: it signifies all that goes into violence between states, and yet it is also too exclusive of something called peace. When violence between nations is explicit and unavoidable, writing may be inadequate for representing the infinite complexities and horrors of war not only because of partisan embedded reporting, but also because war ultimately takes place in the deafening silence and abject violence after talk breaks down. Or if war, which is full of gasps, grunts, and booms, is not exactly silent, its noise is not the noise of public discourse, the exchange of ideas. If censorship is one of the forces on the threshold between silence and discourse that helps to produce both categories, censorship itself is fundamentally bound to war and perhaps vice versa. Bringing the relationship of transwar censorship and one of its apparent opposites—canonization—into focus can help close the critical gap between discussions of wartime and postwar Japanese literature, as well as similar gaps in cultural studies that focus solely on marginalized materials. Provisionally taking “censored” to mean that which an entity with influence over textual production and reception has deemed should not be written, read, or disseminated and “canonized” to mean that which a similar power has deemed should be written, read, and disseminated allows a comparison, bringing into dialogue moments separated by time, space, politics, and culture.3 Episodes of literary exclusion and selection and those of outright censoring around the topos of war vividly render the period’s literary casualties. Literary casualties are not only a dead corpus of belles lettres unwritten because the sentiments they might have contained simply would not jibe with the times or those written ones that never saw the light of day during  

 

114    /    Production the war, but also both those texts produced under censorship that were scarred by their encounter with censorship in readable ways and those stories that came to prominence only after the war had ended. A canon requires various mechanisms (of which censorship is but one) that assign value to texts. Under a censorship system, the work of already canonical writers and presses receive extra scrutiny from the censors because of their potential to reach a wider audience. After the passing of a censorious regime, those works censored in the previous era may be taken up in canons as presenting the underlying truth of the past regime, which is raw and unspeakable. So wartime censorship produces, not a particular narrative of war, but modes of representation of the war that become canonical, and in this way the war censor’s power lasts beyond the war proper. Considering war narrative published during the war as the end of the effects of wartime censorship overlooks the lasting effects of censorship on discourse. If the previous chapter examined the way literary casualties accrue around the populations of texts decimated by the censor in a genre-cide of seditious and erotic texts, this chapter inspects the body of texts that compose a canon valued by a national culture, yet that are wounded and scarred through inevitable encounters with censorship. This chapter is divided into five sections displaying how canonization and censorship in transwar Japan were mutually productive. First, the relationship between canon and censor at abstract and statistical levels delineates the products of censorship as potentially canonical narratives and canonical narratives as already censored. Second, the differences and similarities between Japanese imperial and Occupation censorships displayed in one text—banned by both regimes—enable a discussion of the ways censored texts can prefigure and anticipate their eventual censoring. Third, the maintenance of offense (namely, the continual proclivity toward crossing the lines drawn by the censors, despite or because of successive encounters with the censors) is viewed in one author, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. Fourth, images of casualties of war in two war novels—one banned and the other canonical—provide a telling nexus for understanding the soldiering body that is produced under censorship. Fifth, the internalized traces of external censorship in the manuscripts of two canonical postwar narratives of war show how these categories of censorship are naturalized.  

 

 

 

The Censored with(-in) the Canonized Canons are produced through acts of censorship; censored texts are canonized by having been interpellated through their censorship.4 Canons do

Literary Casualties of War    /    115

Percentage of Bestselling Authors Banned % Banned by Home Ministry

% Banned by GHQ

%both banned

70.0

60.0

50.0

Percentage

40.0

30.0

20.0

10.0

0.0

1926-1930

1931-1935

1936-1940

1941-1945

1946-1950

1951-1955

1956-1960

Periods

Figure 5.1.  Percentage of Bestselling Authors Who Were Also Censored

not obliterate other texts without leaving a trace. Censored texts are never those texts entirely absent from published discourse; to be censored they must already be engaging with canonical ideas. In other words, they must be worthy of being censored. Similarly, canonical texts must engage with (even if to reject) taboos; to be approved and valued, those texts represent the censored issues to some extent. So, in principle, there is no canon without censorship and no censorship without canon. With the rise of relatively cheap means of literary reproduction in the 1920s, the significance and power of mass publication expanded widely.5 As both John Guillory and Komori Yōichi point out, the cheapening of highbrow culture leads to its massification, which may hold greater sway over individuals than highbrow culture alone during moments when empires and capital are primary cultural forces. The transwar period therefore necessitates that, rather than viewing a canon as solely a highbrow phenomenon, we conceive of middlebrow and even lowbrow canons as well.6 Two such popular canons can be found in lists of best sellers and lists of novels serialized in mainstream newspapers. Many stories included in these popular canons were also censored; focusing on the censorship of their authors also reveals some interesting tendencies. Figure 5.17 charts the relationship between best-selling authors and the censors. For example, 60 percent of the authors whose works became best sellers during the period from 1931 to 1935 were banned by Japanese Home Ministry censors at some point in the course of their careers before 1945.

116    /    Production About 20 percent of the best-selling authors would later experience bans under the Occupation censors, and all of those authors had been banned by the Home Ministry as well. The chart presents a striking continuity across the war: no less than 20 percent of best-selling authors from 1926 to 1955 experienced either Home Ministry or GHQ censorship and many had experienced both. So this dynamic relation between the canonization and the censorship of specific authors is not simply a function of the Pacific War alone, though the function is more pronounced in those years. Figure 5.28 gives a similar chart for novelists serialized in the Asahi Newspaper. The percentage of authors publishing in the Asahi who had work banned at some point during their careers is even higher than it is for the best sellers, reflecting perhaps the censor’s concern in the prewar and wartime period over the slightly left-of-center politics in the newspaper. On the whole, 36.5 percent of the authors serialized between 1932 and 1961 were banned at some point by the Home Ministry, while 29.2 percent of the authors were banned by the Occupation censors. The period from 1942 to 1944 shows remarkable convergence; the percentage of authors serialized during that period whose work was banned by either the Home Ministry or Occupation censors is the highest for the entire span from 1932 to 1961. In other words, the canon described by the list of serialized authors at the height of the war is also a list of the most censored authors. Over half of the authors who published serialized novels in the Asahi during that period experienced bans at some point by the Home Ministry. And 44 percent had works banned by the Occupation censors in the years following the war. Thus, we can say that the chances of a canonized author being censored in wartime were well above (over ten times) the average for all authors over every period studied. While this empirical data relating authors to canonization and censorship tells us about the significant overlap between the canonized and the censored in Japan across the war, the numbers cannot describe the ways the canonization of some authors led to subsequent censorship, or, as is perhaps more often the case, the ways some authors changed after being censored, enabling a subsequent canonization. The charts cannot plot the textual nuances that managed to offend the censor and to appeal to the masses, sometimes simultaneously. Furthermore, the charts do not reflect the way texts prefigure or anticipate their multiple receptions, be they censorious, canonical, or otherwise. For that we must read the literature. The hybrid zones of canonized and censored literature across the war signify a critically neglected truth of cultural production, namely, that public discourse necessitates and is neces-

Literary Casualties of War    /    117 Asahi Novelists Banned Total Banned

Banned by Home Ministry

Banned by GHQ

Banned by both

80.0 70.0 60.0

Percentage

50.0 40.0 30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0

1932-1961

1932-1945 1946-1961

1932-1937 1938-1941 1942-1944 1947-1949 1950-1952 1953-1955 1956-1961 Period

Figure 5.2.  Percentage Novelists Serialized in Asahi Who Were Also Censored

sitated by, precipitates and is precipitated by, anticipates and is anticipated by processes of canonization and censorship. Highlighting the ways the “canonized” and “censored” overlap, support, substitute for, and contend with each other calls into question the ways the terms tend to be used and opens the ground for debate on the ethics of literary reception and production.

Censored and Canonized: One Text The Home Ministry and GHQ examination copies of the proletarian writer Kuroshima Denji’s novel Busō seru shigai (Militarized Streets), published in 1930, are surprisingly similar. They illustrate how a text that challenges status quo power and empire can continue to offend even after its first target has lost power. Indeed, the lasting mark of censorship on the novel meant that it was not until long after the passing of both regimes of censors that it was finally published in full and welcomed into the canon of modern Japanese literature. My readings are based on three archival copies. The first two are editions from the Home Ministry collection of examination copies, one a clean copy with few pencil marks, the other the resubmitted copy with fuseji and many red and blue pencil marks.9 The third is the GHQ copy from the Prange Collection, also riddled with pencil marks.10 Though the

118    /    Production pencil marks may not convey all that was in a censor’s mind when reading a text, the pattern that various marks create can occasionally make reading the censors fairly straightforward. For instance, blue pencil marks in the postwar version around every instance of the often-repeated words nation-state (国家) and homeland (内地) reveal the GHQ censor’s concern with Japanese ultra-nationalism, which is wholly consistent with the categories of postwar censorship.11 These marks also begin to vindicate claims by writers that censorship misinterprets literary subtleties. Other marks, however, show the censors—whether the Home Ministry or the GHQ—to be more aware of literary nuance. In fact, both censors were very much concerned with the anti-imperialist overtones of Kuroshima’s novel. This passage, X’ed in the revised second Home Ministry copy, shows that censor’s fear of insurrection:  

 

Japanese

The ******** boss ordered her husband to do business with outlaws. When the police found them, they grabbed him along with the bandits. First he sends his own employee to do business with them, and then Japanese

when he’s caught the ******** declares that the man’s been fired and he knows nothing about it. The evil one’s the boss. . . . The boss is evil! Japanese

The ******** are evil!” 12

The imperial identity of the culprit must go unnamed, or so thought the X’er, whether a censor, editor, or writer. The specification of the Japanese boss is deemed potentially offensive and is covered; yet the X-ing did not cover enough for the censor, who decided to ban the book even though it had been redacted. So perhaps even raising the issue that the colonizer (or someone other than the native) is to blame for exploitation and thievery on the periphery was the taboo here. This concern over blaming the occupier is shared by the Occupation censor, who cites a passage implicating Western involvement in China with clear attention to the possible reading of Japan occupied by the United States as similar to China occupied by the Japanese: “The honkies say they’re here for the churches, the charities, and such. But behind all that they’re doing one hell of a booming business. There’s no comparison with us.” “Free schools and free hospitals are nothing but a trick they use. However you look at it.” 13

During the Occupation, the suggestion that the intentions of the Allies (the promotion of democracy, the liberation of the people of Japan, and so on) are not entirely honorable is taboo. This shared offense at questioning

Literary Casualties of War    /    119 the probity of empire—whether in the name of Emperor and Asian brotherhood or democracy and charity—is striking, because it casts into relief the parallels and continuities between supposedly antipodal censors. Both authorities were interested in consolidating their power and both feared revolution and insurrection within their occupied territories. Consider two different scenes of rape that reflect how the two censors viewed such violence as potentially seditious. The marks surrounding the following gap-laden scene in the Home Ministry examination copy seems to express concern over that which is redacted: the suggestion of unbecoming behavior by Japanese occupiers. Here we are given a com 

 

the young girls

bination of gaps and Xs to blank out the passage: “Moreover As were invariably sampled by Otsu before being handed over to buyers. ** for Koyama no fewer than ten coolies had been caught by his heavy stick and left maimed or *** * * * * * * ** ***** **** *** ****** *** * *** ******  ** *** ***** ***** * * * **** * * * * * * * *

dead

**** .” 14

The GHQ censor is similarly offended by another sexually transgressive scene. The following is marked in the GHQ copy: There were two soldiers. They entered the dormitory housing the female students and sated their sexual hunger. When a woman teacher humbly pleaded with them to keep quiet about what they had done, the soldiers demanded money. Unable to refuse, she paid. Nonetheless, upon returning to their dark barracks, the two proudly told their fellow soldiers all about it. After nightfall, a band of lustful soldiers stormed the school. The Chinese screams and metallic shouts resounded far in the distance.15

Far from an aberrant or random confluence between the two censors, this shared sensitivity to the truth of sexual violence in wartime is evident in many examples. For example, it mimics the doubled censorship received by Kurihara Sadako’s poem “What is War?” from her collection Black Eggs. The poem, which describes war atrocities and rape, was withheld from publication upon composition in 1942 for fear of imperial censorship and was deleted from publication in 1946 at the order of Occupation censors.16 War had to be sanitized of sexual violence, though other forms of violence to bodies were to be expected and readily accepted.17 Only in 1953, after the Occupation censors had ceased to function as a bureaucratic regime, did a paperback edition of Militarized Streets first appear, and even that had significant portions excised. The deleted scenes contained direct references to America and other Allied forces (particularly in chapter 12). While this might seem to support Etō Jun’s notion that GHQ censorship sullied the entire literary landscape of postwar Japan, the Home Ministry censors had clearly left a similar mark. That the effects

120    /    Production of censorship are lasting is evidenced by the fact that the novel was not included in any major anthology until 1964. But whatever taint may have been left from both domestic and foreign censors did not keep a complete edition from publication in 1970. And if canonization can also be measured by the number of times a text has been anthologized, the inclusion of Militarized Streets in various literary collections confirms that the taint of censorship beginning in 1930, while serious and in this case quite long (over twenty years), was not as constraining as Etō’s dark picture of the postwar discursive system would suggest. That the story has overcome the stigma of censorship, or has been canonized because of censorship’s stigma, is clear in its subsequent inclusion in other major collections and recent translation.18 In the shadow of war, we can find a censorship as concerned with the names of the homeland and the enemy as it is with representations of imperial profit and violence. Perhaps the word wound more accurately captures the effects of censorship over time than either taint or stigma, insofar as wounds may heal and leave scars. The history of Militarized Streets, banned by both regimes, tells of a continuing and opened wound that healed over time into the scars of canonization. Not all censorship stories show such a clear progression. The career of one often-banned author presents instead a continuum on which the processes of canonization and censorship reside, a gaping wound or one in the never-ending process of healing.

Censor and Canon: One Author Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s first postwar story, “The Letters of Mrs. A” (“A fujin no tegami”), is the inoffensive, if rather silly, account of a woman who develops a romantic attachment for a pilot she has never actually met; . . . The story, told in the form of letters, is so inept that the reader may suspect that Tanizaki made use of actual letters. The censors were probably not troubled by the silliness of the story, but they feared it might be a covert expression of militarism and suppressed publication in the summer of 1946.  

—Donald Keene 19

Focusing on the historical context, the structural components, and the specific literary references and images of “The Letters of Mrs. A” reveals the position of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō as both marginal and central. By pushing the boundaries between the speakable and the unspeakable, the linguistic and the pictorial, and linear meaning and ironic polysemy in its references, “The Letters of Mrs. A” marks an intersection where these

Literary Casualties of War    /    121 categories begin to dissolve; such intermixings give Tanizaki’s literature both its broad appeal and its threatening charge. That Tanizaki was censored does not limit the power of his utterance; on the contrary, it is his experience of having been censored that makes him so central to modern Japanese literature. The risk and promise of his fiction stem from its ability to obfuscate boundaries, negotiate the processes of marginalization and canonization, and seemingly dissolve these processes by means of ironic posturing behind mixings of genre. “The Letters of Mrs. A” conflates categories and bucks categorization, while resisting interpretations that fail to utilize such categories. Tanizaki’s career shows remarkable continuity despite the critical tendency to settle on three distinct periods. Masao Miyoshi, Donald Keene, Ken Ito, Noguchi Takehiko, and Itō Sei, among others, all rely to some degree on a basic Hegelian narrative to describe it. 20 The first era is characterized by Tanizaki’s infatuation with the West and the “superior” woman of “The Tattoo” (“Shisei,” 1910); next follows his “return to Japan” in Tales of Genji (Genji Monogatari, 1939) and his retreat to the domestic life of Kansai in Light Snow (Sasameyuki [translated as The Makioka Sisters], 1943–1948); and the final period, a synthesis, is signified by the elaborate structure, ironic distancing, and erotic situations of The Key (Kagi, 1956) and Diary of a Mad Old Man (Fūten rōjin nikki, 1961–1962). This naming of three periods (as prewar, war, and postwar) is significant not only in the case of Tanizaki’s career, but for transwar Japanese history as it reflects a larger construal of the wartime as a dark chasm in Japanese culture, an anomaly to be overcome. Although Tanizaki’s career is a unique case because many of the works for which he is most known involve cases of censorship, the conclusions regarding the censorship of Tanizaki apply to many authors of the period. Certainly, one can imagine similar readings of other transwar canonical writers who had direct experiences of censorship, for instance, Dazai Osamu, Nakano Shigeharu, Edogawa Ranpo, and Kawabata Yasunari.21 The choice of Tanizaki here is one of convenience rather than necessity. Written in 1946, “The Letters of Mrs. A” comes at the end of what the periodizing critics term Tanizaki’s “return to Japan” and, therefore, could easily be misconstrued as pointing to a sea change in the author’s career.22 Not simply turning from the romantic back to the erotic following his wartime experience with censorship, Tanizaki managed to change with the times only insofar as it meant maintaining his ability to continue to obfuscate the newly redrawn borders of social decorum and to appeal through offense; in this sense, “The Letters of Mrs. A” epitomizes what  

 

122    /    Production happened throughout Tanizaki’s work. From his debut in 1911 through his wartime exercises (Light Snow and Tale of Genji) to being awarded the Medal of Culture from the Emperor in 1949 and being reprimanded by the National Diet for The Key in 1957, Tanizaki maintained a consistent and uncanny ability to navigate the threshold between the speakable and the unspeakable.23 “Letters of Mrs. A” directly addresses questions of genre. As the writer of the letters, Yasuko draws attention to form by including within her letters what she calls a “picture-story” (絵物語). Unable to express a truth about the personality of the air force employees with words alone in her final letter, Yasuko turns to mixing text with images: “I think it is not an exaggeration even if I say there is nothing that expresses the personality of airplane crews or even all their sentiments themselves. The rest is a picture-story!” 24 Included as part of her story, the following eight pictures are ordering numbered figures (the numbers signaling that they are constructs of Yasuko as an author). The explicit labeling of her creation as a picture-story makes the reader see Tanizaki’s entire story, which also includes unnumbered illustrations outside of the final letter, in those terms. The sudden numbering of the pictures at the beginning of the story-within-the-story signals not only that they are constructs, but also that the entire work is a construct; notably, each of the letters is numbered as a chapter. Not a sign made by Yasuko, this numbering by an implied outside arranger or author of the letters is left behind, allowing the fiction to be seen as a performance of the real, as a representation. Thus, the inclusion of pictures within Yasuko’s framed story serves not as a way of heightening representation as Yasuko hopes it might, but rather as a way of pointing out the limitations of representation by casting our attention to the framing letters and the author in control of the frame of the letters (Tanizaki). An unreadable mark that represents a plane formation included within the flow of the text epitomizes this problem, the ridiculousness of picturestory’s (or any genre’s) claim to be able to represent reality more than another genre. The mark is a picture, giving the formation of three planes following two that are, in turn, led by one. (Fifth Drawing) This time it was really gorgeous; (when I went out onto the roof of my formation aimed at house) from the land they disappeared in a the clouds on the horizon; it was dreamlike. (Sixth Drawing)25

Literary Casualties of War    /    123 The marks are the paradigm of the picture-story (e-monogatari) genre: like the pictures (e) themselves, one cannot tell, speak, or pronounce (kataru) these things (mono). Though the symbols achieve little more signification than in standard language, they do not achieve any less, either. Like ordinary language, the lines are legible at some level, though they have no pronunciation. They are similar, perhaps, to the Japanese numbers 三, 二, 一 (3, 2, 1) but are not presented as individual characters; and the displacement of the middle line in the first grouping precludes our reading it merely as a number. The form here seems to be the important thing: a form mimicking the form of three planes on the horizon. Through the marks, Tanizaki comments on the function of language and the limits of representation: the aporia marked by the glyphs (like language, literature) are not to be read, interpreted, or disambiguated at some secondary level of remove; they are only instantly apprehended, like redaction marks. Tanizaki reveals the futility both of attempts to represent the unrepresentable and of representation that does not make gestures to the unrepresentable. He mocks the notion that literature has messages that can be simply decoded, yet somehow succeeds in conveying and encoding the formation of the planes. “The Letters of Mrs. A” complicates meaning through its references to censorship. In 1946, Tanizaki recounted his problems with censorship in the case of “The Letters of Mrs. A” to a reporter from the Times of London, Honor Tracy: [Tanizaki was] surprised by the ban and still more by the reason given for it, which was that it was encouraging to militarism; but he attached no great importance to the matter because, in the first place, stories brought into the censorship office were translated by Nisei clerks to whom, as was well known, the Japanese language was almost as unfamiliar as the English, and, in the second, the decision to ban or not to ban was taken by Army officers who could not, in Mr. Tanizaki’s view, fairly be expected to understand literature.26

Tanizaki denies the validity of a particular interpretation, positing that literature can be “understood” to have a specific interpretation and that he, the author, knows what his literature means and the censor does not. This notion is not only dubious but also in defiance of the images and references employed in “The Letters of Mrs. A.” The use of the word airplane (飛行機) in the story would have been objectionable to Occupation censors, but this alone accounts neither for the complete ban of the story (a rewrite with the offensive word deleted or the passages rewritten could have been requested) nor for Tanizaki’s use of the

124    /    Production airplane as an image.27 Imperial pilots and by extension their planes certainly presented a quintessential symbol of the wartime imperial state, but to assume that Yasuko’s fetishization of the plane is mere nationalism or militarism fails to account for the possibility of other meanings. In terms of the Freudian notion of the fetish, with which Tanizaki was familiar, the overvaluation of airplanes epitomized by Yasuko’s hearing the engine noise as musical and symphonic would seem to replace a lack of romance, sex, home, and family in her life as an evacuee.28 And yet the letters are a testament to the failed success of this particular substitute; Yasuko’s missives are nothing if not longings for absent body-to-body relations. Similar to the airplane imagery, the books of which Yasuko writes in her letters have nationalistic overtones, though their meanings extend beyond nationalism alone. Perhaps the most important reference in the story is to a German story that Yasuko mentions as an inspiration. She writes: Actually I read a German short story called “A Child’s Room” or something like that and was translated by Takahashi Kenji. In it the theme was a romance between a high-class woman and an officer in the air force. As there has yet to be a great novel like this in Japan, when I lifted my brush, I started to have the urge to want to write it.29

The story to which Yasuko refers is most likely “Unsterblichkeit,” an actual short story by Rudolf Georg Binding translated by Takahashi into Japanese as 「不死」 (fushi, immortality), in which a young woman falls in love with an air force pilot who subsequently dies in battle over the ocean; his spirit in the form of the sea returns and impregnates the aptly named Demeter. Though Binding was not a nationalistic writer, his story, when taken in a Japanese context, glorifies the pilot. But Tanizaki’s reference is not as simple as this; Kodomobeya (Child’s room), the collection in which the story appeared in Japanese, was censored in 1943 at the height of the wartime militarist regime for the Binding story’s bedroom scene.30 Though the translation of Binding was reworked and republished, Tanizaki could have been criticizing the prudishness of the imperial censorship regime by dropping the title into the story just as easily as he could have been creating nostalgia for the passing of the wartime militarists. The postwar publication of “The Letters” is not simply a celebration of a new era in which Binding’s story would be published without reprisal, but a skillfully chosen grouping of references that undermine and reveal how similarly limiting the new era was despite the vastly changed circumstances. Perhaps the case of “The Letters” has been long overlooked because it presents a counternarrative of wartime literary production to a

Literary Casualties of War    /    125 field that is so heavily invested in the divide between wartime and postwar. The story disrupts our notion of a break in literary production under wartime censorship by shedding light on the fact that authors by and large worked with censorship as but one of many constraints on their writing throughout transwar Japan. Tanizaki’s career illustrates a continuity of offense against censors and literary constructs and simultaneously a reliance on censorship as the grist for literary material over his entire career. This is not to argue, however, that external censorship was necessary for the existence of the author or was harmless. Rather, censorship simply produces readable effects on literature and authors.

Canonical Bodies and Censored Deaths: How War Wounds Bodies of Writing The productive effects of censorship on the censored and the canonized can be read in a comparison of the images of bodies in two war novels. In 1938, Japanese authorities issued sanctions against the publishers of the magazine Chūō Kōron, suppressing Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s Ikiteiru heitai (Living Soldiers) for its graphic depictions of the casualties of the war in China and the cruelty of Japanese soldiers. The publication history and the ideological circumstances of the reception of this novel blur distinction between living and dead. In doing so, it challenges canonical narratives of war, exemplified by Hino Ashihei’s Mugi to heitai (Barley and Soldiers, 1939). Unlike the banned narratives of war that sought to represent the threshold between living and dead, in this bestselling novel the living are the living, the dead are the dead, and never the twain shall meet. Following a similar logic to that of canonical texts—which require the literary casualties of the censor, editor, and critic—representations of living bodies in canonical war literature stand in a binary relation to images of dead bodies; the concept of a living body needs that of a dead one to survive. Literary representations that blur categorical binaries and challenge received notions of the distinctions between the “speakable” and the “unspeakable” or the “living” and the “dead” are taboo in periods when the maintenance of such distinctions is most important and are canonical when the blurring of such distinctions is favored. As Elaine Scarry has written, “The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring. . . . One can read . . . without encountering the acknowledgment that the purpose of the event described is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape, and deep entirety of the objects that human beings recognize as extensions of themselves.” 31 The damage done  

 

126    /    Production to the body by war is, as Scarry claims, “omitted,” “redescribed,” or “relocated.” But, despite or through their marginalization and displacement, representations of injured and dead bodies return in canonical narratives, so that the covering of the dead is never complete.32 Similarly, the bonds between the living and the dead—the potential of the living to become dead and for the dead to resemble the living—are never entirely elaborated in suppressed narratives of war. About the hiding of the casualties of war, Etō Jun argues that by censoring remembrances of the war dead, Occupation censors destroyed some essential Japaneseness. He writes, “The severing [by Occupation censors] of the ties between the living and the dead inflicted a fatal wound on Japa­ nese identity.” 33 Etō’s work reveals the dangers of seeing censorship as a wholly localized phenomenon, though he himself gestures toward a comparative approach at several points, for instance, by considering prewar American censorship in the figures of Zechariah Chaffee, a professor of freedom of speech, and Byron Price, the head of the Censorship Office, and by making an implicit comparison between postwar and wartime censorship.34 The short shrift he gives these comparisons, however, results in his fetishization of the violence of the postwar censors without, for instance, acknowledging that the implicit ban on connections between the living and the dead was already in effect during the war and was enforced by imperial censors. Some connections between the living and the dead were canonized in the war period, such as in the image of the spirits of dead soldiers who died honorably for the Emperor enshrined at Yasukuni. Yet images of corpses, and conceptions of corpses as similar to living corps of Japanese soldiers stationed on the front lines, were excised even during the war. In his study of the work of the soldier and postwar novelist Ōoka Shō­ hei, Komori Yōichi acknowledges the impossibility of relating death in language during times of war:  

 

In that moment when the “death” of the war dead is completely bound to the framework of a “national interest” or “nation,” which is called “Japan” and “the Japanese people,” the path of language that approaches a reality based on experience is closed off. As the condensed entirety of the confusing, multilayered interests of war, which is fought concretely and individually and thus between nation and nation, the “death” of each dead person is completely sealed off. “Mourning” is the constant recalling by survivors of the “death” of the dead, which confronts the “death” of the dead and puts it into words in the “here and now” of the living. In what kinds of words do survivors recall the “death” of the dead in the “here and now”? Isn’t it

Literary Casualties of War    /    127 only within the “fluctuating” language between those dead and those living that we can come face to face with reality and historicity?35

For Komori, whose critique of Etō is implied, this fluctuation began after the war. In other words, while Etō argues that the disjuncture of life and death begins within the ideological bounds of the postwar discursive space, Komori sees the space as so open since the war that it finally allows for the expression of the connections between the living and the dead.

Writing Dismemberment, Literary Amputation, and the Offense of the Unreadable In 1938, Ishikawa Tatsuzō wrote Ikiteiru heitai (Living Soldiers) in a reportage style based on interviews conducted with Japanese soldiers in China. Submitted to the magazine Chūō Kōron long past his deadline, this graphic depiction of the cruelty of Japanese soldiers did not escape from the editor’s redactions marks. Editors heavily marked the following passage: “Ah, ah, ah!” While screaming shrilly with madness, Hirao took his stabbed three times the woman’s chest

******* ***** ***** *** * * * * * * * *****.

bayonet and ******* ***

with their short

The other soldiers joined in ****

swords stabbing her blindly about the head and stomach

****** ******** ***  *******  ***** *** * * * *  * * * * * * * * * *.



Like a layer of

***** *****

bedding

*******,

she lay on the dark ground

spread out, spent, * * * *** * * *** **** * * * * * * while a warm vapor thick with the stink of fresh blood **** * * *  ***** ** ***** ***** ­frenzied soldiers.36

drifted upward into the flushed faces of the

The specific details of the wounds to the body are covered over. The watchful editors, however, were not able to hide the general gist of Ishikawa’s work, which, though not antiwar as such, depicted the cruelties of war in a realistic style. The state censors declared the issue forbidden to sell and distribute upon its publication, because of it was “disrupting the public peace and order with depictions of lack of military discipline, and the imperial soldiers’ slaughter and pillaging of noncombatants.” 37 Several editors and Ishikawa himself were indicted. However, that Ishikawa went to jail and that the text was removed from thousands of copies of that month’s issue does not mean that the text was unseen, that is, censored in the sense of being completely obliterated from public consumption. A few days after being imprisoned, Ishikawa was given permission to return to China and to write. The censored book was translated into Chinese that year.38 And the passage of time has seen the

128    /    Production canonization of the text in postwar Japan as emblematic of the repressed truth of war. The problems of the text’s reception are echoed in the story when a young Chinese woman who had pulled a gun on the soldiers is captured. “Let’s strip her down to her skin!” said Kondō.

Somewhat embarassed that

* * * * * * * * ********** ****

might be interpreted as an expression of lust

his words * * * * * ** ********** ** * * ********** ** ****, he added in a small voice, “She might be a spy. Maybe she’s got something on her.” The woman was really dirty. Both her hands and her brazenly unstockinged legs were pitch black with mud and grime. Grimacing, one soldier laid hands on her clothing and ripped it open. Soiled gray under­ wear came into view. From within a cloth purse that came out of her jacket pocket, they discovered a piece of paper that had a code ­written on it as if in some shorthand which was not understandable. “See! She’s a spy,” said Kondō caressing the captured revolver.39

Sexual tension gives rise to the accusation. Lingering on the filth of the body begins to confirm the notion. Finally, the unreadable text released from within the private confines of the body signifies to the soldiers the truth of her betrayal. The meaningless gives meaning and is meaningful; even if it is unreadable, a taboo text can be read. Several months after the Living Soldiers affair, the magazine Kaizō published Hino Ashihei’s Barley and Soldiers; it was an instant and popular success and was reprinted as a book within a year, causing a boom of “something and soldiers” products, which spawned two sequels, several spin-offs, and a popular song.40 Because of this popularity, the case of Barley and Soldiers offers a canonical counterpoint to Ishikawa’s censored narrative of war. In the preface to the Kaizō text, Hino admits to having organized his war journal for publication, but claims to be presenting it largely in its entirety. After the war, however, Hino added or “restored” several passages to the text. The following is one such section added to the sequel Tsuchi to heitai (Earth and Soldiers, 1939): One of the corpses was moving. I went over to look and saw him wriggling, half buried by corpses, bathed in blood. He seemed to have heard my footsteps, and although he couldn’t move, with what seemed to be all his strength, he raised his face toward me. His painful expression sent a chill through me. With an expression of urgent request on his face, he gestured toward me, and then his own breast. Without a doubt, he was asking me to shoot him. I did not hesitate. I quickly aimed at the dying Chinese soldier and pulled the trigger. . . . What’s the point of such cruelty, I wanted to say, but I could not. With a heavy feeling, I walked away.41

Literary Casualties of War    /    129 In the end, the intolerable still-living body amid the corpses is killed. In the canonical depiction, the dead cannot be living. While the good soldier polices this border between the dead and the living, the narrator wants to speak about “muzan” (無残, mercilessness or cruelty) but cannot. The text marks an awareness of the taboo of which it speaks. At another point in the journal, the policing is more apparent: “Many lives have been lost. Yet no one has died. Nothing has perished. The soldiers have overcome the mediocre thoughts that human beings hold dear. They have overcome death itself.”  4 2 Here the typical image of the warrior who lives on in the heart of the nation is invoked to deny the death of the home-team soldier. Here soldiers die for their country, so that they will never die. Of all the scenes that were added to the postwar editions of Hino’s work, the final scene, which takes place in a wheat field, may be the most significant. These intense men spit on our soldiers. So it had been decided to dispose of them. As I followed along, we came to a wide-open wheat field at the edge of the town. In this place it did not matter where you went, for there was nothing but wheat. It seemed that preparations had been made before; in a small clearing which had been cut in the wheat, a long, deep trench had been dug in the ground. The three bound Chinese soldiers were made to sit in front of the trench. The sergeant major who had come around behind them drew his military sword. When with a shout he brought down his sword, heads flew like balls, blood gushed as from a bamboo whisk, one by one the three Chinese soldiers died. I averted my eyes. I had not become a fiend. Realizing this, I felt deeply relieved.43

The narrator is absolved of responsibility, because he is just one member of a group as vast as the wheat field itself. However, the last three sentences, the only sentences of the passage that exist in wartime editions, act as metonyms for the cruelty. Having not read the previous passage, wartime readers had to ask the question why he would think he might have become a fiend. The inevitable answer refers back to the then unspoken cruelty of war. Whether or not these passages were written during the time of the war as Hino himself claimed, the “insidious” mode of self-censorship, that is, the one that showed no traces of fuseji (the mode Etō believes to be unique to the Occupation period), was already in place before America had even entered the war, let alone set up a censorship office in Tokyo.44

130    /    Production

To Publish the Truths of War The words canonical and censored do not do justice to the particular cultural and historical circumstances of these texts. The canonical realities portrayed in Barley and Soldiers result from systems of censorship located in particular historical and cultural moments. Of course, these canonical realities function as substitutes for the unspeakable, cruel realities of war and, in doing so, reinscribe rather than challenge taboos. Nevertheless, as we have seen, one can read the scars of resistance to such norms of acceptability within the canonical texts. Similarly, the “censored” realities presented in Living Soldiers portray certain canonical elements within them, thereby reinforcing the canonized narrative and opening possibilities for their own future canonizations. While it is true that different historical circumstances bring about the canonization or censorship of varying aspects of texts, the divisions between postwar and wartime begin to dissolve when we observe that in all of these cases of war literature, the issue of the truth of the represented realities determines a work’s reception. In other words, the perception of whether a given work represents a truth of war decides its degree of acceptability both in wartime and after the war’s end. The reception and production circumstances of Living Soldiers hang on perceptions of the truth of what is communicated by the text. Perhaps to evade reprimand, Ishikawa first designated the work as fiction in a note appended to it: “This manuscript does not faithfully record the realities of war; rather, the author attempted a free original work. Accordingly, he wishes to acknowledge that many of the names of such things as the company and the soldiers have been changed.” 45 When called before a judge to defend his depictions of the harsh and offensive realities of war, however, he categorized the work as factual and, therefore, beyond reprimand: “I truly believed it was necessary to make the truth of the war known to the Japanese people in order to make them realize the emergency state of affairs and take a firm attitude.” 46 While the addendum claims fictionality at a moment when the story has the potential to be taken for an unacceptable reality, the latter courtroom comment made after having given offense tries to rescue the work on those very terms. When circumstances change, the usefulness of the claim for the reality of a work changes and is exploited by the author for the purpose of self-preservation. What is true for the censored works is true for the canonical ones, namely, that the issue of a text’s truthfulness has a bearing on its reception. Hino relies on perceptions of reality to mark a place for his work.

Literary Casualties of War    /    131 Barley and Soldiers first appeared with a preface claiming that the work was a truthful diary that the author kept while in China. When I tried to clean it up and put it in order, I did not have the proper words for the things I should say about this grand reality. I believe that finding the truthful words necessary for telling about the war is the job of my life. . . . Having finished writing [about the war] as I saw it, I left it that way.47

And from the same preface: “This is simply nothing more than a cleaned up fair copy of the journal I began in the middle of the ocean on route to the front. From the beginning, it was not a novel.” 48 Yet since the war, Hino changed this categorization, calling the work a fictional novel.49 That changing times would see authors spin their works in different ways should not be surprising; what is remarkable, however, is that the reception of war literature is contingent on the degree to which the works are seen as reflecting the truth of war.

Toward the Implicit Censor Within Thus far, our examples label actual explicit external censorships as traces and reminders of other censorships that might be characterized as implicit, insidious, latent, and internal. Reading the prepublication manuscripts of two canonical war stories written after the war provides a glimpse of the effects of censorship at such a private or internal level, removed from the external censorship that we have examined. However, this reading should also remind us how fragile definitions of such levels are. For even at the moment we think we have found in an author’s marked-up manuscript the tangible trace of the internalized process of censorship, we need to remember that there is always another possible invisible layer of censorship at one remove—the black box will always be in infinite regress beyond its positive remainders that we encounter. The prepublication manuscripts of Ōoka Shōhei’s “Furyoki” (“Record of a Prisoner of War,” 1948) and James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1947) provide a convenient ground for considering the effects of censorship on noncensored canonical literature.50 And yet, in reading these manuscripts, the limits of the terms noncensorship, self-censorship, and censorship and implicit and explicit quickly become clear. What crossings out in manuscripts show are the dynamic relations between internal repression and external suppression. Despite publishing delays caused by the Occupation authorities starting  

132    /    Production around May 1946, “A Record of a Prisoner of War” won the first Yokomitsu Riichi Prize for literature when it was finally released and published in the February 1948 issue of Bungakukai. Ōoka later added to the story and published a full-length novel under the same title. The decisive moment in the shorter narrative published in 1948 is overdetermined by the structure of war narratives in the Occupation; it is the scene at the war’s end when a Japanese soldier confronts an American soldier and does not shoot. In the middle of a narrative driven by historical detail, Ōoka’s narrator lingers over the scene in philosophical and ethical reflection. In Ōoka’s manuscript, this confrontation scene is also the most heavily marked, crossed out, rewritten, and reordered by the author. Unlike the rest of the manuscript, which only hints at the difficulties of speaking in the new postwar rhetoric, such as in the numerous replacements of the word enemy (敵) with American (米), the editing of this scene is particularly revealing. Though the scrawl of Ōoka’s hand borders on the illegible and the cigarette burns on the page suggest haste and hesitation, the fits and starts in which this passage was rewritten attest to the author’s difficulty in conveying in words the reasoning of the narrator.51 The crossings out in the manuscript, which may express some authorial problems with the scene, echo the narrator’s befuddlement at this point in the published story. Even in the final version of the published story, the narrator turns back repeatedly, reviewing and retelling the scene from various perspectives. So the manuscript’s crossings out and scribbles have a trace in the published version for the majority of readers, who did not have access to the manuscript’s stricken words. The published text carries an inkling of the concern that becomes so explicit when tracking the changes from the manuscript through the anthologized novel, a concern that lies dormant and implicit in an archive until read. It is not that the narrator refuses to shoot or that he takes a moral stand in the moment he sights the American soldier with his rifle. He just does not shoot. And the narrator himself is at a loss to understand why or to remember his reasoning at that moment. Keiko McDonald lists several options that the narrator considers and rejects: that he did not want to destroy the youthful beauty of the American, that he felt the gratitude of the soldier’s mother for not shooting, that the overwhelming size of the American gave him pause, that he was a coward, that he felt some universal love, that he felt an individual love for the American soldier, and that a filial instinct somehow prevented him from doing his sworn duty.52 In the end, he draws a blank (空白) about why any of these reasons would be compelling. Just before beginning his commentary and explication of the encounter with

Literary Casualties of War    /    133 the American soldier, the narrator claims, “an incident that happened to me shortly afterward has obliterated my memories of unrelated things at that time.” 53 This loss of memory occasions the explication of the scene that lies at the border of memory and thought. The narrator feels compelled to discuss the lacuna, to fill in the lack in his memory. At one point early in the scene, he says, “but that’s enough about my resolve [not to kill].” 54 Then he goes on to ponder this resolution for the following four pages, discussing and elaborating the reasoning behind his grand inaction. A kind of amnesia pervades the scene. The focal point of the forgetting is the recollection of the American soldier himself. Trying to recall the face of the soldier, the narrator recalls, “Then he turned his face once again, so as to proceed in my direction. But for some reason his image at that moment completely escapes my memory.” 55 Later, the narrator is able to name the place of these lacunae: I don’t believe that I resolved not to shoot because of a love for mankind. Rather, I believe that, when I saw this soldier, I felt that I didn’t want to shoot because I loved him for personal reasons. Because my prior resolve [not to kill] had ceased to leave a trace in my mental stream of this time, it is difficult to admit that the resolve led my actions and mind. However, regarding the notion that my love of my father barred me from shooting, I must believe this (despite the fact that I was not conscious of that reality at the time) because it explains a single perception that visited me later and a certain hue of my impressions. This is everything that can be ascertained from a hard look at my mentality. But from this point on everything becomes strangely configured. I know that the American soldier turned his front and proceeded in my direction. And as I’ve written above, I don’t have a recollection of his image. After that, I only remember an inner feeling. It was a stifling, confusing tension. It had the semblance of a sentiment that I would prefer not to be so bold as to call by name. It was terror.56

The narration about his fear at the encounter here fills in for the blank in his memory. Yet this fear does not suffice as an answer; the narrator is still confused about his own reason for not engaging the American soldier. There are a few passages crossed out in the manuscript that repeat this concern surrounding the nonshooting and that also reflect the author’s difficulty setting the scene to words. The manuscript gives: aside from my soldierly caution, I had resolved not to shoot in advance If I thought I do not want to shoot this American soldier to the

134    /    Production extent that it was an urge, it was definitely at that time. Or it was a new impulse born out of my impression of that time. And since seeing the American soldier I felt that I actively did not want to shoot; it was at that time.57

The fragment represents the trauma of the encounter, which is predicated both on what the narrator refers to as the ethical duty not to take the life of another and on the suspension of the narrator’s duty as a soldier to engage the enemy. In the fragment we can read a disjuncture in the fixity of time. The narrator struggles to identify the precise moment of the resolution not to kill. We can read this both in the explicit references to time—“since seeing” (見て以来), “impression of that time” (この時の 印象), “beforehand” ( 事前), and “at that time” (この時で)—and in more subtle words that contradict the crossings out and rewritings of the scene. The intensifier “definitely” (確かに) and the conjunction “or” (あるいは) are good examples. The “definitely” of the second phrase is undercut by the succeeding sentence beginning with “or.” This backpedaling on certainty can be said to reflect the internal conflict either of the narrator or of the author in his decision to excise the internally contradictory text from the published version. The phrase “aside from my soldierly caution” (兵士の慎重とは別に), repeated twice in this fragment, is significant not only because it sums up the tension of the entire scene, but also because the sentiment is repeated at least twice in the published version. By casting away the prudence of his training, which required a soldier to engage the enemy in such a situation, the narrator breaks wartime rules. The writing and publishing of such a scene would have been tantamount to sedition during the war; so the scene is clearly written in the new postwar language. Though a version of this feeling made it into the final published version of the story, this early version needed to be rewritten and reordered several times. The crossed-out version in the manuscript is somewhat vague, leaving the reader to guess exactly what “soldierly caution” the narrator is talking about. Is it merely that he should have taken the safety of his rifle off as he held the American in his sight? Or does it represent the fact that a prudent soldier in wartime necessarily should kill the enemy? Two lines that express a similar sentiment appear in the published Bungakukai first edition, and both are more clear:  

 

That is to say, this repugnance [to killing] is for peacetime, so at this point, I was no longer a soldier.58

Literary Casualties of War    /    135 And when it occurred to me that he stopped proceeding toward me, in that relaxed moment, it was as if I canceled my soldierly compulsion in the presence of the enemy.59

The published scene presents two soldiers during wartime who both violate the norms of being a soldier. By avoiding killing, they forsake their soldierly duties. But here the crossings out of the previous passage are most significant. What does not get conveyed in these examples is the possibility that it could have been happenstance or luck. The caution thrown aside in the crossed-out passage might not have been a decision to kill, but rather a moment of forgetting one’s training or letting one’s guard down. The other question, that of time, is also removed from these published versions. Removing the question of whether or not this sentiment was retrospective philosophizing only possible in the new postwar environment or whether he actually felt that way at the time removes the sense that the two moments of the acting-narrator and narrating-narrator are separated. The published version casts a narrator in doubt, but not about the order of the events. If any doubt remains that the narrator’s anxiety about why he did not kill the American soldier reflects (or extends) Ōoka’s anxiety about what was permissible to say in the postwar period, the explicit censorship of another work by Ōoka makes it plain. Two months after the appearance of “Record of a Prisoner of War,” Ōoka returned to the same theme in a novella, “Field Hospital in San Jose,” appearing in the April 1948 edition of Chūō kōron. Of the two passages marked for deletion by the censor’s report, the second directly pertains to the epic decision not to shoot at an American, which Ōoka’s narrator comes down differently on in this story: “I cannot but recall now with shame my not having shot the American soldier that I saw.” The passage inverts the sentiment published in “Record of a Prisoner of War” and reveals just how conflicted Ōoka may have been on the subject, but it also clarifies that this sentiment, perhaps natural in a wartime situation, was censorable in the postwar period.60 James Michener’s typescript of Tales of the South Pacific presents a similar set of problems relating to implicit versus explicit censorship, though the issues involved are necessarily more tuned to the American experience of war.61 Most significantly, the episode “Lobeck, the Asiatic” appears in the typescript but is entirely absent from all published versions of the novel Tales of the South Pacific, not to mention the musical and the film. Michener himself discusses his reasoning for omitting the story

136    /    Production in The Voice of Asia (1951). A section of that book titled “The Coward” recounts the aversion of the majority of his prepublication readers to the story of an intellectual at war.62 The episode is a portrait of the quirky Lobeck, who prophesies the eventual successful union of China and Japan as a balance to Western imperialism in Asia. Lobeck has “a hankering suspicion that perhaps the white man, after all, had not been destined by God to rule all colored races. This heresy, of course, he had kept to himself.” 63 Though a large portion of “Lobeck, the Asiatic” was published later in the noncanonical The Voice of Asia, the following exchange is unique to the manuscript’s version of the story, bearing a giant X crossing the page: “I consider it inevitable that a good many countries in years to come will side with Japan. Might even accept her leadership again. Nations forget. They don’t live like human beings. They are human beings, millions of them. As the present generation in Japan dies, a new one will be born. Perhaps the ideas of the new Japs will be mightily attractive.” “Even to Chinese?” I asked. “Possibly,” Lobeck said. “And as for our trying to stop Asia from organizing into a unified command, I don’t think we could do it if we wanted to. Not more than once. And it probably isn’t in our interest to do so.” “Then what do you advise?” I asked with some confusion. “Know Asia. Work with her people. Foster strong governments. Good trade. Even help her become mechanized.” 64

In the scene, Lobeck does not have exactly the pro-Asia and antiAmerican slant on things that Michener would have us believe from his later account. Here Lobeck’s outrage stems from a kind of patriotism that does not want to see America lose out in Asia. The fact that the excerpt of “Lobeck” eventually published in The Voice of Asia omits this scene shows the degree to which, even when he was hoping to put an end to his “cowardice” and publish the story torn from Tales of the South Pacific, Michener may have internalized the taboos identified by the early reviewers who suggested he remove the episode before publication. There is still a degree of internalized repression evident in the released version. Recalling the story, Michener claims in “The Coward” that it held some of the most important aspects of Tales of the South Pacific and stemmed from his view that “Asia cannot be divided and conquered.” 65 But this also seems like a revisionist view when cast in the light of another scene unique to the unpublished manuscript. The scene discusses American settlement and the colonization of Asia rather than Asian unification.

Literary Casualties of War    /    137 “It depresses me to find young American men so unwilling to settle in these islands after the war. It truly depresses me to see adventuresome fellows turning their backs on Asia. . . . When the war’s over, we’ll turn the islands loose. And mark my words. There isn’t a case in history where islands have been left unattached for long. We can’t leave these empty when Asia needs land for expansion.” “But could white men live here?” I asked.66

Here Lobeck’s patriotic zeal and imperialist ambitions shine through. Lobeck fears the possibility that Asia will unite because it would happen at the expense of the United States. If he is “Asiatic” (which would mean he is insane, which would mean he is abnormal), he is only so the degree to which his patriotism will allow. Despite the differences between the Lobeck published in the noncanonical, nonfictional Voice of Asia and the Lobeck in the manuscript, a trace of the censorship of “Lobeck” can be found in the canonical Tales. The “silent editing” of Lobeck is not the same kind of censorship practiced by the officers in “Passion,” one of Michener’s stories actually included in the published Tales, but its repercussions are as powerful. In the humorous “Passion,” the mail censors encroach on the private lives of those censored by straying from their duty to excise only military secrets. The story emphasizes the haphazard nature of censorship.67 Michener depicts the foolish censors as having so little sense of passion that they either must excise it from the love letters of others or copy it into their own letters. The nonstereotypical views of love expressed in the letters of “motor mech third class” Timothy Hewitt to his wife cause the passionless censor consternation. We do not need to read the excised Lobeck story in order to get a sense of wartime censorship, because a very significant trace of it is already available in “Passion.” The difference between the canonical work as it stands (including the vision of censorship in “Passion”) and the manuscript that includes the ideologically explicit story “Lobeck, The Asiatic” is related to the difference Edward Said identifies between reading Jane Austen for details of the imperial project and reading “a jingoistic ditty [written] during the Mahdist uprising.” Said comments, “The lesser work wears its historical affiliation more plainly; its worldliness is simple and direct.” 68 But the case of the two different Tales, the published and the manuscript versions, reflects more than merely a difference in the explicitness of the rhetoric or the quantity. Rather, the issues revealed in the canonical text are differently colored than those raised in the marginal one. The canonical “Passion” gives no explicit indication that the context for the bureaucracy of censor-

138    /    Production ship might be the replacement of one empire with another. In fact, there is the very real sense that when the war is over the soldiers will go home to their wives (no matter how racy the letters, their recipients are properly all wives); even the suggestion that Americans would stay on the islands for imperial or colonial pursuits is entirely gone from the sanitized, canonical version. And this is not surprising given the penchant in the United States after World War II (but before Vietnam) for fictionalizing the war as fun, entertaining, apolitical, and highly sexualized. Reading the marginal still has much to add to our understanding because the trace left in the canonical version (that is, the one in “Passion”) is incomplete, not implicating empire as such but the entire sexual world on which it is based, the world of brothels, cheating, and coldness. Writing about these issues substitutes for discussions of economic inequalities and international racial double standards hinted at in the Lobeck episode. This episode displays how the maintenance of a rigid distinction between occupation and colonization may be related less to the rhetoric of short-term occupiers and long-term settlers than to the ideological denial of similarities requisite for a “free, democratic power” to perpetrate an occupation. However, the Lobeck episode itself is no unrepressed truth of postwar thought. Within the narrative itself, the taboo of Lobeck’s ideas that offended Michener’s early reviewers is already prefigured in the comments of Lobeck’s friends who consider him “Asiatic,” “nuts,” “off his rocker,” a “poor bastard,” “beginning to jump his trolley,” “in a pretty bad way,” and “probably harmless but you can never tell.” These derisive characterizations perform a kind of internal silencing of any truth that Lobeck’s views may show. The Ōoka and Michener manuscripts reveal a kind of anticipatory violence to texts related to explicit external censors. And while we may not need the manuscripts to have a sense of the internal mechanisms of censorship in the canonically published versions, they do help accentuate and clarify the process of repression in relation to censorship in important ways. They allow us to gain a deeper appreciation of that which we otherwise may have only been able to sense implicitly. In this way, the manuscripts and their relation to the canonical versions mimic the relationship of censored literature to literature published without the interference of a nameable censor. If we reconceive literature touched by the censor as literary casualties of war, we go far in rethinking the notion of censorship as wholly destructive, since casualties are not only the lives destroyed but also the bodies mangled in the violence of war. The war produces effects on those bodies, and those effects are never far removed from censorship’s violent

Literary Casualties of War    /    139 effects on the censored and noncensored. Indeed, the only mechanisms we often have for considering such violence to bodies is through violence represented in texts. So to conceive of the violence produced by censorship and war, we need to conceive of the war survivors as tangential casualties scarred by experience. The effects of their encounters with censorship are never entirely silent or latent. Censored literature stands in relation to canonized literature insofar as there can be no canon formation without an attendant process of marginalization. This doubled process of canonization and marginalization continues to be elided by scholars who privilege the quality of being underprivileged—that is, the quality of marginality—without recognizing the necessity of reading marginalization as a changing and contingent historical process. If the focus on marginality has the deep problem of reinforcing the very histories of stigmas and discriminations that the critical turn away from the center, the canon, and the mainstream was intended to avoid, then attention to the continuing processes of marginalization should highlight how old margins become new centers with their own new margins. What this means for identity studies should be obvious, but what it requires for material cultural studies may be less so. While, for instance, we might revel in the presentist privileging of formerly banned literature for a moment (recognizing the necessity of reading that which had been formerly severed from the canonical corpus), the opening created by this move is evanescent if not balanced by the continual remembering of both the historical process by which that dismembering of texts occurred and the new moment in which the remembering of the forgotten happens. To simply reverse the situation by declaring the once-unreadable now readable and even a must-read and by creating a cult of the formerly unreadable or unread while forgetting the contingencies of what formerly made them so, we repeat a violence to texts that is comparable to censorship. To read formerly censored literature simply as part of a new canon without reference to its history avoids recognizing the effect historical censorship has had on the later decision to include it within the canon (it may in fact bestow more continued power on the old censors who identified the text as offensive in the first place). To remember the formerly banned as once banned welcomes the text into the canon but with the trace of that stigma. This understanding reminds us—readers, writers, editors, critics, and scholars—of how we are continually responsible for the critical decisions we make in choosing and in not choosing texts, scenes, and words; it reminds us never to forget “the combativeness with which individuals and institutions decide on what is tradition and what is not, what relevant, and what not.” 69  

 

 

 

140    /    Production This chapter has connected canon and censor while attempting to account for the function of these historical processes, not only reading the censored works brought into the canon but also considering the degree to which the canon is already precensored even before any specifiable event of censorship has occurred. But this attention to the production of war narrative under censorship and in the wake of censorship does not go far enough toward outlining that process. For that we need to delve deeper into the issue of redaction, a microcosm of censorship’s effects.70 If the first part of this book looked outside censored writing proper to find out how censorship was actively preserved for readers, and the second part focused on how the production of genre fiction (erotic, proletarian, and war narrative) was transformed by the presence of censorship, the next part looks within literature to examine specifically how censorship marked texts and continues to mark them today.

Pa rt I I I

Redaction

6. Epigraphs Histories of X Epigraph:

This eloquent epigraph, an epitaph for unknown thoughts eradicated from the battlefield of discourse, conveys a commonsense notion of censorship: censorship obliterates words. The unwritten words evoke, in a language clear enough, the results of the violence of censorship at its most extreme: the disappeared works of would-be writers who were censored, jailed, exiled, or killed in action.1 These (non-)works are forever beyond the theater of discursive conflict, so forbidden that they are unwritable, unpublishable, uncollectable, and unarchivable. Unknowable yet imaginable. Here we have already begun to ponder the “absence” as the wake of censorship that banned literature allows us to hypothesize. The white expanse across the page above, the “empty” space, and the word epigraph that precedes it commemorate both the fact that censorship has always left a trace of its existence and operations and the notion that the trace left by censorship is legible, the absence palpable. Censored literature provides an opening for an inquiry into an outside to discourse from within the realm of discourse. No matter how transgressive or subversive a work may seem, we should not take proscribed literature, or literature marginalized in other ways, for an outside to literature, to the canon, or to the archive. The interpellation that censorship performs on texts, authors, publishers, and booksellers inherently prevents them from dwelling in an exterior to public discourse. The hailing of certain books by the censor subjects them (and, by proxy, their authors, editors, and publishers) to a position on the margin or threshold, not an outside. This marginalization is part of the production of both discourse and its outside. In other words, the process of marginalization is never complete and never ends in the production of a “tangible” outside, but happens as a process that continually seeks to construct an outside; and it is only through examination of 143

144    /    Redaction

Figure 6.1. (left)  French Postcard from Miyatake Gaikotsu’s Collection Figure 6.2. (right)  Cover of Miyatake’s Magazine Humor and Eccentricity, July 1927

the explicit process that we can begin to conceive of this (non-)existent, truly latent, implicit exterior literature. Satirizing the banning of a French postcard, the cover of the July 1927 issue of Peculiarities and Humor (Kibatsu to kokkei) provides a remarkably apt image of how censorship leaves a trace that directs our attention to both the act of deletion and what was deleted. (See figures 6.1 and 6.2.) The magazine’s editor, Miyatake Gaikotsu, whose treatment of censors we saw in chapter 3, had placed this particular postcard with other banned postcards from his thirty-volume personal postcard collection in a volume labeled Banned Things.2 When republished as the cover to his magazine, Gaikotsu was drawing not only on childhood memories of the sarcastic tone and attitude of the Circle Circle News (Marumaru shinbun), whose title itself made open reference to the blank Os left on pages that had suffered deletion to evade the wrath of censors, but also on his own numerous encounters with censorship. The striking image of the girl with her crotch covered not with a black dot but with the black and red concentric circles

Epigraphs    /    145 of a target takes aim at the censor while also marking a mode of desire that censorship as a public act inadvertently encourages. The magazine demonstrates how it was possible to play with what could be left behind after censorship in the marks of deletion themselves.3

History of X The use and function of such spots and deletion markers in textual material produced under censorship in Japan from the 1870s to 1945 is well known, often mentioned, and little understood. Since at least Etō Jun’s work in the late 1970s, fuseji have been at the heart of arguments surrounding censorship under the empire, during the Occupation, and beyond. As we have seen, Etō claimed that the presence of fuseji alone was a sign that imperial censorship was pro forma, whereas the lack of any reference to censorship during the Occupation made the institution all the more formidable. But basing normative statements about the efficacy of free speech on the supposed absence or presence of deletion markers and on a presumption of positively identifiable beginnings and endings to the dynamics of repression is true neither to the history of the signs nor to the mode of negation that the markers themselves represent. The following chapters demonstrate that such blanket statements about the absence or presence of deletion markers lack historical sensitivity and nuanced attention to the multiple usages of fuseji. Historically, redaction marks endure, despite the censor’s efforts to eradicate their specific manifestations. Furthermore, the mode of negation itself suggests that the process is never about marking particular kinds of deletions with a specific sign (a particular X), but about continually finding alternative kinds of deletion markers and adopting new methods for avoiding the ire of the censors as well as for navigating social taboo. The crosses borne by literature over time and under censorship are manifold, ranging from Xs to blank type to euphemism, innuendo, and beyond. Investigating the many historical functions of the myriad marks themselves can draw us closer to understanding the historical writers who saw the effects of fuseji as lamentable yet convenient and even expedient and necessary. Rather than playing a zero-sum game of determining resistance or complicity, we do better to ask what deletion markers mark, who makes the marks, and finally, how can we respond ethically to the historical gap that they preserve. Previous chapters implied, but rarely mentioned, the overlapping relationships and parallels between the status and structures of banned discourses and the status and structures of the collections, lists, essays, genres, and images of, on, and in banned discourse. Similarly, the follow-

146    /    Redaction ing chapters take fuseji as blatant, unambiguous, and material markers of the wounds from banning, explicit, legible traces of censorship. Therefore, X-ing is a microcosm of the macrodynamics involved in the banning of literature and in the continued existence of banned literature. Like banned literature, X is a legible marker, a suture between the text and the unnameable or unwritten.4 In this sense, Xs can be read as nodal points, moments of metonymy or apophasis that name without naming the status of banned discourse as a whole.5 What is not omitted in this crossing of pages and words, then, is not the unnaming, not even the name of the unnameable, but the unnameable itself. More overtly, X (as fuseji) is important as an incomplete cover for the linguistic chiasmus performed by the mark of censorship at each moment of its manifestation. In other words, while we must historicize the rising and falling uses of specific forms of crossing such as X—or more specifically the differences between the × (batsu), 〓 (geta mark), . . . (ellipses), and ▊ or blank type—such histories could obscure connections between them in a larger phenomenology of X-ing. Even as specific Xs or instances of X may be taken as offensive by censors, the surplus of meaning that X-ing creates cannot be erased or banned, nor can it be adequately or fully named. Though specific instances of X tend to be taken by readers and censors alike as moments that necessitate a decision or a choice about how to fill in the gaps, X may already signal the fluctuation between both something outside the text desired by writers, censors, and other readers and something within it. Xs are both the words not on the page and a marker of explicit social taboos subverted by their inscription within the text itself. Whether or not the turned phrases or ellipses appearing in surreptitious writing practices were successful at communicating the supposedly offensive politics and ribald obscenities that lurked underneath and behind them, their presence alone testifies to the role of censorship in the formation of a language of redaction that is always legible, at the very least and at its base, as a code signifying the dynamic processes of deletion. This double functioning of X is the condition under which readers read and make meaning. The problem of the X, while signifying the undecidable, unfixed limits and grounds of permissibility, necessitates decisions and the fixing of referents by censors, editors, authors, and other readers.  

 

History of Fuseji We must seek a fuller understanding of those historical decisions made by authors, designers and craftsmen in deploying the many visual and even tactile languages of book form to help direct their readers’ responses.6

Epigraphs    /    147 Tangible historical examples do not help us understand why censorship results in a particular form of deletion; rather, they illustrate the myriad and complex ways deletion has been characterized. A close look at the archival evidence suggests that deletion marks embed no simple dynamics other than the ebb and flow of absence and presence, or in other words, the presenting of absence. The Japanese term fuseji itself is an ambiguous signifier that can apply to a range of different forms of redaction. Rather than treating the various marks of fuseji in contradistinction to metaphor, euphemism, and other forms of elliptical writing, they are better read as one particular historical mode of avoiding taboo, any specific usage of which rises and falls over time. In this respect, fuseji provide another chapter in the worldwide tale of a never-vanishing condition of writing, an Aesopian language developed under oppression as a means of speaking the unspeakable through circumlocution and allegory.7 What is perhaps unique to the Japanese portion of this story is the rapid succession of changes in the legal constraints between 1927 and 1946 and the amount of documentation of their repercussions still readily available today. The rise and fall of fuseji under censorship in Japan is a reminder of the process of self-regulation and self-discipline that continues even when discourse may seem entirely un-redacted and free from visible coercion. A provisional history of fuseji can been sketched as follows. Since their advent in the 1870s soon after the promulgation of new publishing laws regulating the press, the marks survived as convenient tools for publishing the potentially unpublishable and for avoiding bans, though their usage was officially forbidden in 1885 by a largely un-enforced Home Ministry decree. In fact, until 1927 the use of fuseji continued often as the result of real negotiations between editors and censors under what was known as the private examination system (naietsu seido). Under that overtly collusive system, editors and publishers could submit manuscripts and galleys to receive the censor’s “suggestions” about which passages to suppress. Editors could meet individually with the Publishing Police, which was under the Police Bureau of the Home Ministry (Naimushō Keihokyoku no Shuppan Keisatsu), at Metropolitan Police Headquarters to discuss deletions in specific texts. When state censors consulted about specific deletions, their suggestions resulted in a crisis at the galley stage immediately before production because it left publishers little time to reset entire pages of type without leaving spaces. The fuseji served as a speedy, convenient means for removing otherwise offensive writing at the galley stage, thus enabling the book to be printed.

148    /    Redaction The system of direct, continuing consultations between the censor and the censored ended in September 1927, when the burgeoning publishing boom placed greater demands on the censors, leaving scant resources for individual meetings.8 Consequently, a new system was born, wherein censors supplied publishers with general guidelines in a system of “informal meetings” (kondankai). In other words, the publishing world was left to try to gauge the censor’s tastes, suppressing potentially objectionable passages before publication. If they failed, they would likely face postpublication bans, fines, seizures, and possible jail sentences. Though the responsibility for deciding when, where, and how often to use fuseji had shifted from the Publishing Police to the editors, the new system was no less collusive with the state authorities. The “self” in this externally imposed self-censorship must remain always in doubt.9 Left without the benefits of direct consultation with the censors about specific texts, Japanese editors and writers began applying fuseji themselves in what some have called a “golden age” or “heyday” (zenseiki) of fuseji.10 During this period, lasting from 1927 to 1936, fuseji could be found everywhere, from leftist magazines discussing the always-looming revolution to women’s magazines decrying the decay of the Japanese home. Not coincidentally, this decade, when fuseji were in high fashion, has been remembered as epitomizing prewar censorship. Yet a historical approach complicates this “memory” of prewar censorship. In autumn 1936, the imperial Publishing Police began cracking down more actively on the use of fuseji.11 The events in the history of fuseji can be mapped as follows in figure 6.3.12 This timeline makes clear that fuseji were phased out before the future occupiers were even declared enemies. Therefore, arguments by eminent critics claiming that the absence (or rather the obliteration) of fuseji rendered Occupation censorship more invisible—that it “must be practiced as though . . . [it] did not exist” 13 — than imperial censorship are based on false premises. So, too, are the claims that a form of censorship that insidiously censors itself was a foreign import. Thus, Matsu’ura Sōzō, one-time editor of the general-interest magazine Kaizō, writes with no lack of irony that between 1936 and 1938, “the ‘American-style censorship’ of the Occupation army was born.” 14 The historical truth in the timeline does not erase the contrast between the frequently asserted, visible, imperial, and empirical presence of censorship and the postwar invisibility or absence of fuseji, but rather relocates the shift from presence to absence, finding it in an earlier moment and under a different regime. Matsu’ura’s materialist and positivist history still figures the disappearance of fuseji as the decisive moment in the his 

 

19

19

1 X decided in consultation

X decided by editors and writers

officially postcensorship (post-publication, pre-sales) Home Ministry and Police Censors

48 19

45 19

42 19

X fades

1952

1923

19

19

27

38

Epigraphs    /    149

No X precensorship

postcensorship

Occupation Censors

Figure 6.3.  Fuseji Timeline

tory of censorship, but now it is the wartime period, beginning with the heightening of the campaign in China, rather than the Occupation, that seems to coincide with the birth of an invisible censorship that censors its own trace. What is at stake in this postwar assertion of the paramount importance of an explicit trace is a belief in censorship as a destroyer of material. The fight becomes one about who destroyed more rather than how such destruction changes discourse. Maintaining that the disappearance of a visible trace of censorship signifies the end of a less evil kind of censorship fundamentally positions the invisible mode of censorship as the ultimate form, the form that really destroys. This makes the disappearance of fuseji important as an event that marks a tangible shift from acceptable to unacceptable, truly draconian censorship. The logic goes as follows: The vanishing of redaction marks signals a watershed in the history of censorship. Out of this moment, a true censorship that really destroys without a trace was born. This logic, however, neglects the fact that submerged modes of censorship are inevitably connected to overt ones. Self-censorship is not born when an office of censorship tells writers and producers that it prefers them to patrol themselves, but is already present at times when censors work more explicitly. Further, the commonsense notion shared by right-wing apologists and left-wing humanists that censorship is solely a destroyer of material contradicts the logic of fuseji. Recent conceptualizations of censorship have turned this belief on its head; by considering what censorship produces in the wake of its destruction of material, scholars of censorship since at least the 1980s have tended to highlight aspects of the relationship between cultural production and censorship that are more in tune with the history of fuseji.15 For fuseji, as legible markers of the illegible, are no more destroyers of material than euphemism, allegory, and metaphor are destroyers of meaning. Something may well be deleted or displaced by the marks in censored texts, but something else is created: what readers actually confronted on the page would not have been possible without censorship and its contribution of fuseji. Of course, the deletion of words and passages

150    /    Redaction damaged discourse; but as legible markers of the illegible, fuseji also produced new meaning. Fuseji were convenient substitutions that signaled both what was deleted and the act of deletion, or even sometimes only the latter. Rather than wholly erasing or deleting, fuseji negated through redaction. The addition of negation to texts could mean many things depending on the context, but it always at least signified the taboo of deleted content. Moreover, as we shall see, there were times when fuseji were part of the design of the text and, in fact, nothing had been deleted. The fact that fuseji were at times used expressively means that we must consider them in both their destructive and productive possible modes. Fuseji must be thought of on a continuum with other practices of coping with censorship, such as humor, paralepsis, apophasis, and allegoriesis.

A Model for Reading Fuseji In the years preceding 1927, continual consultations with censors educated authors and editors in internalizing the censorship standards and selfcensoring even before they would attempt to bring a text to publication. The heyday of fuseji (1927–1936) was a period when the censors themselves rarely specified passages to be deleted. Instead, editors and writers employed fuseji on their own in anticipation of the censor’s reaction. To categorize this form of redaction as external simply because it left an explicit trace on the page is to ignore the cultural producers’ internalization of the taboos of the Home Ministry censors. Similarly, to regard it as solely an internal self-censorship with no relation to the external state system of censorship would be to disregard the very real reverberations of the earlier period. The disappearance of actual fuseji may spell the end of explicit censorship or even signify the further development of an internal censor, but it does not indicate the end of marking censorship or the birth of a latent censor, since such private, internal self-censorship always accompanied the public acts of state censorship. In this sense, any fetishization of fuseji as markers of a solely explicit, external censorship is ahistorical. If we are to be historical, we must go further and ask how fuseji were employed and what other, perhaps less visible methods for skirting censorship accompanied fuseji. Beyond obviously signifying something deleted, the markers stood as recorders of the processes of writing through censorship. One way to guarantee being more sensitive to the historical circumstances of fuseji is to read the marks only in context, that is, to read instances of fuseji in a given text without making connections with other fuseji, and to treat each individual fuseji (a given X) as performing a radi 

Epigraphs    /    151 cally different function from all other fuseji (all Xs) at every moment of its appearance. Indeed, this is the way fuseji tend to be dealt with in postwar literary criticism, whether the criticism is focused on censorship generally or on specific writers under censorship. That is, in postwar anthologies, a given X tends to be filled in without reference to its connection with other Xs, without a connection to the entire history of redaction, and only with reference to the deleted. But this focus on the resuscitation of the deleted, on the unmarked replacement of fuseji without reference to the larger historical circumstances of deletion, leads to ahistorical readings by erasing the historical fact of censorship. However, by reading a given fuseji as a unique moment and place of inscription and in connection with more general practices of redaction, we can be sensitive both to what readers historically knew and to what we know now. In other words, here a given X is read as an instance of the wider phenomenon of X-ing and as potentially referring to something not printed. To picture how fuseji have been read, we might imagine a series of perpendicular lines crossing the timeline, counting every instance when fuseji were printed. The sheer vastness of the number of marks intersecting the timeline would render such a project worse than counting and measuring the number of hairs on a cat’s tail. But as a thought experiment, it can tell us several things. Reading any single perpendicular line irrespective of the other lines would lead potentially to monstrous sampling errors. We might take a given deletion to be about a given text rather than about an entire genre of texts related to a momentary crackdown in a particular venue. However, doing this sort of close reading in combination with a broader view (reading the perpendicular lines in aggregate and selecting the significant individual lines to read closely) would be to read the signification of a given X against the process of X-ing. It would provide a contextual sense of any particular X. By the same token, while this “scientific” and empirical data, which is imaginable but virtually impossible to collect, collate, and inventory (a single graph of all fuseji), would be useful for knowing whether an instance of a particular mark of fuseji was egregious and anomalous or was, indeed, part of a larger process of redaction, ultimately the chart alone would not be able to convey entirely what we may really want to know: what and how a particular fuseji signified to readers. Finding a particular appearance of fuseji to be part of a statistical trend in the haphazard and hasty business of redaction might absolve us from asking ahistorical and simplistic questions like “Why did this word receive the mark and not that one?” 16 But the graph would not give us a sense of whether or not this particular

152    /    Redaction fuseji meant anything for the reader at the time beyond “something was deleted here because of censorship.” The changing and often idiosyncratic linguistic praxis of a particular fuseji must be seen both in the macrocontext against the backdrop of other fuseji and within the microcontext of the text in which it appears. And even then, there will be no simple scientific answer incontrovertibly presenting us with the fixed meaning of a particular X on a page. In short, the schematic timeline of fuseji and even the most complex one imaginable cover over specific uses and functions of the marks even as they give a broad understanding. Reading specific examples of fuseji against the broad history of the mark suggests some of the problems of categorizing the function of a singular X in a given text at a given moment on our macrotimeline. How much greater is the task, then, when we remember that the word fuseji itself is a covering term, two concealing characters that mask an entire range of other possibilities: not only × as I have suggested, but also ○, 〓, △, ヽ, ＊, . . . , and so on. When I wrote that the ban on fuseji began to be enforced after 1936, I did not mean a ban on an X or even × (batsu) alone, but on all such figures that are meant to conceal the letters and words of banned subjects and ideas in Japan. But this notion of “all such figures” is problematic in its seeming boundlessness, since a wide variety of linguistic practices may fall into this broad definition. Any attempts to delineate the limits of what counts as fuseji are mired in a definitional abyss: Do Xs and Os alone count as fuseji? What about asterisks? Ellipses? Blank type? Euphemisms? Since all of these forms were considered on the same plane even during the height of the usage of fuseji, it makes sense to place them on the same plane now at the critical level, even as we recall a textual, visual, and material difference between fuseji that use a specific glyph and semiotic ones such as “four lines deleted.” 17 There are always other redaction marks with which to redact when use of a specific mark becomes forbidden. The golden age of fuseji saw diversity, rather than standardization, in its forms and uses. In 1934, Nakano Eizō, a scholar and publisher of Edo-period erotic books, enumerated many different kinds of prevalent fuseji, from × and ○ to intentional errata, secret codes, and blank spaces.18 Noting the similarities of all the devices, Nakano also pointed out some minor differences. For instance, he felt that the ○ would encourage readers to fill in the gap more than the ×. In the specific case of the magazine Kaizō between 1923 and 1955, I have found that Xs tended to be used for short, replaceable single words and multiple marks such as ヽヽヽヽ or ellipses were used for longer strings of irreplaceable text (usually three marks . . .

Epigraphs    /    153 per single character replaced) and only very rarely ○s and blank type. But regardless of whether we believe it useful to match specific typefaces to specific usage, it is clear from these observable differences that use of fuseji was neither simple nor predictable. Certainly fuseji are historically determined and produced by the local exigencies of a particular set of producers and censors; but what the myriad uses of fuseji show us most clearly is that all tangible markers of deletion—whether character-forcharacter replacements or more metaphorical figures—mark the process of negation as a method for writing through censorship, alongside other literary techniques that beg readers to read between the lines. One might even say that the history of censorship is nothing more than the history of the rise and fall of different modes of redaction, typographical fuseji being one particularly tangible and incontrovertible mode. Examining fuseji recaptures something of the possibilities for signification within the system of censorship, of what it would be like to read as well as to publish under censorship. The following chapters attempt to reclaim what and how redaction could possibly have signified for readers and writers at the time it was still readable on redacted pages. This is neither a production history revealing the inner story of negotiations between the censored and the censors on what would receive the mark, nor a reception history recounting the voices of readers who made claims to be able to decipher the meanings behind the marks. For both methods would have the necessary failing of relying heavily on the intentionalities of the parties speaking through texts removed from the time and place of the pressing and impressing of the marks and, thus, would be potentially ahistorical. Producers, for example, have an interest in blaming the other guy as far as fuseji were concerned. In their memoirs, readers tend to remark on either the inevitable sense of loss in the deletion marks or in their superior abilities to make meaning through the redactions. In both cases, the function of redaction qua redaction is elided. Instead, the attempt here is to generate a lost literary history and to conjecture with historical sensitivity to what extent the marks on a page allowed readers to read and writers to write: to what extent did fuseji inhibit meaning and to what extent did they convey it? The possibility that at their base fuseji could reference the process of deletion always remains. But the silent removal of the marks from fiction later canonized in anthologies and translations creates an ethical imperative to delineate the connections between explicit marks of censorship and implicit decisions made about texts published in the context of censorship.  

 

7.  Redactionary Literature The Function of Deletion Marks in the Magazine Kaizō

“All right, go to sleep.”

All right, go to sleep.”

“What the hell are you saying.” He sat up. Her face was turned half away, hidden from him, but

“You aren’t making much sense, you know.” He pulled her into bed after him. Her face was turned half away, hidden from him, but after a time she pursed her lips out towards him. Then, as if in a delirium she were trying to tell of her pain, she repeated over and over, he did not know how many times: “We mustn’t. Didn’t you say you wanted to be friends?”

he suddenly lunged out and kissed her neck ** ******** ****** *** *** ****** *** ****.



We mustn’t

“ ** *******. Didn’t you say you wanted to be friends?”

. . . .

. . . .

I’m not anyone’s wife. I’m not some *** *** **** unskilled average woman ********* ******* * * * * * . I won’t

“*** *** ******** ****

have any regrets. I’ll never have any regrets. I’m not that sort of woman. It won’t last. Didn’t you say so yourself?”

“I won’t have any regrets. I’ll never have any regrets. I’m not that sort of woman. It won’t last. Didn’t you say so yourself?”

His physical power had been stronger than *** ******** ***** *** **** ******** **** her will to refuse *** **** ** *****.

She was still half numb from the liquor.

“It’s not my fault. It’s yours. You lost. You’re the weak one. Not I.”

“It’s not my fault. It’s yours. You lost. You’re the weak one. Not I.” She ran on almost in a trance, and she bit at her sleeve as if to fight back the happiness.2

She bit at her sleeve as if to fight back the *** *** ** *** ****** ** ** ** ***** **** *** happiness *********.1

154

Redactionary Literature    /    155 Censorship systems haunt literature long after the last moments of suppression. First published in the January 1935 issue of the journal Kaizō as part of “Shiroi asa no kagami” (The mirror of a white morning), the above scene, which would later become a pivotal moment in Kawabata Yasunari’s classic novel Yukiguni (Snow Country, 1948), signaled potentially offensive passages with marks of deletion in accordance with the publishing practice of its era. The subtle shifts between the scarred early version and the later, mass canonical rendition of this classic of modern Japanese literature cannot be said to significantly alter the plot of the novel, and yet much is different in mood and tone. The suggestion of rough sex, the difference between sex workers and “average” women, and the jouissance redacted from the early version—left as only a series of dots on the page—are by and large not replaced in the postwar novel. Though imperial censorship had vanished and the deletion marks disappeared, the lasting effects of the early redactions are visible in the versions printed during the Occupation and after. The more direct and overt sexuality intimated in the original marks of deletion becomes a smoothed-over, suggested sensuality. In fact, all five major textual differences between the portion of the story published in Kaizō and the multiple versions published as Snow Country occur around passages in the text that contain redaction marks in the original. If the historical marks suggested to readers of the early version that something had been deleted, they themselves remained readable as visible markers of explicit censorship and explicit sex. Later, the marks of deletion that drew attention to the fact that something was missing are themselves missing, elided almost without a trace as the novel entered the modern canon. By omitting the marks, the canonical versions of the novel neglect direct reference to the impermissible but maintain the deletions. That even the postwar canon would maintain the imperial censor’s deletions might not be so surprising, but that it does so in an unmarked or invisible way permits a forgetting of the circumstances of the original circulation that continues the work of prewar censors in new ways. When the changes are subtle ones of affect rather than major plot turns, the concerns reflected in the changes may appear to be less connected to an external censor than an internal aesthetic mechanism of self-control; but it is precisely this appearance that has allowed the phenomenon of redaction to go relatively uninvestigated. The processes of textual transmission and circulation through reprints, collections, and translations that do not maintain the aesthetics of redaction present in the originals dulls our sensitivity to the history of a text’s censorship. Here, there is an ethical imperative to read the archive, to expose the archive, and to make it more explicit,  

 

156    /    Redaction because the archive of censorship itself is what will get smoothed over in the process of literary history. This chapter exposes the ethical necessity of connecting implicit self-censoring practices and editing with the presence of an overt censorship; that connection is exemplified by fuseji. Giving voice to at least two generations of luminaries in Japanese letters, the general-interest magazine Kaizō (Reconstruction, 1919–1944, 1946–1955) was one of the primary organs of leftist thought through which state censorship was internalized in a complex and collusive process. Kaizō was regarded as a particularly redaction-laden journal during the high point (1927–1936) in usage of fuseji. A close look at the practice of covering objectionable words with deletion marks in the magazine’s literature during this period reveals one of the productive, tangible effects of censorship on Japanese literature: an aesthetics of redaction. Further, this focus clearly delineates one of the many methods through which restrictions on literature that began as acceptable negotiated paths around draconian laws ended as textual affectations variously maintained or excised by later producers. Rather than restore to the literary canon the words, phrases, or stories lost in the archives of censors, this story of fuseji in Kaizō literature aims to return the long-forgotten or quickly misread process of self-­ censoring or writing through redaction to its historical place as a makeshift solution that was fraught with contradictions, dangers, and occasional successes. Produced within the bounds of a literary system defined by censorial restrictions, editorial expectations, and authorial poetics, the pages laden with redaction marks encouraged reading between the lines or, more specifically, beneath the covered characters. When that proved impossible, when the system for reading the marks broke down, readers could always read the marks as markers of censorship.  

 

 

Microhistory: Why Kaizō? Another irrational aspect of censorship is that the standards are idiosyncratically set; so the same manuscript is treated much more strictly if it appears in Kaizō than if it appears in Chūō Kōron (The Central Review).  

—Ōya SŌichi 3

The microhistory of fuseji in Kaizō lies at a key intersection of the history of modern literature and the history of censorship in Japan. As a material testament to literary production under censorship in Japan, Kaizō is unequaled. Kaizō is formidable in its breadth and depth as a survey and archive of modern Japanese literature. The magazine carried works by luminaries

Redactionary Literature    /    157 of many different stripes: militarists, antimilitarists, proletarian writers, detective fiction novelists, I-novelists, avant-garde poets, and others. It was said that the serialization of a single novel in Kaizō could launch a career. At the center of the literary world, Kaizō was also a major focus of censorship. While this is particularly easy to note in retrospect, contemporary commentaries also sensed the special place of the magazine, which is captured in Ōya Sōichi’s comment above. Sanctions against Kaizō were deemed so egregious that they spurred the formation of organizations advocating at first the elimination and later the reform of censorship. In August 1926, after an issue of Kaizō was cited for publishing two dramatic scripts, Fujimori Seikichi’s Gisei (Sacrifice) and Kurata Hyakuzō’s “Akai reikon” (Red spirit), an alliance to repeal bannings (hatsubai kinshi kisei dōmei) was formed by members of the Tokyo publishing society and the national magazine society.4 After the consultation system came to an end in 1927, these efforts at repeal (bōshi) were transformed into more moderate calls for reform (kaisei). The Committee for the Reform of Censorship in a January 1928 pamphlet specifically cited the treatment of Kaizō as a reason for demanding the revival of the consultation system. The “unjust” (futō) deletion of the fourth installment of Nakazato Kaizan’s “Yumedono” from the September 1927 issue was offered as an example of a system gone awry.5 In a roundtable discussion published in the April 1929 issue of the magazine Shinchō, the acclaimed avant-garde writer and progenitor of the so-called neosensationist movement Yokomitsu Riichi suggested that if Fujimori Seikichi’s “Hikari to yami” (Light and dark), which had appeared in the February and March issues of the proletarian organ Senki, had been published in the more widely circulated Kaizō, it would have been a problem for the censors, while it would have been safe in the more literary and less political Shinchō. Even later, in the rapid changes brought about following the war, after financial losses suffered as a result of repeated violations of the Occupation-era Press Code threatened the viability of the magazine, Hirotsu Kazuo, Kawabata Yasunari, and Nakajima Kenzō, among others, began a “protect Kaizō” society in 1955, not so much as a defense against censorship as a capital-raising venture to stave off a potential bankruptcy, caused in part by troubles with censors. Kaizō, as a locus for both censorship and the fight against and through it, is an ideal case study for judging the effects of censorship on cultural production.6 From the standpoint of extant archival materials documenting the process of literary censorship, the case of Kaizō is also unique. Essays published in the magazine on the topic of censorship, memoirs by writers and editors at the journal writing after the fact of censorship, and most recently

158    /    Redaction a DVD-ROM collecting many of the literary manuscripts from the archive of one of the editors all testify to the role of censorship in the literature published.7 In the records of the censors themselves, we have the reports of the Publishing Police and their examination copies identifying the portions of texts deemed offensive. In these materials alone, the example of Kaizō documents the censorship process beginning just after the unknowable black box of self-censorship that occurs in the heads of writers and going all the way through the processes of rewriting and editing that takes place before submission to the censors and subsequent publication. A major magazine with a wide circulation and leftist leanings, Kaizō continually pushed the limits of the free press guaranteed under article 29 of the Imperial Japanese constitution (and curtailed by the Newspaper Law of 1909).8 As early as August 1919, only four months after the magazine first appeared, it was banned and suffered deletions at the hands of the censors for an article on Bolshevism and Wilsonianism by Uchida Rōan. From that time until the Yokohama Incident—which began with the arrest of Hosokawa Karoku for his procommunist article “Japan and the Trends of World History” appearing in the August and September 1942 issues of Kaizō and ended with a halt to the journal’s presses in July 1944—the magazine suffered at least nineteen bans and deletions at the censor’s behest, not to mention the numerous fines and even jail time suffered by its editors and publishers.9 (For comparison, the other major general-interest magazine of the time, Chūō Kōron, was banned only once between 1932 and 1935 while Kaizō was banned five times during that period.)10 And Kaizō‘s offenses against the rules of censorship continued even when those rules changed during the Occupation. From the time Kaizō restarted in 1946, it was cited for censorship by the GHQ censors no fewer than eight times.11 Yet for all this attention from the censors, Kaizō managed to survive beyond the demise of other similar and more leftist journals in the early 1930s, and even to publish authors who had made their names in more often banned extreme leftist proletarian journals such as Senki, Puroretaria geijutsu, and Bungei seisen. With the help of concerned writers, editors, and censors, no other major magazine prevailed for so long through so many infractions. It navigated its terms of collusion and complicity with the imperial regime through various means. Of course, its pose of objectivity and balance in the content it provided probably helped the magazine, whereas the open one-sidedness of the proletarian journals condemned them. Kaizō published not only major figures popular in leftist circles such as Nakano Shigeharu, Fujimori Seikichi, and Kobayashi Takiji, but also mainstream militarists such as Hino Ashihei and Ozaki Shirō. An institu 

 

Redactionary Literature    /    159 tional history of the editorial practices of the magazine would certainly go a long way toward explaining how the magazine avoided abject capitulation in the mid-1930s. But just as clearly, we can read in the use of fuseji reasons for the journal’s survival: the positive presence of markers of deletion helped Kaizō to navigate the treacherous waters of early Shōwa discourse. Anecdotal evidence from the time suggests that readers were conscious of a rise in the prevalence of fuseji in Kaizō after the end of the consultation system in 1927. In a discussion in the major literary journal Shinchō in June 1929, the novelist Hayashi Fusao commented, “Lately fuseji have been particularly noticeable. This is not an issue of the left or leftist criticism alone, but rather a general problem. Just to give a recent example, the pieces carried in the latest Kaizō are full of fuseji.” 12 A more peripheral leftist journal, Mumei jidai (Nameless era), was banned in October 1929 for suggesting that Kaizō was overly cautious about censorship: It seems that the editors of Kaizō (one of the leading highbrow monthly magazines) have been in fear of encountering censorship. Since it is a commercial magazine, it might be unreasonable to ask them to go ahead without worrying about possible censorship. However, the point is that they are inclined to cut too many words or sentences that might be opposed by the censors. More often than not, the reader cannot follow the meaning of an article that is filled up with too many Xs. Confronted with such a case, the reader feels as if he were stained with black ink on his face. . . . Above all, it is an insult to the writer for the editor to mutilate his writings in such a manner. Again, it is also an affront to the reader to offer such a defective commodity. Needless to say, the fundamental problem is the present censorship system.” 13

That censors objected to the public declaration in Mumei jidai about the state of publications in Kaizō reflects a growing concern about straightforward acknowledgment of redaction, deletion, and ultimately censorship, a concern that would come to define later Occupation censors. And censors also noted that a change was afoot in the publishing world after the end of the consultation system. Making specific reference to the June 1929 issue of Kaizō, from which editors voluntarily deleted four pages of Kawakami Hajime’s Binbō Monogatari (Tales of destitution), the January 1930 issue of the Home Ministry’s internal publication, The Publishing Police Survey, recognized a notable overuse of fuseji in the magazine: “In every issue, articles appear carrying ideas of the extreme left; however, due to an excessive fear of being banned, editors employ an abundance of fuseji to gear the magazine toward what can sell.” 14 Here the censors appear to understand both the heavy costs of censorship and the possi-

160    /    Redaction bility that fuseji had already acquired a cultural cachet, representing the allure of the forbidden. This desire for fuseji qua fuseji and not for what lay beneath them is openly discussed in contemporary novellas such as Nakano Shigeharu’s The Novelist Who Couldn’t Write a Novel (discussed in chapter 9); still, it is particularly significant to note that readers (here the most well-documented readers of all, the censors) as well as writers got the sense that fuseji could refer to nothing more than censorship. And the anecdotal evidence is borne out by the historical record. The rise and fall of fuseji in Kaizō were determined by two decisions made by censors: first, the decision to end the consultation system in 1927;15 and second, the decision to crack down on fuseji in 1936.16 The average number of fuseji per page in Kaizō was .46 in 1926, 1.46 in 1927, .92 in 1936, .10 in 1937, and .01 in 1941. To put this more plainly, in the first six months of 1926, there was on average less than one character marking redaction every two pages in Kaizō (less than .5 fuseji per page) by my count of typographical fuseji in the magazine. By contrast, in the first six months of 1927, there are 1.5 fuseji per page, a threefold increase immediately after the decision by the Publishing Police to turn over responsibility for determining deletion-worthy passages to editors and writers. During this heyday of fuseji, the magazine averaged as many as six fuseji per page. Then in 1936, the average drops to just under one fuseji per page (.9). And in the first six months of 1937, following the meeting of police department heads in which the decision to crack down on the use of fuseji was made, the average fell even further, to .1 per page. By June 1941, the number was reduced to .01, which is roughly equivalent to uses during the Occupation. Thus, the rising and falling fuseji count shows that the absence and presence of fuseji in Kaizō provide an almost one-to-one correspondence with decisions about the marks made by the censors, even though the censors left the actual markings up to editors for nearly a decade. Kaizō may well be an extreme example of the deep impact of censorship on literature at the time, but we might begin to articulate the role of censorship for literature in venues that are less likely than and not as well documented as this highly visible material example.

Microhistories: Reading fuseji in Literature During the heyday of fuseji from 1927 to 1936, the marks had several uses, which can be divided into at least three categories. The first two of these were for simple replacement: first, the replacement of proper names (usually stemming from a military restriction on releasing details about battle-

Redactionary Literature    /    161 front movements, but sometimes from the need to avoid names for issues of liability or a desire to create “reality effects” in fiction such as “Mr. X” and “T town”); and second, character-for-character replacement of taboo words (most famously kiss, proletariat, and revolution). The third use of fuseji may well also have been the result of character-for-character replacements, but they occurred in such long strings and blocked out such large swaths of text that it would be impossible for readers to reconstruct exactly what the characters presumably covered, though it would not necessarily stop them from conjecturing about the general topic of the deleted content. These three uses of fuseji have different histories. Proper-name fuseji continued unproblematically through the supposed phasing-out of fuseji that began in 1936 and even through the Occupation. And though taboo words and large swaths of text (the second and third categories) did not directly continue to be covered with fuseji under the Occupation, the deletion of simple words persisted in a variant form through euphemism. For instance, since the simple word enemy-army (敵軍) was not allowed under Occupation censorship, authors made the change to American army (米 軍) after 1945.17 So, in fact, only the redaction of long swaths of text faded, and not with the Occupation, but beginning with the change in imperial regulation enforcement in 1937. To explore how historical readers would have first confronted literary texts and particularly how one specific type of reader (the censor) read through the magazine, we can draw on numerous examples that reveal the inherent process of deletion, the myriad forms of usage, and the pervasiveness of redactionary literature. Since Kaizō was a general-interest magazine, we have the added benefit of elaborating examples across individual literary genres that would otherwise limit the ability to read redaction to, for instance, the category of sedition (proletarian literature) or obscenity (erotic fiction). Cutting through these sorts of categorizations is useful when trying to assess the impact of redaction on literature broadly and is more historically sensitive than choosing one genre, since the magazine itself did not distinguish between the varieties of literature it published.18 Collecting all literature at the end of the magazine in a separately numbered section, Kaizō published proletarian novels, detective fiction, poetry, and plays alongside one another with only the occasional note “creative work,” “script,” or “novel” before the title.

Simple Substitution: Proper Names—Places and People  

This first type of deletion mark is so literary, so natural to what literature is (a form of play with the possibilities of representation and cognition),

162    /    Redaction that it seems almost odd to consider it along with other fuseji. Since at least the advent of the roman à cléf, the negation of proper names in novels has been held to lend an air of reality by instilling the sense that the place or person left unnamed or renamed in the fiction is real and therefore left unnamed to avoid accusations of libel. The erasure or changing of names signals both a connection to and a break from our reality. This erasure might be necessitated by what we can call an aesthetics that is internal to fiction as a representation of some reality, a production-level redaction. As already noted, this use of fuseji survived through the Occupation’s express banning of fuseji, perhaps because censors, despite notions of their literary insensitivity, recognized its inherent literary qualities, seemingly unrelated to censorship. At the same time, this literary erasure is analogous to another mode of redaction that seems to emanate from a place outside the production level, a space external to the text and the author. Since at least World War I, military censorship has stipulated the excision of the names of fields of battle and military personnel even in homefront publications because of strategic concerns about the circulation of war secrets. These two forms of proper-name erasure—the literary and the strategic— coincided in important ways at the readerly level in prewar and wartime Japanese letters. Readers at the time could not distinguish between marks of authorial intent and those imposed by military decree, except in obvious cases, such as stories about the warfront like Hino Ashihei’s bestselling novel Mugi to heitai (Barley and Soldiers), first carried in the December 1938 issue of Kaizō, in which the battlefront place names and division specifications are duly replaced with fuseji.19 Readers’ abilities to distinguish these two (authorial and military) forms of proper name deletion were significantly impaired. Though readers could conjecture using grammatical and syntactical clues, no hint was left on the page whether the redactions were inspired by the author, the editor, or the censor. Examples of these modes of proper-name deletion in the literature published in Kaizō abound. For instance, the script of Kurata Hyakuzō’s banned play “Death of a Police Chief,” which was published in the September 1925 issue of Kaizō, before the censor’s abdication of responsibility for the marks through consultation, contains instances of fuseji that illustrate some of the major issues.20 The play stages the difficulties of expression under a repressive regime and includes many ellipses and over ten instances of the word silence (chinmoku) as a parenthetical stage direction to signify dramatic pregnant pauses. In fact, the play is not much more than a series of halting conversations and arguments between Hiroshi, a supporter of  

 

Redactionary Literature    /    163 the proletarian party, and his father, the police chief Iwata Eitarō, at a time after an earthquake that has brought on general hysteria. The first instance of fuseji appears in Hiroshi’s answer to a question regarding the location of his nightly activities: “The XX ghetto,” he replies. This simple deletion seems like a reality effect. Since ethnic Koreans are mentioned in the same scene, the reader is aware that the deletion here is likely referring less to the ghetto’s ethnic characteristics (as a Korean ghetto), which are clearly writable, and more to the proper place name of a particular neighborhood. So the omission would cause the reader to think either that some specific ghetto or that any ghetto near the family’s residence in Hiroshima could be the birthplace of Hiroshi’s social awareness. A later scene between Hiroshi and his mother offers a more complicated instance of using fuseji to cover a proper name. Toshiko: You did nothing to be ashamed about. Hiroshi: Of course. But how Dad will feel about that is another matter. I was involved in the XX incident. Toshiko: (with surprise) The XX incident? Hiroshi: Yeah.21

Readers at the time might have drawn on clues within the text to guess that the unnamed incident is the Gakuren (学連) student uprising that began in May 1925 and continued through the end of the year. In that incident, the recently passed Peace Preservation Law was employed to restrict the activities and publications of the Kyoto and Dōshisha University student movements. But two facts open the possibility for reading the XX here as any number of incidents following the Great Kantō Earthquake, such as the Bokuretsu, Amakasu, and Kameido incidents: first, that the incident did not reach a crescendo until December 1925, after the play was written; second, that the earthquake looms so large in the play. Although the play is clearly set in Hiroshima’s Motoyasubashi, near where the dramatist was raised, there are a number of clues that Kurata was drawing on the recent Tokyo earthquake in his slightly veiled allegory. Certainly a Tokyo audience and readership would have made connections between the play’s fictional police action and inaction after an earthquake in Hiroshima and real events in Tokyo that had taken place less than two years before. The unnamed incident is alluded to again in the play’s final scene, in which the father and mother discuss their own misunderstanding of their son’s attempts to help the downtrodden. In the end, they resolve to die in an act premised on conflicts between social rights and individual activism, in contrast to a traditional love suicide prompted in the conflict between

164    /    Redaction duty and passion.22 In the final lines, the motifs of silence and censorship are replayed: EitarŌ: I feel like dying. How about you? Toshiko:  . . . . . . .  . . . . . EitarŌ: Will you die in silence? I am at a loss. Toshiko: (Takes out a short sword and shows it to Eitarō) EitarŌ: (Silence) Sorry. Toshiko: Like General Nogi . . . .  . . . . . EitarŌ: Yeah. Toshiko: But before that I need to tell you something. Hiroshi was part of the XX incident conspiracy. EitarŌ: (Shutting his eyes) I see. Toshiko: I am not sad at all anymore. EitarŌ: (He nods) Let us two become one stone. (He takes out the knife.) Toshiko: (Nods and grasps his hand). (The distant sound of bells tolling the daybreak over the metropolis can be heard).23

The referent covered is neither so vague that it refers to everything nor so specific that every reader would fill it in with precisely the same content. Furthermore, at the readerly level there was no way of distinguishing if the fuseji came from the author, editor, or censor. Readers knew the mark was associated with censorship; and this vague understanding was the most specific filling-in that all meaning-making could share. Although this state of not-knowing is generally what historical readers confronted with regard to this first type of fuseji, there are instances of proper-name deletion for which more information survives, providing us with the retrospective ability to establish who dictated which marks. For instance, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s “Kappa” in the March 1927 issue of Kaizō (discussed in chapter 3) illustrates both the confusion that readers necessarily confronted when faced with fuseji instead of proper names and the extent to which literary history is able to recover literature that has incurred the scars of censorship. In the prologue, which is narrated by an anonymous compiler and sets the scene for the madman’s story that follows, readers’ eyes meet the following: “I will try to reflect this story of his as accurately as possible. And if anyone is unsatisfied with my notes, they should try visiting the S Mental Hospital on the outskirts of Tokyo

Redactionary Literature    /    165 in XX village.” 24 Here the two erasures play against each other, with the S offering a hint about what it erases and the XX effecting a blotting-out that offers no hint. This play may seem to suggest that readers take this as simply an instance of authorial employment of a “reality effect.” 25 From these marks the reader might for a moment believe there is a real madman at the Setagaya hospital in our actual world’s Tokyo. The marks double or enhance a play between the fictive and the real at the level of signification already enabled at the level of structure by the framing prologue itself. But readers might have asked themselves, Why is there an S in the first instance and XX in the second? Could one be the author’s mark and one the censor’s? Could they simply be ways of differentiating the redaction of different words? Similarly, the fuseji appearing in section 15 of the narrative (a vignette about a séance reviving the spirit of the famous Kappa poet Tok) are difficult to parse. In the fragment, a translation of the Kappanese record of summoning the ghost of the luminary Tok (a text presumably provided by the patient-traveler-narrator of the main narrative to the compiler of the prologue), readers find another instance of doubled fuseji serving to localize the story within the story: “Our Spiritualist Society held a Special Investigation Meeting at the photography studio of XX at 251 □□ Street, the former residence of Tok the poet who committed suicide a while ago.” Here the name of the street and the name of the proprietor of the photography studio are equally erased, but by two different marks. Readers at the time might have conjectured about the different meanings of the mark, wondering if this text within text was redacted in the fictional Kappa world or ours. Did the two marks refer to different modes of negation—one replaceable, one not; one censorial, one not? Or did someone use one mark for one deletion and another mark for another deletion simply to avoid having readers think that the street had the same name as the person? The contemporary reader could find no solid ground for resolving these questions, no proof positive of the particular underlying meaning of the marks. The marks could equally easily have served the aesthetic demands of fiction or the haphazard demands of censors. The manuscript, however, gives clear and precise evidence; all of these marks (those in the prologue and in section 15) were written in Akutagawa’s hand, part of the original design of the narrative.26 Other marks of deletion in the first publication in Kaizō, however, were not written in Akutagawa’s hand. At the end of the section 7 of “Kappa,” the crux of the problem of proper-name redaction can be most clearly seen. Recording the pandemonium of the police descending on a concert hall,  

166    /    Redaction the scene as it appeared in Kaizō is wrought in visual and diegetic play on silencing: “Isn’t this censorship wanton?” “What!?! It’s more progressive than the censorship of any other country! For instance, have a look at *****. Even just a month ago . . . ” It was just at the moment he was saying this when, unfortunately, an empty bottle fell on the crown of Mag’s head, so he cried out, クアック (this was but an interjection), and at once lost consciousness.27

Not only does the proper name Japan receive fuseji in the Kaizō version, but a deus ex machina in the form of a bottle lands squarely on the head of the Kappa, Mag, who is about to tell perhaps how unreasonable Japanese censorship is in comparison to Kappanese censorship. (His exclamation— the word quack—is given with a parenthetical, scholarly explanation in the “original” Roman alphabet, since Kappanese is presumably written using the Western alphabet, here translated into the Japanese to preserve the cross-linguistic effect.)28 With this exclamation, Mag’s still-to-come comment on censorship is displaced, ending the scene and any further mention of the topic. Like fuseji, the bottle and quack are themselves markers of silence that speak for silence, signs that cancel intended signification. Because the story at the moment of the inscription of the fuseji in this scene is squarely focused on the subject of censorship, readers at the time could have suspected that the marks were from the hand of the author himself, performing with the characters on the page what the rest of the scene illustrated. But this was not the case. We now know the actual fuseji to have come from someone other than Akutagawa, either the censor’s hand during a consultation or the editor’s at Kaizō. We can surmise at least two possible motives: first, that an editor sought to anticipate any potential concerns of the censor about the criticism of censorship; second, that the editor wished to improve the work by tripling the ways the character’s critique was silenced. While the second possibility is generally less likely, in this particular case it is not without its logic.29 Most of the postwar print versions of “Kappa” fill in 日本 (Japan) for ××, or what I have translated as *****.30 The postwar pressings maintain the fuseji for proper names in the earlier prologue and section 15, those sections where the manuscript shows fuseji in Akutagawa’s own hand. While this seems logical given the manuscript evidence, it is not necessarily the best possible solution to the conundrum presented by fuseji. One can see how after a censorship regime has passed it would seem nostalgic at best and reactionary at worst to maintain the deletion marks of the old regime,  

 

Redactionary Literature    /    167 to repeat the violence of censorship to discourse. The feeling that, having emerged from censorship, we should present the narrative as it was originally written (in the manuscript) is natural. However, filling in the fuseji without continuing to mark their historical presence eliminates the fortuitous synchronicity of discussion of censorship within “Kappa” and the tangible effects of censorship on the text in the form of fuseji. If the elision of Japan is not part of Akutagawa’s original authorial intention, it remains significant as a historical marker of what readers confronted. Given only a postwar version of the text, readers today might conclude that the work was merely a fantasy wholly removed from the historical moment in which it was written. The marks, however, push in the other direction, revealing the work to be firmly a product of its moment. Akutagawa’s fantasy would have been read as a direct and pointed allegory for the world and the censorship he confronted and not as an escape from it. Whether these fuseji were intended by the author (as in the case of the unnaming of the town and the photographer) or were a device used by an external editor or censor as a means of evading a ban (as in the case of localizing the comments on censorship to Japan), they can be classified together as reality effects, moments that heighten the seeming reality of the fictional world they help to articulate, once our point of attention is placed on the historical reader. The fuseji in “Kappa” provide a link between the reader’s world and the fictive one being represented. In the appearance of fuseji on the page, distinctions between these worlds collapse. Even though in this case we have empirical evidence that some of the fuseji were not the work of the author,31 there is still value in preserving marks of deletion and not filling them in. By maintaining the redacted text in this way, we can at least partially reclaim not only what it was to read and make meaning under censorship in Japan but also how redaction might have enhanced literature by underlining the critique of censorship itself and transforming it into a critique that performs what it proposes.

Simple Substitution: Taboo Words The second major category of fuseji usage resembles the first insofar as it seems to represent clearly inferrable and easily insertable content. It is also the particular mode of redaction most remembered in the postwar period as characteristic of prewar and wartime censorship. In many postwar memoirs, writers and readers nostalgically assert that fuseji were not detrimental because everyone knew what words had been excised; readers could, according to this common narrative, grow accustomed to reading fuseji, to reading the meanings and intentions behind the characters

168    /    Redaction of redaction.32 Though this longing for a simpler time when enemies of expression were clear is saturated in its postwar contexts, the supposed ease with which readers might disambiguate the marks was a cause for concern even under the imperial regime; during the height of fuseji, the censors recognized this particular mode of redaction as a problem. In an article on the seditious tendencies of leftist publications that appeared in the midyear Publishing Police Survey of 1930, fuseji are listed along with other strategies employed for evading censorship. The description reads, “fuseji: these are generally applied to words like revolution, Communist party, and dictatorship and can be easily deciphered in their surrounding context.” 33 It was this type of easily legible fuseji to which the censors most objected, considering them ineffective and even having a “reverse effect” on censorship. An extreme example of the degree to which censors found fuseji problematic is mentioned in the December 1932 Publishing Police Report, which lists a ban on a secretly published pamphlet that included a fuseji-decoding table for the Selected Writings of Lenin. 34 The nostalgic descriptions of easily read fuseji recall only this one aspect of fuseji, omitting the inevitable truth of an irreplaceable loss perpetrated by the marks. Kobayashi Takiji’s novel Numajiri mura (The village of Numajiri) exemplifies the advantages and the dangers of writing and reading through this type of single, isolated, and simple character-for-character substitution of a word with redaction marks. The story was first published serially in Kaizō from March through May 1932, then as a book in August of that same year. Though the book version carried much of the original serialized text, even reproducing its fuseji, it raised the ire of the censors and was banned in November of 1932. Only later was it reissued in a revised version. The book ban could be due to the overt politics of its new publisher (the Japanese Proletariat Authors League), or to the new segments added to the book version, or even to the whims of a never-rational censor who applied rules haphazardly,35 but the two textual versions (the one that first appeared in Kaizō and the censor’s examination copy of the subsequently published and banned book, which is now held at the US Library of Congress) offer another possibility: that the underlying and constant function of fuseji as simply the sign of redaction—pointing not to absented words but to the act of deletion itself—may have played a role in causing the book to be banned. The case of Numajiri mura reveals the difficulties of designating a singular individual responsible for the administration of fuseji. The marks of deletion scarring the text in both the magazine and book versions of Numajiri mura were likely inserted by either editors or the author. How­  

 

Redactionary Literature    /    169 ever, any editors or writers applying fuseji did so in the shadow of the censor. In the postwar story “Fuseji,” the one-time Kaizō editor Kanbayashi Akatsuki recounts the practice of imposing fuseji in the late 1920s and early 1930s and suggests that the fuseji in the magazine were attributable to a single editor in charge of redaction, the ignominious “Mr. M.” 36 Critics, authors, and other editors dreaded Mr. M, who worked around the clock at the left-leaning magazine. According to the story, the censorlike Mr. M would say, “ ‘Those are to blame,’ pointing to manuscripts being too explicit or too violent and not caring a fig about censorship.” 37 While Mr. M himself tried to follow a strict “safety first policy,” he was always concerned with how the censor might take not only the text of the writers being published but also his own fuseji. When called by the Home Ministry authorities, Mr. M would have a fearful look, worrying that the large quantity of fuseji he used would be considered excessive. When an issue of the magazine was banned, Mr. M would visit the censors and beg for permission to publish with some pages torn out. Kanbayashi’s portrayal of Mr. M also reveals his close relationship and collaboration with the censors during the period of the consultation censorship system, which ended in September 1927. Over the years of consultation, censors taught editors how the vague list of bannable topics and censorable words would be enforced. This lesson was eventually internalized to the extent that Mr. M’s job was to precensor, to anticipate the work of the government censors. To argue that Mr. M was solely responsible would be to ignore his long-standing role as a cultivated intermediary between the censor and the censored. He is rather the very person who disrupts the usefulness of these binary figurations. To complicate matters, some authors took on the role of censorship themselves. In fact, according to the postwar paperback version of Koba­yashi’s Numajiri mura, Ino Shōzō, the editor of the original edition of the book and the revised edition from 1932, claimed to have set the galley from the author’s manuscript, inserting fuseji according to the author’s instructions, not an editor’s hand.38 Yet again, we cannot consider the deletion marks as solely the result of self-censorship, as the product of the producers—the authors and the editors—acting irrespective of a censor. So redaction we know occurred, but the redactors were multiple, from the author to the editor and the censor. Each thought they knew the rules of permissibility to a limited extent and decided the locations of potential offense on the basis of that knowledge. In the end, the first edition of the book version of Numajiri mura was banned due either to a miscalculation of these multiple redactors or to an inability to entirely cover the “offensive” with fuseji.  

 

170    /    Redaction Written in the shadows of the Manchurian Incident, Kobayashi’s novel combines the proletarian and farmer-labor revolutionary ideologies with the antiwar and antifamily struggles inherent in class war. Following several characters in a small Hokkaido village during a moment of crisis in which the town is divided between the farmers and the coal-refining factory workers after it is hit by the multiple shocks of war, murder, and suicide, the story roughly adheres to the proletarian literary theory of the time and does not settle on the struggle of a single hero. Instead, we are given several main figures: the young upstart Yoshie, who works in a factory with her friends and is allied with the older political clan in town; the young proletarian revolutionary Ken’ichirō, who recently returned home from Tokyo with ideas of how to unify the farmers and laborers; the grandfather who resists Ken’ichirō’s ideologies and eventually commits suicide; and the elderly teacher at the local school who tries to collect money to give to the families of soldiers for care packages. The entire novel is structured around scenes of silence and silencing. Instances of self-silencing surround the discontented Yoshie, who murmurs questions about the war and her low wages. Yoshie argues that in times of war it is “only fitting” that there is more work “because coal is the most important,” and states that the increased work should be matched by increased wages.39 But whenever Yoshie says such things, she quickly realizes that no one is listening and stops. In another scene, Ken’ichirō stops talking to the teacher after declaring his party affiliation: the naming of the party itself silences conversation. Later, when the citizens of Numajiri confront the corpse of their fellow townsperson, they are speechless. All of these silences (and many others) overdetermine the necessity of reading the silences conveyed by fuseji. The fuseji in the novel center around the expression of antiwar sentiments. When the subject of the difficulty of preparing comfort boxes for the soldiers on the front arises, the conversation turns to the war, and the narrator insists that a boy’s extra hands on a suffering family farm are more important than serving the nation. There was no way that it would be OK for an entire family to live homeland

like beggars saying something like “it’s for the * * * * * * * *!” At sowing and harvest time, that family went to the town hall and demanded their son get special leave to return home. However, he would return war home two years later. When it comes to * * *, their one and only worker kill

would be ****ed.40

Redactionary Literature    /    171 The censor’s report quoting this passage fills in the redaction marks, underlining the fact that, in the context, it is not hard to imagine what was excised. As villagers note that giving their sons to the war effort is a waste when they need help at home, the text is spotted with fuseji that draw attention to the offense even as they hide it. In another scene, the teacher exhausts himself trying to cope with his student’s simple plea, “Please try war to stop the *** .” 41 Most tellingly, when the young, proletarian-minded villager Ken’ichirō confronts his father Yoshikichi on his opinions, which posit a separation of the labor fight from the farmer struggle, the serialized text of 1932 is rife with fuseji (which are “restored” in postwar collections):42 war

Having seized the chance to try to make * * * as they did when Japanese army invaded Manchuria

the ******** * * * * ******* * * * * * * * * * , using the names like “National Full Mobilization

**** ************”

Guarding

and “ ********* the Homeland” it is obvious that

war ***

avert

against the landlords is  ***** ed and the All Farmers organizations are destroyed.43

Though elsewhere in the story, all of these redacted words (war, Man­ churia, country) are presented without fuseji, in these explicitly antiwar contexts they are redacted. In the middle of the war, antiwar sentiment is unnamed, and this unnaming is considered necessary for publication. And yet there is evidence that the ease with which the offense can be read in the marks eventually resulted in the banning of the first book version, because this moment, which pitted class war against national war, is absent from the revised edition of the book, which passed censorship. The interesting question is whether the offense was read by filling in the fuseji or by the presence of fuseji alone. The evidence of the multiple texts also shows that there were times when even the simplest replacement of words with deletion marks proved impossible to fill in. The marginal pencil marks and notes of the censors are legible in the examination copy of the book version held at the Library of Congress. Here, as in thousands of other volumes of extant examination copies from twenty years of Publishing Police archives, marginalia tend to accumulate around instances of fuseji. Like most other readers of the time, censors tried to fill in the gaps; but what may be more startling (for fetishizers of the moment of the passing of fuseji, of fuseji’s presence and absence, or of the semantic content behind fuseji) is that the censor also underlined fuseji without attempting to fill them in. Whether this was due to an in-

172    /    Redaction ability to think of what could replace the gap or to the notion that the marks were always seen as potentially significant references to the act of deletion, the fact that the censor was reading the gap as a gap is significant in and of itself.44 Figure 7.1 shows an example from the passage in the censor’s examination copy in which the censor read fuseji as something else—here penciling war (戦争) for the ×× in “having seized the chance to try to make ××”—though the other fuseji are left unfilled. The passage speaks its offensiveness both through what the fuseji cover and through those marks as covers. Although in this particular case it may just as likely have been that the censor could read through all of the marks and merely chose not to fill some of them in, the widespread tendency of the censor’s pencil marks to accumulate around fuseji throughout the extant examination copies held at the Library of Congress and the National Diet Library indicates that the redaction marks themselves were important. In fact, in many examination copies like Numajiri mura, it seems that the censors were concerned primarily with the redacted portions, largely skipping over the intervening text. The censors’ attention to the marks of redaction attests to the notion that gaps are fecund areas for readerly circumspection and conjecture. But more importantly, the attention to the marks also shows that the  

 

Figure 7.1.  Passage from Censor’s Examination Copy of Numajirimura with Marginal Notes

Redactionary Literature    /    173 marks themselves made direct reference to censorship and that this reference itself was a potential problem. The case of Numajiri mura shows that fuseji were rarely successful at entirely evading the real, perceptive censor. For even when the specific meanings behind the marks were impossible to determine, the censor read fuseji as an offensive marker of the offensive and did so long before the explicit, official crackdown on the marks began in 1936. Not surprisingly, the use of fuseji had begun to fade even before that crackdown by the police, because the marks could always be read as taboo and were becoming an ineffective means of skirting censorship.

Long Passages: The Undecodable Then and Now “The kids are waiting at the XX tea shop, so I’ve got to go. Want to come to XX?” “Not now.” “Well, then I’ve got to go.” Akira put on his hat. “Wait!” said Aiko demanding a kiss. Akira faced her. Demurely, Akiko’s eyes gleamed. “ヽヽヽヽ, ヽヽヽヽヽ.” ヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽ. ヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽ.45

The use of fuseji in Tokuda Shūsei’s domestic novella “Moto no eda e” (To the stem of a branch), first printed in Kaizō in September 1926, provides a useful visual distinction between proper name deletions, simple word deletions, and lengthier deletions: the shorter excisions were replaced character-for-character with Xs, while the longer redactions replaced each character with a variant emphasis mark (｀ ). Although this case was an exception—most texts left no distinction in the characters used for redaction of one type or another—it allows us neatly to highlight the differences between the different uses of fuseji. Most important, of course, is that while the single-word deletions tended to be easy to fill in, the longer redactions were impossible to decode without some sort of recourse to other information outside of the text (a personal connection with the author, a manuscript, a reprint, a censor’s copy, or a cipher). In the September 10, 1926, issue of Bungei jihō issued later that month, Tokuda rails against the redactions his work had received, emphasizing how they could distort the meaning of the story:  

 

174    /    Redaction A portion of my novel, “To The Edge of a Branch,” carried in Kaizō was done over in fuseji. . . . Since I had only just finished it before the magazine’s deadline, I first found out about the fuseji after it was printed without any notification prior to the publication; and for that story, a truly important part received fuseji. [Without it] . . . the story’s entirety unravels. . . . [T]he reason they used fuseji on that passage is extremely vague. If I had written the word osculate [seppun] instead [of kiss], would the censors have erased it with fuseji in the rest of the narrative? We can infer that the censors probably did not read through the entire thing, just erasing the essence of a single passage that happens to catch their eye. At the very least, it cannot be said that the works are read by the censors with careful consideration. . . . And, what kind of positive effects could putting fuseji on a part of a work have? Actually, in contrast to what you might think in cases such as this, readers imagine far more stimulating characters than the actual characters covered by fuseji.46

Naturally, Tokuda’s lament is launched against the author’s loss of control at the moment of reception: when readers take the marks to suggest more risqué material than what fuseji replace, the readers fill in content inappropriate to the author’s design. But when we think about redaction not as an individual, localized act linked solely to a specific text but as part of a range of functions across a number of texts, we can begin to gauge the productive impact of censorship on the literary landscape: inherent in this form of fuseji were possibilities for producing meaning at the readerly level beyond or outside authorial intention. So ignoring the history of the practice and function of the use of fuseji obscures those possibilities and overprivileges the agency of an author as master not only at the level of production but also at the level of reception. What is perhaps most significant to literary history about this category of lengthy redaction by fuseji usage in Kaizō is that despite scholars’ best efforts at preserving and restoring texts and manuscripts, this third type of redaction often proves that it cannot be replaced, not only for readers at the time but also for literary history long after the event of deletion. For if no manuscripts exist after the reason for the redaction is past and authorial memories of deleted lines fail, all that is left to literary history is the gap. Thus, the choice for postwar publishers, editors, and writers about whether to rewrite the gap, close the gap, or leave the gap remains troublesome. The lines redacted from this Tokuda story, for instance, are not replaced in subsequent postwar anthologies, but lost to the vagaries of a censorship that is long since past. The most recent Collected Works of Tokuda Shūsei maintains the fuseji in place of the lines, keeping the loss

Redactionary Literature    /    175 palpable for a contemporary audience. This case is the exception: in most postwar collections, the deletion marks themselves are excised. While such “thinning” of textuality may seem like its own loss to those who are aware of the presence of redaction marks in the original, it is not necessarily felt that way by readers today, and it is certainly not necessary for us to consider them as a loss at the critical level.47 In fact, the excision of redaction marks produces new receptions and new sets of meanings for the texts. And yet, when newly “cleaned” editions of the texts are taken as historical documents that tell us something not about the here and the now but the then and there, problems may arise. At the time, the deletion of lengthy passages was instrumental in enabling the otherwise impermissible to be published in Kaizō at all. The former editor Kanbayashi Akatsuki remarked about the publication of Kuroshima Denji’s A Flock of Swirling Crows in Kaizō that the novel “was able to avoid a ban thanks to the merciless fuseji.” 48 It was particularly the long swaths of deletion that enabled the most risky material to be published without a ban or fine. So, for instance, it is no surprise that Kishi Sanji’s novelization of the death and torture of Kobayashi Takiji that appeared in the August 1933 issue only six months after Kobayashi’s actual demise at the hands of his police captors used this means of lengthy redaction, undecodable by historical readers. The following passage, in which the main characters discuss the brutality of the police as evidenced by the beaten body of the fictionalized proletarian writer, was entirely redacted with Well it was beyond words There

emphasis marks (ヽ) when published in Kaizō: “ ****, ** *** ****** *****.

*****

is staking your life on something but when you see that corpse it’s clear this went far beyond

** ******* **** **** ** *********, ***  * * * *  *** *** **** ***** *** ***** **** ****  *** ******

that It was like a samurai broken by arrows and swords

****. ** *** ****  *  * ****** ******  **  ****** *** ******.” 49

The responsibility for the death and torture of Kobayashi would have been suggested to news-aware readers through the redaction marks on the page and other more semantic and metaphorical means employed by Kishi. But interestingly, rather than a clear and direct reference to the murder, even the redacted text reveals only the difficulty of discussing the issue (“it was beyond words”) and an internalized taboo in the shift to the metaphor of the broken samurai. At some point in the editorial process, the shift to the metaphorical itself must have been deemed insufficient to cover the offense-giving of the passage; hence it was covered in fuseji, a safer (because more ambiguous) linguistic tool of displacement. Readers who would have had only the fuseji could not have guessed precisely what lay beneath; and, as Tokuda suggested about his kiss scene, their imaginations might have filled in the gap with more stark and direct terms.

176    /    Redaction Similarly, the Kaizō version of Fujimori Seikichi’s “Two Disputed Things” suggests the nature of its offense through some lengthy redactions, and the history of its publication reveals just how successful at avoiding bans the lengthy deletions could be. An earlier work of Fujimori, the play Gisei (Sacrifice), is typically referred to as a turning point or important moment in the history of censorship in Japan and for Kaizō.50 Although the issue of Kaizō carrying the third, fourth, and fifth acts of the play (which is about the author Arishima Takeo) strove to anticipate potential bans by using fuseji of the simple, single-word variety,51 the redactions were not enough to satisfy the censors, and the issues were banned. In 1929, the forty-seventh volume of the Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Collected works of modern Japanese literature, also published by the Kaizō company) successfully published the play, apparently because most of acts 3 and 4 were redacted with the fuseji-like phrase “printing the rest of this plot is banned.” 52 These larger redactions, which cannot be replaced, allowed at least the partial text to be republished. Significantly, the money Fujimori earned from that volume of his collected works enabled him to travel to Berlin and write a thinly veiled novel about his experiences at the Second International Conference of Revolutionary Writers held at Kharkov in November 1930. In June 1932, Kaizō carried that novel as Two Disputed Things, including some lengthy redacted passages. In comparison with the book version issued the following January by the Japanese Proletariat Authors League, the original Kaizō magazine version covers far more with fuseji. In fact, the restoration of particular passages in the book version caused serious problems and led to its banning. Put another way, what Kaizō magazine had redacted and successfully published was expanded and filled in for the book version the following January and then banned. Although the roman à cléf focuses on the character of Akagi (modeled on the real-life proletarian activist Katsumoto Seiichirō) and his intrigue with a German spy, the censors were particularly concerned about the novel’s portrayals of postrevolutionary Russia. The Publishing Police Report on the book version of the story cites the following passage as being particularly deserving of the ban: communist party

“Well, of course, if it ain’t the * * * * * * * * *  ***** way, it ain’t worth doin’, so they say,” grumbled Nishimura or Kubota. “Precisely because of that communist

you guys have no way of winning the fight. It’s because of the * * * * * * * * * party

that you guys are even a real political party. More than just as a theory, as real evidence you only need to have a look at the treatment of the sailors from Russia where the communist party holds the reins of power.” 53 *****

Redactionary Literature    /    177 Where this banned version used only proper-name and simple-word deletions, the earlier Kaizō version that perhaps emboldened the producers to redact less or fill in more had long passages of deletion that would have been impossible for even the most astute proletarian readers of the time to fill in entirely: “Well, of course, **************************,” grumbled Nishimura or Kubota. “Precisely because of that **************. ******************. More than just as a theory, **********************************.” 54

This is a clear example of the lengthy redactions in the early Kaizō version being reduced to more decodable proper-name deletions in the book version and causing offense; that is, it is a straightforward case of a more explicit scene (the scene in which more words are printed and fewer redacted) causing a book version to be banned. So it would seem that this lengthy form of redaction could potentially allow texts greater flexibility until the crackdown on fuseji began in 1936. The lengthy redaction seems so deeply connected to the history of fuseji’s inscription that the frequent deletion of such passages from postwar editions is startling. Though we know what lay behind these particular marks in Fujimori’s work because of the attempt to republish with fewer words missing, it is rare that such lengthy deletions have been so easily replaced in subsequent reissues. What the lengthy type of redaction tends to result in for later issues are permanent edits that perpetuate the work of a censorship that is long past, silently maintaining the deletion beyond the censor’s term.

The Lost and Lasting Aesthetics of Redaction The long-term impact of deletions drives particular ahistorical receptions of literature from 1923 to 1945 in the postwar period. Examples of misreadings resulting from transformations between the original and the canonical versions of the (purportedly) same text abound. What follows are examples of significant, lengthy redactions in three novels appearing in Kaizō—by Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Kuroshima Denji— that illustrate the variety of ways redactions themselves were edited out of reissues, possibly leading to skewed readings of texts. These exemplify both the contribution of fuseji to the literature of early Shōwa and what their absences produce in postwar revisions of this literature. The July 1929 issue of Kaizō carried the second and final installment of Edogawa Ranpo’s Mushi (Maggots), a macabre story that endeavors to describe the forbidden desires of a necrophiliac. There are instances of the  

 

178    /    Redaction proper-name variety of redaction: a “○○ liquor store” is unnamed in what may have seemed to readers at the time a mere effect for literary reality.55 Postwar versions replace the two circles with the proper name Tsuruya ( 鶴 屋), suggesting that this name had been redacted for purposes beyond the literary or was added to accommodate the literary sensibilities of a new generation of readers unused to the redaction marks. There are also simple word replacements throughout the text, for example, ×× for intercourse (情交). The deletion marks throughout the original heighten a foreboding sense of the forbidden. In characterizing necrophilia, for instance, the original version of the story carried gaps that left readers with the concise “It was. . . . It was. . . . ”; thus, the fuseji offered room for any number of its readers’ fears or fantasies to come into play. But postwar readers were given a more lackluster version: “It was a nightmarish love. It was a hellish love.” The positively measurable addition of words to the postwar version necessitates a loss in the range of possible vagaries suggested. The postwar changes due to the restorations, however, are not limited to proper-name and single-word redactions. Beginning in the second paragraph of the original second installment, there was a third type of redaction, a replacement or substitution of a different order: “twenty-three characters deleted.” 56 Then on a single page, there are four separate instances of the same type of redaction: “thirteen characters deleted,” “ten characters deleted,” “thirteen characters deleted,” and “twenty-one characters deleted.” 57 Most of these lengthy deletions, made readable in postwar versions, refer directly to the main character’s necrophilia. The following excerpt renders in boldface the passages redacted in this way in the original Kaizō version and then later replaced in postwar editions: He washed it. Then, like a puppet master putting the finishing touches on his living puppet, he painted over the entirety with lotus flowers. Then when the uncanny death spots could no longer be seen, next, with regular picture paints, as if doing an actor’s face, he tried adding some pink shading beneath the eyes, plucking the eyebrows, applying lipstick, tinting the earlobes, and to every part of the rest of the body he bestowed hues as he thought fit. In this work he spent an entire half of a day. At first, his goal was only to hide the gloomy complexion and the death spots, but while he was doing it, he first discovered an aberrant interest in embellishing the corpse. As he faced the “canvas” of the corpse, he drew a voluptuous nude and became an incredibly strange artist, whispering all manners of sweet nothings; even amid kissing the cold “canvas,” what garnered his obsessive focus was moving his paintbrush. 58

Redactionary Literature    /    179 Here, from postwar restorations, we are able to discern the reasons for redaction: necrophilia as a general concept was not taboo, but the specifics of how its unspeakable love might be spoken were offensive to legal mores. In this case, the postwar version in comparison with the originally published version clearly defines what content might have been deemed worrisome. But there are a number of passages that have never been restored to the text. The opening of part 9 uses several redactions in rapid succession that have never been restored in subsequent editions. “Fuyō’s cold corpse (seventeen characters deleted) sadly was laid out directly on the straw mat floor. But like some kind of forbidden real doll, it was not entirely something ugly; he felt there was even something singularly charming about it.” 59 This passage is followed almost immediately by another that similarly replaces the deletions of 1929. Further, all mention that deletions had taken place are erased from the later versions. In the lines that follow, the words and marks receiving a strike-through are not present in postwar editions. Maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots, maggots. ゝゝゝゝゝゝゝゝゝ. Innumerable maggots squirmed around in the folds of his grey matter. The sound of those microorganisms chewing up everything resounded.60

Here, characters mark the crisis of representation not only of the relation of necrophilia itself but also of censorship. The repetition of the word mushi (maggots) thirty-three times in the original Kaizō version and twenty-four times in the later versions not only gives the onomatopoetic sense of writhing, but also a visual sense of the vast quantity of maggots and of the inability to express them any other way. More than the reduction of the number of times maggots is repeated in the postwar version, the silent deletion of the repetition (ditto) marks that trail off at the end of the list reveals how this sense of nonsemantic textual accretion so endemic to the practice of writing, publishing, and representing in Kaizō was summarily disregarded in subsequent editions. What could the repetition marks have meant for readers at the time? Why have them there in the first place? Certainly, it could have been that all the characters the typesetter had for mushi (蟲) had been used up so the printer resorted to the repetition marks. But this would mean that the previous thirty-three were deemed insufficient for representing the sound and visual uncan-

180    /    Redaction niness that the producers had in mind and moreover that somehow the sonant marks could continue the signification of mushi enough for readers. Another possibility is that the repetition marks ゝ were deemed to have a visual similarity to maggots. But viewed within the context of the aesthetics of redaction, they might have been chosen as similar enough to the emphasis mark ヽ used as fuseji to draw attention to the way the maggots that eat away at the brain are themselves parallel to the way the fuseji eat away at the text. In this way, it is significant that further on the same page, readers of the original confronted another string of fuseji in the form of the emphasis mark ヽ. Both the repetition marks and the fuseji are absent from postwar editions. The redacted passage following the maggots and repetition marks reads, “When he took her hand and gazed upon her, he saw her finger tip as if packed in lime, as opaque as lead, her thumb as if deformed was bent back into her hand and would not move. ヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽ、 ヽヽヽヽヽヽ、 ヽヽヽ ヽヽヽヽヽヽヽ.” 61 The silent deletion of the redaction marks in subsequent editions displaces the original version’s emphasis on death and its intimation that something taboo is being done with the hand of the corpse. The postwar text simply smoothes over the fissures of the original by neither replacing with words nor preserving the marks of redaction. This is staged in an overt way in the first paragraph of part 10, where four redactions are neither filled in nor marked in any way in subsequent editions. Here the deletions occur at moments of flights of fancy and fantasy in the mind of the necrophiliac main character, Masaki: Unexpectedly, he felt that Fuyō’s appearance was even more beautiful than in the morning. When he touched her, he could tell rigor mortis had set in, but when he saw the brightness of her swollen, pale flesh, she gave off the sense that she was a beautiful cold-blooded creature dwelling at the bottom of the sea. So (three lines deleted) [U]ntil morning, her brow was oddly knit, and her entire face appeared to be in anguish (however, that expression was [twenty-one characters deleted]) Now she had an expression as crystal clear as Mother Mary, the ink on her lips that he had so incompetently done was just beginning to fade and with her white teeth made a sweet smile. With a vacant look, her complexion was as transparent as wax and carved from marble with a secret smile like a statue of Mary. Masaki was completely relaxed. He thought of how ridiculous his recent worries had been. He thought if only he could preserve Fuyō’s figure at that moment for an eternity, then ヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽ ヽヽ(ten more characters deleted). Since he knew it was something that could not be granted, he gave up the bold prayer.62  

Redactionary Literature    /    181 The redactions in the initial version hint that the flights of fantasy must have gone even further, into the realms of explicit taboo. Whereas the unmarked, postwar versions give a sense that we are reading the full extent of the strange love elaborated in the story, the original version gave no such feeling of completion, leaving much more open to the reader to imagine. A subtle difference, but a difference nevertheless. It is not the case that the later version sanitizes or normalizes necrophilia, but it suggests far less of the taboo nature of the crimes to the reader than the original did through its suggestive uses of fuseji. Toward the end of part 8 of the story, three large redactions appear in rapid succession. Viewing these redactions in comparison to postwar versions of the story shows the net loss for the postwar versions and also what they gain in the process. In the following translation, the passages restored to postwar anthologies that were originally referenced as “a twenty-three character deletion” and “a thirty-three character deletion” are rendered in boldface. The subsequent paragraph, which appeared originally but is entirely absent from postwar versions, is printed here with a strikethrough mark: When Masaki would think about it, all of a sudden he would love the body before his eyes so much that he would shiver down his spine. As if it was a doll from his distant past, he would hug Fuyō’s torso, and that cold cheek pressed against his cheek, and he’d hold still, his eyelids grew hot, and swelled with tears, until they dripped and ran down to where his hot cheek met her cold one. He could feel it go down toward the chin. Within the storehouse there was a completely different world because there his companion was a soulless real doll. Masaki would forget his so-called shame and while grimacing like a child, sob uncontrollably, crying all the tears he could and saying all he wanted to say. (four lines deleted) and in that way, this deranged scandal of things beyond our world between the misanthrope and the corpse gruesomely and persistently continued from that night through to next.

The “four lines deleted” of the second paragraph, which like the paragraph itself are entirely absent from all postwar editions, attest to the effacement of the suggestion of something perhaps truly scandalous or censorable; but the fact that those lines are not restored and that the entire paragraph is left out of postwar editions suggests something else. It suggests that the lack of restoration of the four lines (because they never existed, have been lost to time, or are still too scandalous) required a smoothing-over, an edit that would not only remove the marks of redaction within the par-

182    /    Redaction enthetical but maintain the work of a censorship that is long past. The redaction clause marking a deletion gives birth to a wider silent deletion in the postwar version. Readers today may be able to conjecture from these passages rewritten after the war the kinds of things that would have been redacted from some originally complete manuscript ur-text that may or may not have existed in the past; but there is merely a scant trace of censorship in the reference to the crisis of signification represented in the titular maggots. And this hint would not have even been apprehensible from a look at the postwar versions alone. For readers of the later versions today, there is little sense that they have anything less than a complete text. And it certainly is complete in one historical sense. That is, the postwar text as a postwar text in the postwar moment is complete; it is only lacking in comparison to the historically previous version that contains the supplement of the historical violence of censorship. The postwar reader has no sense of that original. In other words, the postwar text is only “thin” with historical detail relative to the prewar one. Indeed, the textuality of the postwar version is “thick” with details of its connections to postwar publishing practices in which a smooth text is of higher value.63 And this would be a perfectly normal and acceptable state of affairs were it not for the fact that the story, and other reprinted stories like it, are read today as artifacts not of their new postwar publication but of the times of their debuts in the imperial period. This problem is exacerbated by the exalted place in critical scholarship held by the major scholarly anthologies and collected works in Japanese literary studies. But this is not an argument simply for a return to the historical materials, because the materials themselves can only hint at the total loss. Rather, this is an argument for reading the marks of fuseji as tangible markers of an intangible censorship. It is a call to preserve those marks in republications, critical editions, and translations as a countermeasure to the tendency to read literature simply as a kind of historical document detached from the textuality of its original publication and connected rather to some presumed ideal original moment of its conceptualization. Until the modes of textual reception drastically change, this is a necessary provisional move in the aftermath of censorship. Since there is neither the necessity nor even the possibility for texts to be simple and clean monological signifiers, there is no need to flatten the historical verticality of the material markers of deletion that scream, “This was censored!” Reading is not eased in the process of editing out markers of deletion, because the desire of readers to make meaning was never really thwarted by the marks of redaction in

Redactionary Literature    /    183 the first place. Even those few readers who may have thrown down the magazine in frustration at not being able to make sense of the fuseji made meaning of the text insofar as, to them, the text meant that which had been so censored that it becomes meaningless. So when I write of some fuseji that they are undecodable, irretrievable, or irreplaceable, I do not mean that they were not decoded, retrieved, or replaced, but I mean to cast doubt on the efficacy of such work. And this doubt cast on filling in or smoothing over lengthy passages of redaction should also lead us to suspect the filling in of even the more easily decoded gaps. Although the stakes for the transformations of the text may not seem high in the case of this relatively obscure novel by Edogawa Ranpo since they do not fundamentally shift the plot, the transformations accrue around the novel’s climactic moments and thematics, subtly emphasizing that which is impossible for the reader of the cleaned postwar versions alone to glean: the historical taboos of the topic related. While readers of the postwar versions will have to sense this strictly from the semantic content of story, the readers of the Kaizō edition had this signaled through the metalinguistic fuseji. But fuseji, as I have been proposing all along, always work at both the metalinguistic and the linguistic level. In the following two examples of lengthy redactions that lead to even longer silent deletions in later editions, this linguistic level is more significant to the ultimate meaning of the work. In his study of the various versions of Tanizaki Jun’chirō’s novel Manji (Maelstrom), the literary scholar Tsukuda Takafumi insightfully highlights several salient features of the textual changes over time. Following the novelist and critic Kōno Taeko’s brilliant revelation that the true offense of Tanizaki’s novel lay less in its depictions of lesbianism or of the ménage à quatre relationships than in its references to birth control, Tsukuda tracks the discrepancies among three versions of the text: (1) the original version serialized in Kaizō from March 1928 to April 1930; (2) the first book version, published by the Kaizō company in 1931; and (3) the edition published by Shinseisha in 1946, upon which subsequent anthologies such as the Complete Works of Tanizaki draw.64 At several climactic moments in all versions of Manji, there are references to a book on birth control. Within the world of the novel, that book is a source of much anxiety, a fictional anxiety directly connected to a real-world ban on books about birth control in Japan. Thus, the treatment of the reference grounds the fiction in our real world (as does the framing narrative that features a confession of the affairs told in the body of the novel to a Tanizaki-like author). In summer 1921, the Kaizō company

184    /    Redaction invited four internationally renowned thinkers to Tokyo, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and Margaret Sanger. Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger was by far the most controversial. Though many of her ideas circulated in Kaizō and more marginal scientific venues during the early 1920s, by the end of the decade her position and instructions for birth control generally and abortion specifically took on a new offense-giving potential as the government began to push an unprecedented population expansion.65 In October 1928, while Tanizaki’s novel was still being serialized (only six months after the appearance of the first installment), a translation of Sanger’s pamphlet “Methods of Contraception” was banned.66 The close association of Sanger and Kaizō made the magazine an ideal venue for Tanizaki to skew his story toward the real-world context of contraception. And indeed, Tsukuda finds that several fuseji-laden passages revolve around issues of Sanger’s contraband text. Further, he posits that Tanizaki’s fuseji were largely “volitional” for a “visual effect” in his “mode of expression.” As evidence of Tanizaki’s intentionality within the marks, Tsukuda cites the following passage from an editorial Tanizaki wrote for the Tokyo shinbun (Tokyo news) on the release of the “complete” Shinseisha edition in 1946: I myself have continued to allow the deletion of portions with fuseji from old editions and have thought that there is no need for sparing the life of fuseji. But the advertising copy that reads “unabridged and without fuseji” is no good, allowing us to hold onto the feeling that somehow the fuseji passages have been restored.67

Here Tanizaki’s stance betrays the fact that the pervasive postwar desire for complete and unabridged editions is in fact an insatiable fetish, because abridgements and silent deletions are nearly inevitable after censorship. The ultimate proof of this almost intangible process appears through a comparison of the denouement of Manji in the postwar anthologized version with the one in the serialized version that originally appeared in the February and April 1930 issues of Kaizō. The following passage (when the main narrator Sonoko recalls how Mitsuko manipulated Sonoko’s husband Kotarō to behave impotently, like Mitsuko’s own estranged fiancé Watanuki) gives some idea of the qualitative shifts in the story, again representing the postwar loss with a strikethrough. “You’re getting to be more and more like Watanuki,” I told him one day. “I think so myself,” he replied. “Mitsu wants to turn me into a second Watanuki.” By that time he had meekly bowed to his fate, whatever it might

Redactionary Literature    /    185 bring. Far from trying to resist becoming another Watanuki, he seemed happy about it. As for the sleeping medicine which at first he had despised, he was asking Mitsuko to give him more in the end. “Staring at ヽヽヽヽ, the moment I eventually lose consciousness at ヽヽ or ヽヽ” And it was right around that time when she would recite that poem: You, knowing, in the land of the garden of hell Where God denies the fruit The fruit of paradise remains untouched For a body that loves beyond the quotidian. When I asked the meaning, she would reply, “having a guy like Watanuki, you could say, ‘ヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽ’. It could be ヽヽヽヽヽヽ ­precisely because of someone like Watanuki that ヽヽヽヽヽ.” But just how far she was being honest, I can’t say. And Mitsuko, now that the three of us had arrived at this stage . . . how could there be a satisfactory conclusion for her? She must have felt desperate, ready to do anything, maybe even to weaken us with that medicine until she had killed us off—didn’t she have a scheme like that buried deep in her heart? . . . I wasn’t the only one who thought so. My husband was resigned to it. To tell the truth, in the pit of Mitsuko’s stomach she was probably sick and tired from “ヽヽヽヽヽヽヽヽ.” She might just be waiting for the day we both dwindled down to wraiths and died, a day not far off, when she would skillfully free herself from us and become completely respectable, ready for a good match.68

It seems clear that the poem in the original was edited out of the postwar version of the novel likely because of its proximity to the undecodable fuseji that frame it. But the poem has an incontrovertible value as a sort of mise en abyme for the entire novel. Coded as beyond interpretation through both its fuseji and its skepticism about Mitsuko’s honesty, the poem not only regards the forbidden love as the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden but also seems to be setting up as taboo the narrative of the fall of man and woman from Eden itself. Although the surface meanings of the poem have to do with lesbianism, it may also have to do with the overtly political aspects of sexuality, birth control, and abortion, as witnessed in the surrounding references to Watanuki’s position as the jilted lover, to the abortion that enabled the furthering of Mitsuko’s unmarried lifestyle, and to the violations of the sanctity of Konoko’s marriage that the lesbian relationship presupposes. The subsequent editions’ omission of the redactions could lead to perverse readings that privilege the perversions over the text’s self-consciousness about the illegality of those perversions. Although the depoliticization of sexual behavior across the textual

186    /    Redaction versions may be an expected long-term effect of the sexual obscenities of Tanizaki and Ranpo, the depoliticization of an ideological novel more clearly underlines the significance of textual transformations for literary history. If the overt politics of representing of non-hetero-normative sex practices such as necrophilia and lesbianism in the late 1920s in Japan is difficult to remember today, we need only to turn to the explicitly political nature of threats of sedition through antiwar sentiment for an account of a politics which remains fairly obvious for readers today. And yet the same sort of neutering takes place surrounding fuseji in proletarian antiwar novels as in these more grotesque and erotic ones. One need only look directly at some stories that are more overtly transgressive politically— stories whose politics were on the surface rather than submerged in an erotic fantasy world—to gauge the permanence of the loss to literature perpetrated by censorship. What is recoverable from the archives of censorship and restorable to literary history and perhaps to the canon are the knowable traces of censorship’s violence: marks that always suggest what exceeds mention and recovery. As a significant antiwar piece on the Siberian Intervention, Kuroshima Denji’s “Flock of Swirling Crows,” published in the February 1928 issue of Kaizō, exemplifies the problems for literary history particularly inherent in fuseji excising longer swaths of text. Kanbayashi Akatsuki begins his postwar story on the topic of fuseji with the following account of Kuro­ shima’s story:  

 

Lately with the paperback reissue of “A Flock of Swirling Crows,” a representative work by Kuroshima Denji, there have been memorial celebrations and the like. And today it seems its reputation as an antiwar novel has only increased. A long time ago, around the beginning of the Shōwa period, I worked at the K. Company as an editor of their general-interest magazine K. (And I’m using that letter on purpose to give a feeling for the period.) “A Flock of Swirling Crows” came out around that time in K. magazine. . . . Immediately, the editor-in-chief Yamamoto Sanehiko gave it a read. Out of the blue, he appeared in the editorial room with the manuscript still opened in his hand. “Hey, this is a great piece. Print it!” . . . However, it was published laden with fuseji. And just near the end, at the important part where the wretched flock of crows swirls above the bodies of soldiers sent on the Siberian Intervention, the fuseji made it such that you couldn’t tell what was what. That was largely the work of the editor Mr. M., though we too checked it over just to be sure. . . . “Flock of Swirling Crows” was able to avoid a ban thanks to the merciless fuseji. Instead, the work’s fate was to survive in that form.69

Redactionary Literature    /    187 Kanbayashi’s memory of the background of the publication highlights the significant role that fuseji played in the publication of the work in the first place. Although there are a variety of shorter redactions throughout the text (e.g., where the place name Iishi is replaced with Xs), Kanbayashi is correct in identifying the lengthy deletions at the end of the novel as particularly significant, since only some of them have been restored in postwar reissues. Japanese soldiers were indeed buried in the snow

It became clear that ******** ******** * * * *  ****** ****** ** *** * * * * . The insignia on the knapsack indicated it was Matsuki and Takeishi’s company. The following day a company of men marched out to the spot over which the crows had been circling since the early morning.

The crows *** *****

were already swarming over the snow striking greedily with their rapacious beaks

* * * *  * ****** * * * * * * * * **** *** * * * * ,  ******** ******** **** ***** ********* *****.

As the soldiers approached, the crows, in a crescendo of cawing, soared cloudlike into the sky. devoured bodies lay scattered over the field Their faces had been hideously

Partly ******** ******  *** ********* **** *** *****.  ***** *****   * * *  * * * *  ********* mutilated and

made unrecognizable. The snow was nearly half melted. Water seeped into pools. Screeching wildly, the crows swooped to the ground some hundred yards away.

********* ***

pecking and tearing

The soldiers saw them ******* * * * ******* amid the snow and started after them. Again the crows whirled up screeching and dropped down two Corpses sprawled

or three hundred yards off. * * * * * * * ******** there too. The soldiers ran toward them. The crows were gradually fleeing farther and farther—two miles, five miles—touching down in the snow all along the way. Matsuki and Takeishi’s company, scrambling to survive, wandered over the snow; trudging, they drew on their last bits of energy. Then over the snow 、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、 、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、 the birds, as if knowing it, flew over there and 、、、、、、、 the snow.70  

 

The silent deletion of the sentences concluding the story seems in part due to the presence of this third type of undecodable fuseji. It is clear that readers in the early 1930s read a different text from those who encountered the text first in postwar editions. For in these final lines (even thus redacted), we get the sense that the plight of the two men lost in the snows of the vast continent is not limited to them alone but is exportable to the entire company and even perhaps to Japan adrift in the snows of Siberia. And though this certainly would have been a possible allegorical reading of

188    /    Redaction the postwar versions, the redacted original suggests this reading explicitly through the play between the marks and the surrounding text. By eliding the very moment when the individual and fictive may be likened to the national and real, postwar versions avoid direct confrontation with wartime ills. In this way, the textuality of the postwar versions can be said to be thick with evidence of the postwar avoidance of war responsibility in certain right-wing and state-centered circles in Japan and thin with respect to the imperial moment in which the original was published. Similarly, the Kaizō versions are thick with markers of that imperial moment. The texts in aggregate raise the problem not of the loss of textuality over time but rather of critical perspective. If we take the postwar version as a prewar one, we are doing worse than forgetting the past: we are misremembering it at the very moment we think we have it. So the point is not to lament or lambast the anthologies of today, but to reevaluate their use value for historical understanding. This type of redaction of lengthy passages suggests the need for a further subcategory distinguishing passages that were undecodable for readers then but have since been recovered from those that remain undecodable even after the passing of the censorship regime. Many long redactions have been replaced with words based on personal, governmental, or other archival material attesting to what lay beneath the fuseji originally applied; but many more have not. Although both of these subsets of lengthy elisions represented by fuseji were undecodable for readers at the time, this did not mean readers would not assign meanings to them and fill in the gaps in both general and specific ways. It merely meant that readers would remain in doubt about whether or not their interpretations of the gaps were correct and, further, that they would never doubt that they referred to censorship. In these cases, their incorporation into the text was precisely drawing on this basic function of the marks.

The X-ing of Japanese Studies When thinking about the functioning of censorship over time, a theory that accounts for both of these variables—the irretrievable then and now— is necessary. One way to think of the problem is to state it as a double bind: redactions that cannot be filled in over time perpetuate the damage of a previous mode of censorship, allowing that previous mode to continue indefinitely; at the same time, redactions that are filled in silently repeat the violence of censorship in reverse by erasing or covering over the history of censorship. So the legacy of censorship is that discourse is  

 

Redactionary Literature    /    189 left in a conundrum. What could possibly move beyond the paradoxical situation? How can we deal with the problem ethically? Or to put it into more concrete terms, what should critical editing and translation do with fuseji? Since at least some instances of fuseji were written originally as fuseji (never having an un-redacted ur-text), and since these texts are, in terms of filling in, no different than those for which we no longer have the possibility of filling in (that is, those for which redaction follows conception), it seems only right that such fuseji be maintained as part of any reissued versions or translations of the texts. Similarly, my translations here attempt to illustrate a mode of maintaining the marks of deletion even when it is possible to fill them in. By including asterisks, strikingsout, and fillings-in, the examples cited in this book show some of the possibilities for a rough or unsmoothed textuality that, while not historically accurate to a moment in which readers only had fuseji, will nevertheless be sensitive both to the historicity of the redacted version and to that of the historically privileged reprints that have the benefit of reference to archival manuscripts and censorship reports. This chapter is written within the disciplinary milieu of area studies, or more specifically East Asian Studies and even more particularly Japanese Studies. As such, a conclusion to this sort of prolonged case study might tend to take either of two possible forms: the particular, spatial, and textual or the local, linear, and historical. In the spirit of negation and not mentioning, I would like to point out here that we need not mention these typical conclusions. We need not conceive of how they might play out and where they might lead. We need not recount how the materialist or textual version might have presented certain lessons for people reading fuseji in other venues in other media beyond the confined case study of Kaizō magazine. This possible conclusion would have cautioned us first and foremost to be sensitive to typeface when it appears, particularly during the boom from 1927 to 1936 in Japan. Second, it would have reiterated the necessity to be sensitive to the variety of usage, reminding us that proper name redaction continued through the switch of censorship regimes in 1945 and can still be seen today. It would draw attention to the fact that simple-word redaction was offensive throughout the period even to censors, who for a limited time turned a blind eye to the usage. It would emphasize the fact that longer swaths of textual deletion vanish by the late 1930s and are all but absent amid the paper shortages of the 1940s. Lastly, it would push upon its readers the notion that there is no singular narrative of fuseji, but only histories of various types of fuseji. And in the context of postwar debates about

190    /    Redaction how the Occupation changed Japanese discourse, it would stand to debunk the myth that prewar censorship was always marked while postwar censorship was entirely invisible and intangible. Of course, if we are not going to discuss this type of conclusion on textuality, then we should also not mention the more historical conclusion that would attempt to broaden the historical scope by giving some perspective on the long history and possible futures of punctuated deletion beyond the scope of the present study. This would probably begin with the history of typography and give a sort of national and contextual parahistory of fuseji: when Yamada Bimyō, Futabatei Shimei, and Tsubouchi Shōyō were among the first users of ellipses in Japanese letters in 1890s, they were doing so already within the historical context of other nonphonetic typographic characters like fuseji, which had been used since the 1870s and were already being used for parodic purposes in publications such as the humorous rag Marumaru chinbun (Circle Circle Paper), which began in 1877.71 This line of thought would draw attention to the occasional use of three-dot ellipses as fuseji to signify censorial deletion. It would assert that it should not be surprising that the elliptical markers of silence, which would come to be associated with the modern condition and specifically interior monologue, were in Japan always already related to the history of censorship and specifically the avoidance of external censorship known as self-censorship. This would not be to say that, for instance, censorship generated the modern interior psychology, but rather to argue that the relationship between ellipses and deletion marks is closer than might be expected. So, for instance, we would be compelled to compare the halting interior world of the tubercular patient depicted in Hirotsu Ryūryō’s novella Zangiku (Last chrysanthemum, 1889)—in which the closer to death the narrator comes, the more ellipses are scattered over the textual surface—with the censorship marked in the Siberian novels of Kuroshima Denji (in the late 1920s) that become more scarred with fuseji as they elaborate a character’s position in a stark world on the edge of empire. This conclusion would place on a continuum these two different usages that mark things left off the page during two different literary moments and would highlight the fact that both may share similar causes in the conditions of the modern nation-state and empire for the individual. In the context of the gap(p)ing resulting from the high point of censorship, the ellipses in novels such as Kaze tachinu and Sei kazoku by Hori Tatsuo in Kaizō or the ellipses in proletarian plays by Fujimori Seikichi might be read productively as potential internalizations of a system already saturated in silence. The death, loss, and pathos evident in Hori’s ellipses could  

 

Redactionary Literature    /    191 be seen as a shadow effect of a pathetic response to imperial censorship evident in fuseji. Although both of these lines of conclusion are interesting and appropriate to the facts, they would nevertheless encourage a variety of thinking that needs no encouragement. We can imagine these avenues ending with the suggestion, never overt, that this concomitance of meaning and material text or self and self-censorship in the typographic sign is somehow intrinsic to Japan or contingent on Japanese history. That is to say, it would result in a conclusion of the following rhetorical form: Although a close correspondence between print textuality and underlying meaning or between self and censorship may be a product of modernity, they certainly form differently according to their times and places. So the Japanese case is unique, but only in relation to a similar story elsewhere around the globe. Or the Japanese case is the same only insofar as the same dynamics are in place as elsewhere, though they manifest differently in the details. This method would have the great effect of seeming incontrovertible and authoritative, yet it would necessarily feed into the problematic set of assumptions that present a transhistorical set of Japanese aesthetics as always already somehow circulating around negative spaces and empty signifiers. The transhistorical would be reified by the incontrovertibly historicized. In Japanese linguistics, for instance, the timeworn popular topic that attempts to identify (and thereby re-essentializes) the Japaneseness of the language is the subject of ellipses or, rather, the ellipsis of the subject. Here we might extend the discussion to include foreign appraisals such as Jacques Derrida’s own fetishistic fascination with a Japanese book (in English) he found in the lobby bookstore of the Okura Hotel in Tokyo. To decipher the “yes” in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Derrida draws on the counterpoint image of a transhistorical negational aesthetics of Japan, and thus his anecdote fixates on the title Sixteen Ways to Avoid Saying “No” in Japanese.72 But Japanese Studies tends to do no better than Derrida in leaving open this possibility for the empty space at the center. So in Japanese art history we are told there are empty spaces; but they are not empty, the blanks on the scrolls are filled with meaning.73 Or in Japanese literature we are told that the ethereal aesthetics of Kawabata distill some sort of essence of rarefied taste. Empty spaces (kūhaku or ma) and pregnant pauses (Kabuki’s mie) are said to be essential components of a Japanese aesthetic, drawing on negative space that is traceable back to the Tale of Genji and mono no aware pathos. So here the reification of the “empty” space is what needs to be historicized. But to accomplish this, historicization would not be enough. In fact, historicization has tended not to resist the reification of the

192    /    Redaction empty space as a central motif, but to make Japaneseness all the more rarefied. In my efforts to be specific about fuseji, we might recognize a movement away from any transhistorical connections to a Japanese aesthetic, a move necessary for locating the moment of this particular kind of empty space (fuseji) to a specifiable time, even a year, month, or day. But if left there, the phenomenon seems all the more uniquely Japanese. Not just Japanese, but uniquely Japanese: now not only unique to an essentialized place associated with a culture, but also to a particular exoticized and essentialized time period (the transwar period), year (1927), or day (the day after a secret police meeting in 1936). In other words, what Japanese Studies scholarship tends to find acceptable is leaving open the possibility (an empty space?) for the reification of exoticism through the historically contingent because the very premise upon which Japanese Studies is based presumes that we must continue to see Japan as a different other forever in need of explication. This is the unsung, unspoken, pregnant pause of Japanese Studies: that, while seeming to go against the gross overstatement of cultural and ethnic stereotypes and of transhistorical essentialism with nuanced readings of history, cultural products, and linguistic effect within their particularized contexts, and while seeming to suspend and short-circuit the prejudging to which stereotypes often lead, Japanese Studies all too often ultimately leaves engagement with those claims of difference in the stereotypes out of its purview (or simply replaces transhistorical cultural difference with radically historicized contingent difference) and thus leaves open the space for their nasty, devilish return. And so while highlighting the connection between the seemingly noncensored Hori Tatsuo and Kawabata Yasunari and the overtly censored proletarian writers and while raising the fact that their halting style seems connected not so much to a transhistorical essential Japaneseness but to a historically contingent moment of censorship seems to shift significantly the grounds upon which the stereotypes are based, it does not go far enough. It leaves open the notion that the pregnant pause is still the significant trope in Japanese literature (modified to be an identifiable textual form in modernity). Even if it is present, even if it is connected to censorship as well as reified by a nostalgic postwar view toward censorship and toward a transhistorical unsaid and unspeakable, to end by promoting this view is simply unethical in the present circumstances, which no longer dictate the necessity of reifying an aesthetics of a particular national literary production. A third possible conclusion may be of more use to criticism that aspires

Redactionary Literature    /    193 to engage with something beyond the local Japanese historical context. What we see in stark relief in the story of the fading of fuseji as a practice is both the inability of a state bureaucracy to entirely eradicate a particular mode of text production and the inability of writers through their writing to resist state suppression entirely. This mutual powerlessness of textual agencies might also be rephrased as positive: it shows the power of writing to resist the attempts of authors and censors to radically alter its unpredictable course of reception. It reveals how textuality gradually evolves under the influence of writers, editors, publishers, readers, and censors without pegging any of these agents with absolute authority to control the text. It draws us close to the being of fuseji. This third possibility forms the ethical trajectory of the next two chapters.

8.  Beyond X From Myth to Ethics

The myth that imperial censorship in Japan was always marked and that deletions became unmarked or “silent” during the Occupation serves a range of contemporary ideological functions, all of which paint imperial and Occupation censorships with a broad brush. The resulting picture of two distinct discursive arenas bifurcated by the war’s end is too impressionistic, sacrificing clarity of detail to render overall moods. In this context, connecting the similarities between wartime and postwar censorship by elaborating a transwar phenomenology of redaction—describing the dynamic process of marking deletion as encountered by readers and audiences—goes a long way toward dismantling the myth and explaining more of the historical record of writing and reading under censorship in midtwentieth-century Japan. Fuseji have been requisite signs for fueling the myth, symbols of an explicit trace of censorship before 1945 in contradistinction to their supposed absence after 1945. The myth in turn has transformed fuseji into historical objects of fetishization both for those haunted by memories of wartime oppression and for those disgruntled with the postwar situation. The truth jettisoned in favor of either haunting memories or nostalgia is that the trace of censorship takes many explicit and implicit forms and, thus, cannot be entirely eradicated. In spite of the tendency to render absent particular markers of deletion, the stubborn presence of redaction stands as a testament to writerly and editorial tenacity in the face of censorship as well as to the censors’ occasional inability to recognize and willingness to allow the signs. The overemphasis on fuseji as the ultimate form of redaction, as opposed to metaphor, metonymy, euphemism, allegory, and other forms that substitute a palatable surface for an underlying taboo expres 

 

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Beyond X    /    195 sion, trivializes other forms of encoded, surreptitious writing that take place under censorship and overvalues the typographic mark. This chapter launches two parallel investigations to examine what is covered over by the myth and the value of the myth for contemporary society. To underscore the realities of redaction in contrast to the myth’s assumptions about silent deletion, the first section moves beyond the archaeologies and crass historicizations evident in the provisional timeline of chapter 6 to find the traces of silent deletion, which the myth tends to associate with the postwar, in prewar and wartime letters and, conversely, to locate other explicit markers of deletion akin to fuseji in postwar Japan. The second section moves outside of the typology of fuseji in chapter 7 to illuminate the difficulties of defining what counts as redaction, widening the purview of redaction studies to include visual and aural arts. This chapter then identifies a genealogy of the species of redaction in transwar Japan. These interventions ultimately enable the transcending of the local and historical examples of transwar Japan and work toward providing useful understandings about redaction more broadly.

Beyond X History X Nostalgia: Crossing Myth with Desire Postwar attitudes toward fuseji range from thankfulness for the new democratic situation in which the marks are no longer requisite to open nostalgia for the old imperial era’s necessitating redaction. Both views posit that a radical break between wartime and postwar regimes had a radical effect on signification: where one view praises the new regime’s openness, the other blames it for removing the conditions for fuseji. The cartoon in figure 8.1 presents a comment on fuseji that straddles the divide between the wartime and postwar discursive regimes. The aged leftist holds a postwar fill-in-the-blank quiz, a sign of the imported ideals of democratic education, which (it was hoped) would open the doors to success to all on the basis of facts and merit, not rhetoric or rank. As he stares at this kind of crossword puzzle, he is reminded of his old mode of reading into or behind fuseji. The joke of the comic centers on the belief that the comparison between imperial censorship and postwar education is ludicrous, that the two are connectable only in the mind of the dotty old man who once believed in a then-banned and now-abandoned ideology. In other words, the humor hinges on a clean division between wartime and postwar and the assumption that things are better now than they were then. This kind of pro-postwar view is balanced in postwar discourse by a

196    /    Redaction

Figure 8.1.  Sugiura Yukio’s “Omens of Censorship?” in Chūō kōron, October 1956. The text reads, “The Elder Marx-Boy says, ‘How unpleasant to remember bygone days!’ ” (Source: Sugiura Yukio, “Ken’etsu no zenchō,” Chūō kōron 71.11 [October 1956]: 224.)

nostalgia for fuseji. Recollecting his experiences as a young writer during the war in an essay titled “Fuseji” (1950), the novelist Mishima Yukio recalls his interactions with an editor for a school periodical where he had submitted a piece for publication. “Here’s what you do. Put fuseji over the terrible parts. If you use fuseji, we can print it. Right?” . . . That night I was so happy I couldn’t sleep. My poem would have fuseji in it! What an honor! What great luck! In those days, becoming an author whose works had tons of fuseji was everything to me. This hope, however, was not realized. The poem simply died. . . . When the war ended, the bizarre specialty ­product called fuseji disappeared in Japan, and I began to make a ­living by writing things. My dreams will end unrealized.1

The cultural cachet of fuseji reflected in Mishima’s comments is heightened by the editor’s ambiguity about whether he was recommending fuseji because portions of the text were actually offensive or because the poem needed to be spiced up. To have been a writer that suffered fuseji or a writer of fuseji would have been a source of pride for Mishima, so much so that the mark itself takes on value apart from the meanings it covers. Rather than a desire to express the unprintable word that lies beyond the mark, there is instead a happy sense of presenting taboo as taboo in the marks of redaction. But by treating fuseji less as a substitute for something else than as a sign with a value all its own, and in presuming simultaneously that redaction no longer occurs in the postwar discursive space, this nostalgia for fuseji is the groundwork for the argument and politics of blame that seek to absolve the imperial regime of censorship and to point a finger at those who supposedly opened the floodgates of discourse, the Occupation forces. In a short piece in the May 1958 issue of Gunzō, Noma Hiroshi was

Beyond X    /    197 more balanced in his appraisal of the marks. Here Noma both exhibits nostalgia and admits the untenable situation the marks placed writers in: Fuseji, of course, did not eliminate those passages entirely; rather, they occluded them with a number of characters of Xs or Os. Fuseji were written such that, with a bit of attention during reading, readers could use their imaginations to compensate for the passages after calculating the number of characters. Some people became skilled at reading fuseji, but it was very weird talent. Once during the war, I bought Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? at a used bookshop. To my happy surprise, the fuseji had been filled in. The previous owner clearly had access to the original text. In the case of two characters, the word was probably revolution [革命], and with three it was probably revolutionary [革命的], but with a passage of ten or more characters no one could restore the text. . . . In the end, we could not even publish fuseji. Noro Eitarō’s Nihon shihonshugi hattatshushi and Yamada Moritarō’s Nihon shihon­shugi bunseki and such were halted from publishing. . . . Shortly after I began writing my own novels, it became clear to me that no one could write under censorship. It completely kills literature.2

These postwar perspectives on fuseji have tended to encourage a fetishistic mode of reception that treats typographic markers of redaction exclusively, deeming them to be of a different order than other means of redaction in other times and places. This presumption leads to the conclusion that redaction ceases in the postwar period, which, in turn, enables the gaze back on the presurrender marks, whether in horror or nostalgia. But this forgetting of other means of redaction itself covers the fact that redaction lives on in other forms. We need to resist falling into the position of either being haunted by the past or longing for it; both positions reinforce the moment of surrender as the zero point for the history of signification under censorship. Rather, we need to learn how to find and read redaction beyond the periodization stipulated by the myth of censorship in Japan. Indeed, we might first do well to notice how the narratives of fear and desire are themselves a kind of redaction. If in the old man from the cartoon we have a reflection of the unspeakable of the postwar (namely, that it is not so different from the wartime), then in Mishima’s nostalgia we find covered over the fact that fuseji were not only about marking presence but also about absence and loss. So the fear of and nostalgia for fuseji are themselves entire discourses that act as markers of a vital redaction, covering over the possibility of finding contemporary postwar redactions. In one instance, doing so is laughable; in the other, it is presumed to be beyond possibility. Explicit traces, being no more than the visible ends of censorship, fail

198    /    Redaction to encompass the totality of its work. Thus, with self-censorship, as with an iceberg, the bulk hidden beneath the surface cannot be precisely measured solely by what is above. The iceberg metaphor suggests the interconnected nature of that which lies in plain sight and that which does not. But the metaphor also omits and covers over the fact that some tips are bigger and more noticeable than others, and that no indication is given of what lies beneath. There is, it is true, an underside to every iceberg, or an intangible consequence to every archived moment of censorship, but some archival traces floating on the surface are inconsequential for the barge of free speech to impact, while others will sink the ship. Since all we have upon which to base our judgment is what lies on the surface, any assessment regarding the degree of self-censorship in a particular historical instance—and thus any account of the full impact of censorship—will be a leap of faith. The nature of the trace (how explicit it is) is often assumed to represent and correspond directly to the political valences of the censorship it accompanies. Bureaucratic censorship by the police or the state that leaves an explicit trace is considered totalitarian. Corporate censorship that goes unpublicized is thought to be insidious. But this is not always the case. So rather than directly trying to measure the archival trace as a signifier of the unknowable, it is better to read the markers of deletion to understand the phenomenon of redaction as marking the space between the visible and the invisible.  

 

Toward an Archeology of X As long as the notion of an insidious, untraceable censorship under the Occupation obtains, there is an ethical imperative to read materials published during the Occupation period for precisely that trace of censorship which is said to be absent. The following intentional rereading of Occupation publications keeps an eye on censorship to counter the notion that the absence or presence of redaction can be so simply historicized. Though we may historicize the various faces of censorship, the being of redaction, the dynamics of deletion, and the processes of censorship in its presentation of absences are never not present. In short, reading redaction as continuing even when one form of it is supposedly long gone questions the wider usefulness of the timeline of fuseji presented in chapter 6, highlighting the fact that when the object of study is present absences, the object itself evades the possibility of such historicizations. The previous chapter documented literary redactions in Kaizō as explicit markers, not of an externally stipulated censorship per se, but of a negotiated process between external measures and ones so internal that

Beyond X    /    199 they remain only imaginable through these explicit traces. This section works from the other side, finding silence when cultural products were supposed to have been marked and looking for the marks of censorship when those marks were supposedly absent. The history of fuseji presented in the timeline of chapter 6 should be supplemented and disrupted in several ways. One way is to try to be more historically nuanced and sensitive to the actual particular historical uses of fuseji at every point on the timeline, as chapter 7 does with its typology. Another way that seems more compelling in light of the sheer complexity of those uses is to refocus our attention on examples of the unhistoricizable dynamics of redaction that are part of the process of writing under censorship in order to gain insight into the ultimate harm or value of redaction. Doing so helps to transcend the hair splitting necessary for distinguishing between the Xs and Os on a page and displays the continuing process of negation. The history of fuseji shows that whenever one marker of redaction falls by the wayside, it has immediately been substituted with an alternative form of redaction. A landmark case from Japanese discourse demonstrates both the impossibility of absenting the dynamics of redaction (despite a crackdown on a particular form) and the inaccuracy of the myth of a clean break between the pre- and postsurrender. Slated for publication in the March 1938 issue of the general interest magazine Chūō kōron, Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s reportage novel of the campaign in China, Living Soldiers (1938), was deemed unpublishable by the censors because of its generous use of fuseji. Here, as in other cases we have seen, the deletion marks themselves seem to have offended the censors. According to the memoir of one editor at Chūō kōron, Amenomiya Yōzō, the ban was the result of a “careless mistake.” Because the fuseji in the story submitted as an examination copy differed from the galley copy, the censors thought the editors were trying to deceive them and decided, therefore, to ban the story.3 But the fuseji may have been part of a deliberate authorial construction: in two articles on “fuseji writers” appearing in the Yomiuri Newspaper on September 19 and 21, 1937, Ishikawa suggested that writers using excessive fuseji may have found a way to express the inexpressible.4 But in any case, the content behind the fuseji was not in question (it was assumed to be objectionable); it was the discrepancy between the number of fuseji in the submitted galley and in the version that went to press—an affront to censorial authority—that conferred offense. Long strings of meaningless characters of redaction had meaning for the censors, and the novel was torn from every copy of that month’s issue on the censor’s orders.  

 

200    /    Redaction Yet the shadow of the censors’ inability to eradicate the marks of deletion is now visible in the formerly secret publishing police records. The report on the novel in the monthly Publishing Police Report is the single longest report on any book, magazine, or article—foreign or domestic, fiction or nonfiction—in the report’s two-decade history. The report itself, which quotes long passages from the novel, attests to the pernicious return of a trace of offense even as one particular trace (fuseji) is being eradicated.5 Another trace of the novel survived the ban and was available to the reading public at the time: the title itself. On the cover and in the table of contents of every copy of that month’s issue of Chūō kōron in circulation, the title Ikiteiru heitai remained behind. The title referred to both an absent story and the absenting of a story from the journal. Like the scars of long strings of fuseji, the title referred to a content that could only be conjectured. Significantly, the story’s greatest offense may lie within the title: Ikiteiru heitai (Living Soldiers), a phrase drawn in opposition, one must assume, to dead soldiers. Ishikawa’s reflections on the war suggest an anxiety about living soldiers who are sworn to death in battle. At one point the narrator reflects, “They were neither living nor dead. Their dead war friends were the same; there was no distinguishing between their (living) selves and the corpses.” 6 As soon as they march into battle, the living soldiers of the title, having sworn their lives, are as good as dead. And this crossing of the living with the dead marks the ultimate taboo of wartime literature. Ishikawa implies that they die an inglorious death from the horrors of war while still living. All of this is conveyed in the title. For Ishikawa’s work, the deletion of redaction failed, yielding only more redaction. At the moment of the deletion of deletion markers, something else appeared to play a similar role: the title archived the censoring of the text for the reading public. News reports of the ban, the paper remnants of pages torn out still clinging to the bindings of that month’s issue, and the title still emblazoned on the magazine’s cover would have piqued readerly curiosity, inviting readers to over-read the title. Baptized with a ban at the moment of its birth, the novel has been forever linked to this trace of censorship and the desire to over-read that banning begets. This desire in fact enhances the trace, magnifying it, placing it entirely beyond deletion. So, for instance, beyond the limited geography of Japan, the novel circulated in Chinese translation almost immediately.7 And beyond the limited confines of the war period, the novel appeared in postwar Japan as the canonical symbol of the suppressed antiwar sentiment removed from wartime discourse.  

 

Beyond X    /    201 But for Living Soldiers to have this particular symbolic life after the war, popular consciousness had to annihilate it from wartime discourse. Rather than wanting to understand Living Soldiers as partially legible during the war, postwar history continually tried to place the novel beyond the bounds of permissible discourse—making it neither speakable nor unspeakable—rather than simply placing it on the defining border, on the threshold occupied by redaction. The title was there, as were contemporary reports, however brief, of Ishikawa’s trial in the newspapers of the day. The fact is that an inkling of the text circulated during the war, despite the efforts of wartime censors to remove it from wartime discourse and the inclinations of postwar critics to remove it from the memory of wartime discourse. In short, imperial censors and postwar critics alike attempted to render it the unspoken and unspeakable of wartime Japan, though to some limited degree it had been spoken. This striking instance of the imperial censor’s inability to quash the dynamics of redaction is paralleled by the ineptitude in the attempts of the Occupation censors to eradicate entirely the process of marking censorship, despite explicit bans on mentioning GHQ censorship and the use of fuseji. That referencing censorship itself and drawing attention to the contradictions of the existence of censorship under free speech were stipulated as ineffable in Occupied Japan led to a number of circumlocutions for discussing the phenomenon. Though it is true that articles and books squarely on the subject of Occupation censorship published during the Occupation are scant, oblique commentary abounds. Odagiri Hideo’s famed postwar collection of stories previously banned under the imperial regime (discussed in chapter 2) is at once a celebration of the new era and a covert attack on the new censorship system, one attested to by the SCAP censor’s concern and report on the book.8 In his Hakkin sakuhinshū (Banned works anthology, 1948), Odagiri Hideo makes some generalizations about censorship in the imperial discursive space of Meiji that one cannot help but read as a reference to his own postwar moment under the quasi-colonial GHQ censors. For instance, he writes, “From the wounds of prosecution and bans on selling, authors and editors have been made to learn that everywhere authors appear, authorities may stand in their way.” 9 Insisting that authorities impede authors “everywhere” appears to be a not-so-subtle reference to Occupation censors. The critic Nakamura Mitsuo talked about contemporary Occupation censorship through his focus on not a previous moment of censorship but on a different mode of contemporary domestic censorship. In the May 9, 1951, issue of the influential Asahi Newspaper, Nakamura wrote an article  

 

202    /    Redaction on the recent obscenity trial in Tokyo over a translation of Lady Chat­ terley’s Lover. “The Specter of the ‘Censorship System’ ” argued that, “even in the present, which has completely changed the situation of yesteryear, we continue to be threatened by the ghost” of the prewar censorship system.10 The obscenity case centered on the publication of a more complete translation of the novel than was allowed in the prewar period. Because the trial took place outside the explicit authority of the Occupiers (obscenity not falling within the general stipulations of the Press Code) and was the sole responsibility of Japanese jurisprudence, Nakamura’s critique may seem to be aimed only at the previous imperial Japanese censors and the new juridical Japanese censors. And yet, despite his claim of “complete change,” Nakamura’s use of the metaphor of a ghost of censorship can be read as referring to both censorship carried out during the prewar era and censorship enforced by the Occupation authorities, who prohibited the explicit mention of their censorship. In the spirit of recognizing the undying character of censorships and the censored as well as the preoccupation of discourse with and by censorship, we can recognize indirect, subtle gestures toward the possibility of connecting Occupation censorship with prewar censorship. Nakamura’s essay on the ghostly remainders of a bygone censorship makes these connections more through allusive undertones than direct reference. By contrast, Nakano Shigeharu’s essay “Sokkuri sono mama” (Nothing changes) in the March 1946 edition of Kaizō suffered two lengthy deletions at the hands of the GHQ censors for direct reference to continuities across regime change. One passage dealing with freedom of the press is particularly worth noting: “There is something known as freedom of speech, but actually those of the capitalistic and military classes use it as their own personal possession. On the side of the honest hardworking people, there has yet to be free speech.” 11 On this passage, the censor’s report commented, “DELETED; implies that SCAP shows partiality in granting freedom to Japanese.” 12 This deletion leads, on the one hand, to a deep historical irony for this poet and essayist who had so often suffered redaction before 1945; it would seem only to prove the point of his essay, that nothing has changed. On the other hand, one could argue that, because of the silent mode of redaction here, everything has changed. In contrast to the wartime essays that gestured toward censorship through fuseji, this essay could not even mark what it suffered at the hands of the new regime. Yet again, we must question whether the postwar deletion is actually complete. In fact, the deletion does not entirely erase the gist of Nakano’s point about freedom of the press from the published version. Although his

Beyond X    /    203 explicit rant on freedom of speech is gone, and no typographic markers of redaction mark the spot, a trace of its ideas can be read in the penultimate paragraph of the published essay: “They [the Japanese ruling class] effectively use freedom of speech, press, and assembly. They use the so-called law to do this in pretty much every building, factory, school, and government office. It is all exactly as it was.” 13 And in a passage from the final paragraph, underlined in the GHQ censor’s copy though not marked for deletion and in fact present in the published edition, Nakano is even more stark: “All of the Japanese have been enslaved by these earthly gods. And that is what the statesmen of our country are really doing. They have not lost. They are locked in a decisive battle for the homeland with the Japanese people.” 14 In both the deleted passage and these two passages actually printed in the published version, the critique is launched less against the occupiers than against the Japanese bourgeois toadies of power. The context, of course, is that the occupiers hold that power, though they are not explicitly mentioned. So while the direct statement that freedom of speech exists only for the chosen few is deleted, Nakano’s larger point remains that in many ways the old regime continues even with respect to preaching the ideals of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In the realm of fiction, we have seen the process by which the general offense may survive the specific deletion, as in the example of Ooka Shō­hei’s Record of a Captive (1948) discussed in chapter 5, where much hesitation about the rewritten scene of confrontation between American and Japanese soldiers is still palpable in the printed version, if not quite as pronounced as in the earlier archival manuscript versions. Dazai Osamu’s Pandora no hako (Pandora’s box), written toward the end of the war and originally published in sixty-four parts from October 1945 to January 1947 in the newspaper Kahoku shinpō, is an even more pronounced case of marked deletion without destruction, deletion that preserves. In June 1947, the Kahoku company compiled the serialized portions and published them as a book. A second edition was published in June 1947 by Sōei books. Discrepancies among the several versions are numerous, but in terms of censorship, the shift between the Kahoku and the Sōei editions are most telling. The following passage was cited for deletion from the second edition. Here a tubercular patient, who is the protagonist of this odd epistolary novel depicting life at a sanatorium, engages in a quirky thought experiment:15 “In Japan today it is not an expression of freedom to think about fighting against yesterday’s militarists. That is just bandwagon thinking. So if there were real free thinkers right now, what is it that they should be shouting?”

204    /    Redaction “Hmm, what could it be? The thing that should be screamed.” He asked in a sort of Kappore comic dance of an absent-minded question. “You know, right?” he said, sitting like a street performer. “Long live the emperor! Banzai!” Up until yesterday, this shout was old. How­ever, today it is the newest free thought. The freedom of ten years ago and the freedom of today have different contents. That shout is mystification no more. It is the innate love of mankind. The true free thinkers today should die shouting it. I am told that America is the land of freedom. I am sure the Americans will recognize this Japanese cry of freedom for what it is. If I were not sick, I would stand in front of the Double Bridge [at the imperial palace] and shout, “Long live the emperor! Banzai!” 16

In this passage—cited by postwar scholars such as Donald Keene as evidence of a general awareness about the contradictions in the new freedoms of the day—Dazai reveals with his biting wit a sense that voluntarily screaming allegiance to nation and leader when one no longer is coerced to do so is perhaps the ultimate freedom. But because this attempt even to just describe the historical irony of a freedom whose ultimate expression is uttering the phrase that in the past had been compulsory was itself censored, it is now clear that the Occupation censors saw a threat in the phrase ”Long Live the Emperor, Banzai!” even when couched in such a self-consciously sarcastic passage. And yet, the entire passage was actually published in the first edition. Thus, the deleterious effect of GHQ censorship on literary history in this instance was negligible. For some readers, at a particular moment in the history of a defeated nation (readers of the second edition only), the openness described in the passage—the openness to describe the supposed new openness—was itself confined to a place on the border of the writable. It is deeply ironic that precisely at the point when Dazai is celebrating the new freedoms brought by the Occupation, they were being taken away. But there are two more levels to this irony. First, there is the fact that when the story was originally written during the war as Hibari no koe (The Voice of the Lark, 1944), it was held by the publishers from publication for fear of the imperial censors, since it came in the shadow of Dazai’s direct run-in with censors in 1941 for his story “Hanabi” (Fireworks), which was published and retroactively banned in the Kaizō Company’s Bungei (Arts) magazine. So it suffered a silent, internal, editorial (self-)censorship before 1945; during the period when the myth would have it that censorship was always marked, the story was absent from the public forum. Second, there is the history of the material itself; an air raid demolished the Koyama plant where the manuscript was held in December 1944, causing Dazai to rewrite  

 

 

 

Beyond X    /    205 the novel from the leftover scraps. This gave Dazai the occasion to insert the very topical passage that the Occupation authorities found offensive.17 Unlike Nakano’s argument that, despite the proclamation of freedom of speech, nothing changed, this passage by Dazai shows how the same phrase can change when uttered in different historical circumstances. The wartime rallying cry is a call of dissent after the war’s end. But the reception by the censors of Dazai’s articulation of the change reverberates with Nakano’s claim that nothing had changed. Although it was silently deleted from the second edition, this passage was widely circulated in the first edition and was discussed by critics who were unaware of its having been deleted at the hands of censors. Although some scholars such as Andō Hiroshi had long suspected the censor’s hand, proof of the GHQ’s objection did not surface until the examination copy was recovered from the Prange collection in 2009.18 For more than sixty years, only the author and publisher knew that the censor was to blame for this deletion. Because Dazai successfully repeated the passage’s theme in different guises in at least two other works from that time, it had seemed unlikely that censorship was at fault.19 Pandora’s Box reverses the myths of mid-twentieth-century Japanese censorship. The text was silently censored by the publisher in the period (presurrender) assumed to have been entirely marked with external and tangible censorship and only became readable by the public when it was actually externally censored during the period (postsurrender) in which censorship is supposed to have been so insidious that readers would never know something was missing. This case highlights the ways in which explicit and implicit, overt and insidious, external and self-censorship, and wartime and postwar are contiguous and even overlapping. Despite the censor’s best efforts to erase the traces of erasure, signs of censorship and otherwise censorable content continued to slip out into the public view: producers continually found ways to make reference to suppression, and at the same time the process of censorship left its own trace not necessarily intended by the producers of the material. Beyond any intentional or conscious employment of an aesthetics of redaction, what we find in these examples is the resiliency of redaction as such, despite its changing manifestations.

Toward A Genealogy of X Redaction as a result of censorship is difficult to pin down because it takes so many forms beyond the typographic. The censor’s crackdown on fuseji

206    /    Redaction was itself, as we have seen, only partly effective. Only the use of fuseji to replace large swaths of text was somewhat successfully eradicated. And even that was probably due to the growing scarcity of paper during the war as much as to the censors’ crackdown on textual references to censorship; under the severe paper constraints of the mid-1940s, publishers would have been far more selective about the usefulness of this form of redaction, whose only function was to point to the fact of deletion. Thus, we need to be highly critical of any historicization that does not account for usage and wider historical phenomena. More to the point, even the imperial censor placed fuseji alongside conveying meaning through strategic semantic characters that had no offensive meaning but were homophones of offensive words.20 Redactions could be neither entirely eradicated from discourse nor adequately quantified because they are hard to define and their usage was so varied. This is not because one can never completely ban things, as some might conclude from the claim that censorship always leaves a trace. And this is not because witty writers will always be able to fool the censors, as the crass liberal portrayal of the scene of censorship would have it. Certainly, we can imagine the possibility of a censorship that could successfully ban the use of particular typographical marks in particular ways, such as by the confiscation of the actual typefaces. Rather, by acknowledging the difficulty of completely erasing or counting marks of redaction, I am arguing that the object evading critical and censorial grasp evades it because it has always been too narrowly conceived. The confiscation of a particular character from all printers—the X, for example—would likely result in printers using other characters to stand in for it. And in the context of so many and varied instances of things that we might call fuseji-like or fuseji-related, it makes sense to apply provisionally fuseji to fuseji, to unname fuseji, to relabel fuseji X. That is to say, to not confuse those who would adhere to a strict definition of fuseji as solely typographic characters replacing characters deleted under imperial Japanese censorship, and to recognize that there is a difference between some means of redaction and others, we might do well to use X and X-ing to stand generally for the signs of redaction and the processes of signaling redaction. The positive utility of the variable X is that it both recognizes the benefits of connecting variant forms of redaction and acknowledges that those forms are not all the same. X is a sign for redaction that incorporates the sum of an unattainable, complete genealogy of methods for marking deletion. X-ing in some form seems always to continue even as particular instances of X are being eradicated. Is this not the nature of X-ing, to negate,  

 

Beyond X    /    207

to delete without deleting? Does this process of X-ing figure the limits of censorship? There are always other Xs with which to X when one X is no longer permissible. This function of X-ing is visible during the war and through the Occupation. EvenDocuments ifDocuments necessarily incomplete, a broader genealogy of literary modes of Part Explicit Part I: I: Explicit concealment would need to consider postwar examples of redaction along with actual prewarofXsother and Os to illuminate some of the problems of limit- Jō Ichirō, plane with a variety covering affectations induced censors, plane with a variety of other covering affectations induced byby censors, Jō Ichirō, h ing the scope of our discussion to the typographical alone. Jō Ichirō, one of the few critics to consider fuseji together with a variety of other covering rightly placed fuseji with secret codes,uses uses foreign languages,and and other mean rightly placed fuseji with secret codes, ofof foreign languages, other means affectations induced by censors, has rightly placed fuseji alongside secret codes, uses of foreign languages, and other means of avoiding the ire of avoiding giving offensethe and raising theofire censors. JōJō considers followi avoiding giving raising the ofof censors. considers thethe following censors. Jō offense considersand following useire the original English in a postwar translation of Henry Miller’s Sexus: 21

original English a postwar “translation” Henry Miller’s Sexus: thethe original English inin a postwar “translation” ofof Henry Miller’s Sexus: てて いい なな いい とと 彼彼 云云 女女 いい はは 、、 すす ここ しし もも 疲疲 れれ

getting down getting down from the table and from the table and solicitously squeezing my solicitously squeezing cock and then my balls my and cockthe androot thenofmy then myballs cock,and all then such the root my cock, all with tirmof(sic), discreet withdelicate such tirm (sic), discreet and manipulations and Idelicate that almost manipulations gave a squirt in thateye, I almost gave a squirt in the the eye,

27 27

たた つつ まま 背背 はは づづ ずず 丈丈 おお 。 。 いい 二二 がが れれ てて 人人 高高 がが 腹腹 でで いい 彼彼 ここ 合合 背背 かか 女女 うう わわ 中中 をを よよ しし せ 合 知 り せ 合 知 り てて にに わわ りり もも おお 立立 せせ たた どど いい っっ にに がが れれ てて てて 立立 るる くく 彼彼 みみ ちち のの らら 女女 、、 でで いい

While English word “cock” itself a displacement,a euphemism a euphemism signaling While thethe English word “cock” itself is is a displacement, signaling thet While the English word cock itself is a displacement, a euphemism signal-

ineffable, transcription the word and surroundings into transl ofof thethe ineffable, thethe ofof the word and itsits surroundings into thethe translat ing the effing oftranscription the ineffable, using the English word and its surroundings in the translation provides a further displacement.22 It is clear (especially,

provide a further displacement. It clear (especially, not only, read though not only, for readers ofItEnglish) that the passagethough isthough legiblenot despite provide a further displacement. is is clear (especially, only, forfor reader its guise of foreign inscrutability. How different is this example from

prewar inscriptions ofpassage X thatisencouraged readers toits filllinguistic in the gaps, often despite English) that the above is legible despite difference, despite English) that the above passage legible despite its linguistic difference, i providing hints for doing so? Like the prewar X, the covering words here

present taboo throughHow their covering, even forexample those readers ofprewar Japanese disguise foreignness. How different this example from prewar inscriptiono disguise ofof foreignness. different is is this from inscriptions

who cannot read idiomatic English. The words stand out as different. It was not necessary for readers decode the often entire providing semantic content of to how to r which encouraged readers in the gaps, hints which encouraged readers toto fillfill into the gaps, often providing hints asas to how to rea the foreign words, to disambiguate the agrammaticality represented by momentary aporiae; for they could read the lacunae qua lacunae as gaps?these Like prewar covering words here tell a taboo their cover gaps? Like thethe prewar X,X,thethe covering words here tell ofof a taboo inin their coverin unambiguously signifying taboo or offensiveness and move on.23 A complete genealogy of X would show us how suspension points of

those who cannot read idiomatic English. The The words stand out being diff forfor those who cannot read idiomatic English. words stand out asas being diffe

Like prewar readers who desired know what beneath given read Like prewar readers who desired toto know what laylay beneath given XsXs read thethe XsXs a

what behind them,postwar postwar readers could also attempt piece together what laylay behind them, readers could also attempt toto piece together thethe mem

208    /    Redaction ellipses are always part of literature even when they are expressly banned, as in the case of the US Occupation forces’ stipulation regarding the mention of censorship. So it might, for instance, emphasize an elliptic poem like Kaneko Mitsuharu’s “Santen” (Three points, 1948), from his collection Ga (Moths). A master of the art of poetic subterfuge who had in 1935 managed to publish the potentially seditious poem “Todai” (Lighthouse) in Chūō kōron, Kaneko often used symbolism to convey layers of meaning difficult for readers to parse. The question we need to ask regarding “Three Points” is whether the surface symbol of the ellipsis standing for the family unit is also readable at another, unspoken layer of symbolization. The poem opens: Father, Mother, and Child are three points. Around the circles formed by these three points the hearts of the three people play. No matter how divided the three points become They will reconnect above the circles. The three people, no matter how different, Their hearts meeting around the circles will flow together and understand each other. What stabilizes the precarious balance between father and mother Is the point of the child. Wandering in other countries Was a sadness resolved by the child.24

Here the interlocking circles of the Borromean knot which represent the family could be read as related to ellipses that bind the unwritten to the written, and therefore to censorship and to the pregnant pauses and gaps wrought by censorship on the literary text. Later in the poem, the signifiers of a bygone past evoked by words such as Singapore and the war signal the empire without discussing a specific context, so that in the end we are left with a desperate plea that the three points, read in this version as suspension points, be left alone, suspended and preserved somehow outside or beyond the reaches of history: Years! The ties of fated flesh. War! Don’t distort the pure wheel so rare and perfect. Don’t wreck it. Father and Mother and Child Are three points Around three revolutions their three hearts play together. Mother, let us two not lose track of our one point, the child. Or else the star will stray from its orbit And this earth will crumble.25

Beyond X    /    209 To read the “three points” of the poem as family, ellipses, and empire transfers the focus from editorial shifts in typeface usage to concomitant metaphorical shifts in writing practice to argue for the necessity of considering the presence of absence, the process of redaction, more broadly. In such a reading, the three subjects/citizens of the empire line up with the wartime practice of redaction; thus, the explicit caution against breaking up the three points of the family could, according to this reading, be taken as nostalgia for the unity of the wartime ellipses marking deletion, now seemingly absent from postwar discourse. This sort of reading supports the argument that postwar reprints of wartime literature and translations should be more textually sensitive, at least until our presentist mode of textual production (discussed in chapter 7) is matched by a presentist mode of textual reception where a new reprint is read as a new reprint and not as some transparent medium for the historical work. Perhaps this would be an over-reading, to read the poem as surreptitiously marking deletion, even possibly unbeknownst to itself or its author. But in the context of the examples that follow, it makes sense to open up the notion of redaction to such wider practices of elliptical production, even if in the end we still feel that the proof for this sort of reading may be lacking. That is to say, even if I am not entirely convinced about making this connection for this particular poem, there is still a contingent ethical reason for attempting to do so. In short, even to argue that this poem should not be made to relate to discussions of redaction, we needed to compare it with more typical instances of redaction. Too often, however, such a comparison goes unstated in discussions of fuseji. To test just how far we should take redaction, it is useful to consider some postwar adaptations of X-ing in visual culture, some of which took up the radical potential of marking redaction from earlier times, while others recognized a more conservative potential in the signs. But to see the close connections between the typographic mark of redaction and later postwar adaptations and appropriations, it is first necessary to return briefly to the imperial context. Radical uses of the typographic mark of redaction have been in play almost since its first appearance in Japan in the 1870s. But the burgeoning interest in the modern crisis of signification exemplified by the surrealist and Dadaist movements in Japan, which were concomitant with the fuseji boom, made the late 1920s and early 1930s ripe for radical play with the mark.26 Drawing on the possibility that readers could read the ubiquitous potential of redaction marks as referring simply to the process of redaction, the Dadaist poet Kusano Shinpei’s famed poem “Tōmin”

210    /    Redaction (Hiber­nation), published in his 1928 collection Dai hyaku kaikyū (The hundredth class), consisted of a single dot, a filled-in circle: “●.” The poem can mean just about anything if wrenched from its moment of production; but in the context of the history of the mark, it can mean only one thing. Hibernation or sleep is a kind of censorship, a necessary respite from waking action, which can be generative of dreams and rest, but also uncanny and dark like the eternal sleep of death. Not long after Kusano’s poem appeared, a young girl in Matsumoto took up the dot, which would later become her signature device. When the globally renowned artist Kusama Yayoi was a ten-year-old girl, she drew a portrait of her mother punctuated with dots. The polka dot was for Kusuma a chance to mark and thereby transform the world as it existed. When she hit the cutting-edge art world of New York in the 1960s, Kusama talked of her dots in terms of self-obliteration. Her spotted paintings and dotting performance art gained much press in the United States throughout the 1960s, more for their outlandish figurations of the nude body strewn with dots than for the radical antiracist and feminist intent behind it. Jennifer DeVere Brody’s work on Kusama comes close to the mark when she claims that “Kusama’s visual work—her drawings, painting, and impromptu danced demonstrations—are akin to writing and especially to graffiti with its visible scrawl, its public display, and its performance of anti-establishment, illicit, and even illegal (if legible) activity.” 27 Although Brody’s work does not connect the aesthetics of redaction already cultivated during the fuseji boom to Kusama’s turn to obliteration through dots, her argument is all the more justified if we connect the free-floating, whimsically applied polka dot to the scene of writing under repression. We can see now through the connection of the dots to fuseji how the positive uses of fuseji are a form of graffiti that to some may appear to sully and render impure signification, but to others are the only possible means for true expression. The irreverence of avant-garde filmmaking from the 1960s is closely intertwined with the urge to mark negation as part of artistic production, to cover with redaction to express, to inscribe blots on the already present to change it. In 1967, Kusama shot the film Self-Obliteration, in which she sticks dots on horses, paints them on naked bodies, and superimposes them over images of the New York Stock Exchange, the United Nations, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building. Her film was surely influenced by two shorts from the early 1960s, Tanikawa Shuntarō’s Batsu (X, 1960) and Iimura Takahiko’s Shikan ni tsuite (On Eye Rape, 1962).  

 

Beyond X    /    211 Well before the notion of tagging associated with graffiti since the 1970s, the renowned poet and filmic dabbler Tanikawa Shuntarō directed the short 16mm film Batsu, which features a man running all over the city and drawing an X in chalk on all sorts of city objects. The man’s X-mark is a sign of dissent;28 Tanikawa would later explain, “× is not an × [an algebraic sign for a variable]. Rather it is the ‘no’ of ‘yes or no’ (maru batsu no batsu de aru). × is the spirit of negation.” 29 His comment stands as a corrective to those who might think of the Xs in the film as only a variable linking all the objects thus marked (e.g., the street marked with an X is the same as the truck marked with an X). Instead, Tanikawa emphasizes the denial of the extant, objective world in the mark. But the fact that the issue requires a supplementary response by the artist illustrates the presence of both possibilities: all Xs are the same, and X negates. Like a fuseji, Tanikawa’s denial of the variable as a possible reading confirms the possibility of that response. Otherwise, the film’s titular X could only refer to itself and not all the other Xs and X-ings depicted in the film. For Iimura’s short film On Eye Rape, a hole punch was taken to nearly every frame of a piece of found footage that had been part of a sex education film. A huge circle of light variously covers (and nearly blinds the audience to) two zebras about to engage in coitus, a diagram of a plant with the sexual organs labeled, and a microscope’s view of an amoeba presumably about to divide. The result is a film with an empty center or, rather, a center full of light. Kusano’s Self-Obliteration inverts this image in its opening credits when the round black hole of the camera lens is filmed, creating a dot that points to the medium itself. By presenting the darkened blot, the shot directs our gaze to what is not enlightened by projection and our thoughts to what lies outside the screen in the dark. Within the film, Kusama’s dots are of many hues and shades, from light to dark. But in these opening moments of the film, the image of the lens as a black dot connotes a sense of the abyss of signification into which we are about to enter. The close connection between free-love movements and the taking up of a sign of redaction against the censor of obscenity is clear throughout, but here the sense pervades that ultimately production under censorship leads to a reflection on the possibilities of signification at all, even in the impossible, fictional, or imaginable absence of censorship. Here the blot is figured ultimately as the uncrossable bar between signifier and signified. Two feature-length avant-garde films take up the redaction mark in even more playful ways, less as a bar than as an insult. Matsumoto Toshio’s Bara

212    /    Redaction no sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969) features a scene in which three cross-dressing friends enter the men’s bathroom, hike up their dresses, and begin to relieve themselves in a urinal. The backs of the urinators are to the camera as their skirts are raised. Another man walks into the bathroom, regards the feminized bodies at the urinals, looks perplexed as if he must be in the wrong place, and leaves. The scene lasts ten seconds before an Eirin seal, a certification of a film’s registration with the Board of Film Ethics usually reserved for a corner of the screen as the credits role, fills the frame with an accompanying loud buzz. But what exactly does the seal cover, in the middle of the film in the center of the shot? Here the seal signifies not a deletion so much as the existence of those who would see the scene as deserving of a deletion or cover. As the confused man who just wants to urinate is repositioned in an awkward space by the presence of bodies he cannot easily categorize, the viewer is confronted by the Eirin symbol, which renders awkward any smoothly passive relationship to the narrative and thwarts our ability to enter the fiction without thinking about the moralists in our real world who would try to stop the fun. This scene’s wink at a censorial sensibility is echoed later in the film in a parodic fight scene between two transvestite hostesses who shout bubbled print words at each other in the manner of comic books. The final bubble that ends the exchange of insults is “o-XX-ko” (c**t). The content behind the Xs is entirely legible through the marks: “omanko” (you cunt!). Matsumoto’s over-the-top sardonic style contrasts with the rich decadence of Terayama Shūji’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, produced three years later. Also steeped in taboo sexual images, Emperor features a children’s army whose mark is X, a nihilistic or anarchic reference to both the fascist swastika and the enemy troops of the pop cultural superhero Moonlight Mask (Gekkō kamen), who similarly donned Xs on their uniforms. Whether the film is railing against the youth movement of the day or those who oppose the movement, it is clear that the sign points to the empty rhetoric behind political logos, reversing the signification of words like brotherhood, nation, liberty, and democracy that recent regimes had so emptied of meaning.30 We can read all of these terms behind Terayama’s X. In short, Terayama’s X unifies the two meanings presented by Tanikawa; X both as variable and as negation. The accretion of the mark of negation in avant-garde films from the 1960s testifies to a fascination with the mark that continued beyond Japan’s surrender and subsequent Occupation. These clear examples mark (not necessarily something absent, but instead) the meaninglessness of obscenity laws, phallocentric sexual morality, totalitarianism, fascism,

Beyond X    /    213 democracy, and existence. But while they give a good sense of the possibilities for fuseji outside of print media, they remain too connected to the typographic form. To open the confines of X even more, we need to consider analogous structures of deletion that do not necessarily have a typographic form.

The Sound of Inadvertent Redaction Nowhere is the issue of the palpability of deletion more salient than in the medium of popular film, with its narration via the cut and its organizing principle of continuity. The film Muhōmatsu no isshō (The life of lawless Matsu), released in 1943, is significant in film history not only as the work of three preeminent masters of film—the director Inagaki Hiroshi, the writer Itami Mansaku, and the megastar of silent film Bandō Tsumasaburo—but also as one of the small subset of films to have been censored by both the wartime Home Ministry censors and the Occupation censors. Whereas the Home Ministry censors neutered the potentially seditious love story between a rickshaw man and the wife of a soldier by deleting an intense confession scene at the film’s end, the Occupation censors emasculated the political and allegorical virility of the film by cutting scenes featuring celebrations of the victory in the Russo-Japanese War. To assume that declarations of love or war parades were completely erased from the audience’s reception of the film, however, is to forget several things: first, that Iwashita Shunsaku’s novel Tomishima Matsugorō den (The legend of Tomishima Matsugoro), upon which the film was based, had presented the love scene in its entirety only a few years earlier; second, that the screenwriter Itami Mansaku published the complete screenplay the year before the release of the film in the January 1942 issue of Eiga Hyōron (Film critique); and last, that the film in its various versions carries traces of censorship, albeit ones easily missed by viewers.31 In his book published after enactment of the new Film Law of 1938, the film censor Tashima Tarō argues that continuity was foremost in the film censor’s mind.32 The censor’s fear of destroying continuity can be seen as the fear of making censorship known. Under censorship, a sloppy cut would be like a public archive of censorship or fuseji after they had been deemed counterproductive: a blot draws attention to the fact of deletion. In the case of Muhōmatsu, the censor had an ally in the screenwriter. Itami spoke at length of the difficulties he had in producing a draft even before submitting it for censorship review.33 Noting that the essence of Muhōmatsu was a love story (ren’ai shōsetsu), and as such censorable under the still-new film law, he internalized some of the modes of the censor in trying to write  

 

214    /    Redaction a successful screenplay. In an ironic reversal of roles, the screenwriter tries to self-censor while the censor attempts to make the story flow. One would think, given this confluence of screenwriter and censor, that the presence of a marker of deletion would be an impossibility. And yet the one fault with the film that the film critic Makino Mamoru has identified as shared by all critical reviews at the time was its “unavoidable revisions.” 34 That is to say, critics universally recognized something wrong, discontinuous, strange, or missing about the ending of the film. The mark of deletion in the film is auditory, a discontinuity in the soundtrack at the moment of the cut. In the climactic scene, the film cuts away from Muhōmatsu beating a taiko drum to a complex montage, full of double exposures and music fading in and out. The suddenness of the incongruous sound cutting at this one moment in a film otherwise remarkable for its fluid use of sound technologies was the point that drew attention to an otherwise seamless narrative. This irksome jump signaled something wrong to contemporary critics. And indeed, it marks the place in the film where the love scene had been cut. The Occupation authorities, of course, were not concerned about the love story but about the rabble-rousing capacities of the wartime celebrations the film depicts. In the original version from 1943, the celebration is indicated by a banner declaring victory in the Russo-Japanese War and a montage of extended shots of newspaper clippings, which lend a story to the banner. The scene was cut at the behest of SCAP for its re-release in 1946. The director’s “complete” remake of the film, made in 1958, starring Mifune Toshirō reinserts many of the cuts stipulated by the wartime Home Ministry, but does not entirely replace the victory celebration deleted in the version from 1946, leaving a deletion marker of those scenes in the later version. In a brief cut, the banner declaring a celebration in honor of the victory in the Russo-Japanese War flies high, but there are no lengthy shots of newspaper clippings. This short shot of the banner might go unnoticed unless we had seen both earlier versions. Here the deletion stipulated by the GHQ censors is signaled and preserved by this momentary fragment, almost a non sequitur in the remake, just as the soundtrack preserved the major cut of the wartime version. If the differences lie in the content of what was cut by the different censors, the similarities may be found in the mode of cutting, which always leaves something behind, a trace of the missing between the enjambment of scenes, a mark of deletion. Opening X to comparison with these other forms of concealment necessarily raises the question to what extent X should be further opened to

Beyond X    /    215 account for other displacements of taboo words, images, and thoughts in other times and in other cultures. To what extent, for instance, are periphrasis, euphemism, and dysphemism examples of X-ing when they cover or exacerbate taboo words and concepts? And why stop there? Were there not alternative devices used that were beyond the reach of the censor? A complete phenomenology of X in Japan might include the use of euphemism in the Occupation, as well as the tradition of kinku (禁句, taboo words) of waka and haiku of the premodern era, and even the long-time use of the pseudonym as a means of evading authorial responsibility. In Japanese film, it would require navigating a course from kiss scenes, to underwear, black boxes, fogging (bokashi), and digital mosaics.35 One method would be to read the traces of censorship where fuseji do not exist, to find allegory in the utterly unallegorical. And while I think that moving the concept of redaction away from fuseji as far as possible to gain further insight is ultimately worthwhile, these closer connections with fuseji are a good start. To some extent, the previous two sections have worked like a redaction mark to undo the work of the previous two chapters, to rewrite them, to displace their lasting effect. Now the argument of this book can be translated into new terms: X is always at work during censorship. This is because by definition external bureaucratic censorship is that of which we have some tangible proof connected to suppression, some tangible, material X; and self-censorship is simply that for which we may not have proof, but can imagine from the extant Xs. So the story of withholding of Dazai’s Voice of the Lark for fear of censorship is but one example of an absenting, an X marking an X-ing. But what an X also represents is that there are always other Xs with which to X. And in this way, censorship is always belated to the text, even as it always precedes the text. This is why no censorship, however internalized, can ever be complete. Censorship is X. That is to say, censorship both is X and is more than X. Censorship is X insofar as it captures or freezes in time and space the dynamic process of presenting and absenting consonant with censorship. It is more than X insofar as X represents but does not entirely account for the loss to discourse that is the result of censoring. In many ways, this entire book has been a testing ground for the myth that censorship was always marked in presurrender Japan and always silent in postwar Japan. What this book has shown repeatedly is that while particular archives, indexes, essays, genres, and marks of censorship rise and fall, it is always the case that censorship is preserved and preserves, that it produces effects that in turn preserve it for history, and that typographic

216    /    Redaction redaction is but the most obvious and overt instance of this. Contrary to both conspiracy theorists who would find the hand of an outside force in everything and status quo reactionaries who would claim a historical end to censorship at the war’s end, censorship was marked through the war. The question then becomes, how was it marked? for whom? and when? And finally, is there something to be done about it?

9. Unnaming and the Language of Slaves

The political and ethical implications of redaction are complex. Redaction, as a function of signification, cannot be fully explained by or contained in modes of apprehension such as historicizations and typologies that reductively force events into categories and classifications that may not have held for specific historical readers. As a method of dissemination control that is relatively open to free interpretation, redaction may not fulfill the wildest dreams of authorities that ultimately seek to limit the possibilities of thought. Similarly, as a strategy of resistance that continually depends on the time and place of reception, redaction is hardly controllable or useful. Yet the multivalent ideological implications of redaction remain compelling for inquiry precisely because so many producers marked deletion from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s and because both imperial and Occupation censors recognized its threat. Rather than simply declaring the marks of redaction to be signs of either complicity or resistance, deferring the question of responsibility (at least until the end of this chapter) may allow for greater sensitivity to their range of meanings and functions, may allow us to avoid thinking about complicity and resistance in a zero-sum relation, and may therefore approach the situation of writing under censorship. If the determination of whether marks of redaction are complicit or resistant requires a “teleological discourse of consciousness” or the ability to assess unitary individual responsibility, then it fails to account for the myriad agencies involved in the production and consumption of redaction.1 Rather than simply declaring judgment on the efficacy of the marks, we do better to chart the ethical dilemma preserved in the mark and to recognize that the ambivalence in the mark is both its risk and promise. Artists are blocked by external constraints, but they can also be cre217

218    /    Redaction atively inspired by censorship to find inventive ways around them. But occasionally, these efforts to convey hidden meanings fail. In such cases, attempts at writing between the lines—whether through suggestive scenes, twisted language, or deletion marks—direct attention not to some specific unspoken words but to censorship itself. This happens both intentionally and inadvertently. Both condoning and condemning censorship, these uses lay the basis for understanding why redaction is of central importance for understanding censorship as a fundamentally archival endeavor. Returning once again to the typographic sign of deletion, this chapter proposes two complementary models for understanding the underlying political modalities behind the marks. This return to the typographic is not a displacement of either an archaeology or a genealogy of X, but rather a recognition that the relative simplicity of the typographic mark puts into high relief the dynamics of other forms in the species we have been calling redaction. The two models proffered here are like the two bisecting lines that form an X. These intercutting lines of thought support, enable, enhance, and lean against each other to create a new meaning in the cross. The first returns to typographic references to censorship in order to refocus the inquiry squarely on the point of a striking character as a model for identifying the stakes of censorship. If the pose of simply, almost innocently, redacting proper names was used for both subversive and conservative ends, then the ethics of redaction must always be at least ambivalent. This complexity is itself a function of the fact that redaction marks which point solely to censorship place the burden of understanding on readers. So the success or failure of the marks ultimately will rest not on the intentions of the X-ers, but on the desires of those who read the X. The second line of inquiry crosses the first on the material page, which is the horizon of understanding between the writer and the reader.2 It is at the moment of the X when the visible scar of censorship is both felt and read. The violence of laws regulating texts binds bodies to texts, rendering people accountable, and it encourages writers to disavow or sever texts from their selves, sealing texts in a world of ideas removed from the world of their bodies. In this context, X stitches together the wound between the body and the text for readers and writers. Like a suture that closes a wound to the body but leaves a scar, the X joins the gaping hole between textual realities and lived experience. This is why in 1929, at the height of the fuseji boom, Nakano Shigeharu wrote a powerful critique of typographic redaction, labeling it the “language of slaves,” presenting a community of writers and readers, intellectuals and the masses in opposition to and oppressed by the masters of state-sanctioned discourse. This phrase, as a  

 

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    219 metaphor for speaking about fuseji, places the worked-over text in relation to overworked bodies and lays the foundation for charting a network of relations between censors and the censored that starkly undoes set conceptions of them. Assessing claims about the supposed complicity or resistance of the marks militates against the notion that discursive action can be so categorized and leaves us with a rubric for pinpointing degrees of comprehension on the broad continuum of a politics of redaction.

The Utility of Unnaming Censorship There was once a publisher who prided himself on teasing the censor. Around this time fuseji were in fashion, the excessive use of fuseji made him delight in shocking the censor. “Putting her ○○ on ○○○, ○○○○○○○, the woman ○ed ‘ooh,  ah.’ ” We have a tendency to think that when this was written it was some­ how describing a risky scene, but when you would ask the same guy to fill in the fuseji, it was nothing more than, “Putting her bags on top of the cart, as she went up the steep slope, the woman groaned in exhaustion, ‘ooh, ah.’ ” 3

In 1932, at the height of the fuseji boom, Tachibana Takahiro recalled this humorous story in his memoirs of his time as a censor for the Home Ministry. The anecdote suggests several things about the nature of redaction: first, the desire and ability to fill in blanks is the expected norm; second, whether the readerly ability to make meaning from the blanks is consonant with the producers’ intent behind the gaps is always contentious; last, the ambivalence of marks, which can swing from the obscene to the quotidian in a moment, is in their very nature. The ambivalence of the marks is balanced by the identity of the reader; that is, the marks might allow different kinds of readings, but, because of this, they behave as Rorschach tests. How the reader fills in the gap is as telling about the reader as it is about the passage. So, with this passage, if the reader maintains prurient interests, the sexual meanings of the spaces will hold; if the reader is of pure (or naïve) heart, perhaps more innocent readings will come to mind. But the publisher’s innocent reading of the redaction in this scene is a sham, of course, which makes the entire passage funny. The humor is enabled by the fact that if the intent behind the marks was indeed as innocent as the publisher claims, then there would have been no need for redaction in the first place (in which case the passage is a form of censor-baiting, drawing the censor out of his hole and clubbing him with the “proof” of innocence).

220    /    Redaction Redaction places readers in at least two possible positions: first, seeing the redaction as a substitution for something not present; second, reading that substitution itself as something present on the page. Where the nested narrative of the publisher in the story denies the sexual reading and thereby confirms it, the framing narrative by the censor Tachibana places the emphasis on the marks themselves. Here the double readings behind the marks (sexual and innocent) are doubled again by the surface possibility of reading the marks either as markers of something else hidden from view (sexual or innocent) or as things that give a positive value on their own, the positive value of a negation that cannot be satisfactorily filled in. The importance of the reader in these readings is clear. In the overt gesturing of redaction to redaction alone in this surface reading, we can find even more powerfully clear statements being made about censorships. The clear statements are proclamations of deferral, neither wholly complicit with nor resistant to the censorship system from which they arise. Yamanoi Ryō’s poem “The Hated X,” first published in the June 1931 issue of Napf—one of the leading proletarian organs—treats X as X. The poem expresses a deep longing for a moment when the X mark of fuseji can be turned against the standing powers.  

 

Red

The organized X X X Army fights And the weapon they bear in their hands, The Type 38 Arisaka rifle, is branded with the hated X over the Chrysanthemum insignia! X X X X X X X X X X X X X  XXXXXXXX Oh, when will that day be! Soldiers of the working and farming people are comrades of the working and farming people. insignia

Sealing the hated XXXXXXXX in Xs, we will file it down with a rasp. Red

Under the waving X X X flag, We will resolutely fight! Oh, when will that day be!4

In the future imagined by this poem, Xs redact the golden chrysanthemum insignia of the imperial regime, rather than displacing words that are ideologically of leftist orientation, such as proletarian. The poem longs for a time when this symbol of the emperor and empire will be taboo and will need to be covered with Xs. (We need only recall the example of Dazai’s “Long Live the Emperor!” in chapter 8 to understand that the Occupation would later bring just such a moment to Japanese discourse.) Though the postwar reissues of Yamanoi’s poem filled in most of the Xs,

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    221 the poem in its ironically redacted original form gives a clearer sense of the power of redaction. The other Xs in the poem, those used simply as markers of X-ing as in the rhetoric of a “hated X,” marked a spot of potential resistance by pointing to the process of deletion itself. Nevertheless, when X is used as X alone and not as a stand-in for an absent word, it does not always mark resistance. Occasionally, even when X means X, it may in fact mark absolute capitulation to or complicity with censorship. That is, while it is true that fuseji can be used to speak truth to power and to communicate messages by circumventing censors, the marks, even when they point only to censorship, can also be supportive of the state and its goals. There is a deep ambivalence in Yamanoi’s poem that both qualifies the X as “hated” and yearns for a time when the despised sign can become transformed into a weapon of the people just as the Arisaka rifle he imagines it embossing had been a weapon of the state. Thus, we see that X is always divided against itself; there is, even more than the hated X and the desire to use the X in the poem, the hatred of the desire to use the X. The mode of fuseji use that redacts proper names, discussed in chapter 7, can broaden our picture of the ambivalence of X. Even the simple redaction of specific names, the unnaming of names, may seem to fluctuate between resistance and complicity. The following three examples illustrate the different ends to which this type of redaction can be put. First published in May 1936, toward the end of the fuseji boom, Sakai Tokuzō’s dialogue “Fuseji” illustrates at least two important components of what we might call an unname: first, the absurdity of filling in specific names behind an unname; second, the ways unnames themselves may have transformed resistance into divisive name games. X: Announce yourself, you masked fool! O: Announce myself, and then what? You do it! Once you announce yourself, perhaps I’ll do so as well. X: What? Oh, I see. I am “XX.” O: “XX”? There is no such name. But if that’s all you want, then I too will reveal myself. I am “OOO.” X: “OOO”? Really? Then I understand. You see, you and I are “XXOOO.” O: Why! Who’s that? That dude standing in the dark with the same mask! X: A weirdo, let’s get him!

222    /    Redaction O: Hey you! Who are you? Announce yourself! X: Take off your mask!

△: Uh, I’m sleepy. Me? I’m “△ △ .” It’s a mask. I can’t say more than that. If it is less, well, I can say that anytime.

X: Eh. Still, a mask. . . . Announce yourself! O: Announce yourself! Scum!

. . . : Announce? Scum? Ha ha ha ha, what about your own face? I am “ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ” Are you surprised? Ha ha ha ha.

X: Outrageous fool.

. . . : That just now is spot on!

O: Outrageous fool. 5

This absurdist excerpt lampoons the lengths to which proletarian writers were pushed under censorship to write at all. Here X is merely X, a name ascribing a deixic or relational identity. The content behind the fuseji simply does not matter, or matters only insofar as the dialogue’s humor presumes a desire to fill in the redaction marks. The humor depends on the repeated frustration of this desire. O’s statement that there is “no such name” as XX suggests that she or he understands the marks to be replacements or redactions and not positive content in and of itself, for if they had a specific positive value the marks would be perfectly acceptable names. The joke is on O, of course, because the dialogue shows how marks do have positive value. The ensuing conversation (and even the format of a dialogue that names the characters with fuseji) works against O’s statement, declaring at every moment that there are such names as XX and OOO. The marks begin by suggesting a mere binary difference in the early interaction between X and O and, as the conversation continues and as the characters △ and . . . are introduced, the marks suggest relationality. It is the fuseji themselves that give identity for the duration of the text. To argue about the content masked by the fuseji is to engage in a guessing game for “outrageous fools.” In this sense, both those who censor and those who uncensor or fill in blanks are fools. Only those who perceive meaning in the surface cover of things are able to avoid the slide into foolishness—and enjoy the joke. This is not to say that the potential for content behind the marks is superfluous: surely this critical mode of X-ing that evades having a specific underlying referent would not have been possible without other modes that did efface, obscure, or unname the names of (for instance) political  

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    223

Figure 9.1.  “OO Occupied Zone” in the September 1938 Edition of the Women’s Magazine Girls Club

parties and sexual organs. But in some cases, the exploration of the surface possibilities of dissent from within the dwindling realm of the publishable allowed by a censorship system takes precedence over the content of the dissent. Here, as in the case of “The Hated X,” we have an example of the X being read as X: the redaction mark not as lack but as the positive marker of lack. In comparison to the uses of the mark that readers were able to read between the lines in order to find hidden meanings, this dialogue might seem to suggest a greater degree of complicity or at least frustration with the necessity of the marks and with the possible misreading between the lines they might encourage. And yet prior to the crackdown on the mark itself, the hated and revered Xs of Yamanoi’s poem and the unnamings in Sakai’s dialogue exemplify last-ditch efforts at saying something, however mitigated and mediated by the mark itself, counter to the state. This was not always the case. Often the result of a direct military stipulation to avoid naming places or people, fuseji replacing proper names were also potentially the most complicit type of fuseji. The amusing series of letters between a soldier at the frontier of the empire in a not-so-mysterious place called the OO occupied zone and his family in the homeland, published in the September 1938 edition of the women’s magazine Shōjo kurabu (Girls club), opens up the possibilities of X to include entirely complicit efforts in support of aggressive war. (See figure 9.1.) The letters play

224    /    Redaction with bans on naming specific locations of military action not only in their title, “OO occupied zone” (○○占拠), but also in the glyphs of the letters themselves. All of the pictorial signs in the series of rebus-like letters have specific nameable content, whether that content is directly semantic, as in the case of the picture of an envelope meaning “letter” (手紙), or phonetic, as in the case of the picture of the hand. (We can translate the hand as the character 手 with the phonetic reading “te” [て] and, thus, the hand with sonant marks can be read as “de” [で], leaving only the phonetic content behind from the semantic chain set off by the picture. So, for instance, the phrase “ ‘yon’+hand picture+sonant marks” equals “yonde” [read].) By contrast, the ○○ defies a singular replacement with another word or sound. The ○○ occupation may be figured as an anyplace in the occupied zones, or it may be read as suggesting a range of words—Imperial (皇軍), central China (中支), northern China (北支), Yanan (延安), Canton (公東), Taiwan (台湾), and more—but not one of these specifically, individually, exclusive of the others. And though this difference between the pictorial signs and ○○ is clear, the series of letters brings the two techniques of signification together, reminding us that no matter how devoid of content the not-soblank spaces of ○○ seem to be, the reader will always specify a meaning, even if that specific meaning is as vague as “some unnameable occupied territory over there.” Even during the height of war, the letters provide a jocular reminder of how X was viewed as not wholly divorced from other signifying practices. But at the same time, the multiple possibilities for fuseji are also flattened by the simple and readable rebus in which the redaction marks are placed. What the letters ultimately convey is that reading through fuseji is not so bad; in fact, it can be fun, just like a rebus. Far from a radical critique, this usage of fuseji recognizes the necessity of fuseji and represents life under censorship and war as trying but ultimately enjoyable. An even more popular version of this understanding of fuseji is visible in a record produced in the same year as the rebus letters. Released in March 1938, Tokuyama Tamaki’s humorous song “○○ bushi” (The maru maru [OO] warrior) also arrives a bit late for a deep or biting critique of the censor, though, like the dialogue written by Sakai Tokuzō, it uses the marks to evoke laughter. The song opens:  

 

Maru Maru Warrior charge! I’m Private Marumaru Maru The popular guy of the Marumaru Unit Heading toward Marumaru Serving my Marumaru mission

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    225 All of the instances of maru or ○ in the song refer to the kind of deletion stipulated by military censorship. The song ends with a patriotic flare characteristic of the period and perhaps necessary for a ditty that at first seems to destabilize the authority of the military censors: Now my soldier’s helmet In the round [marui] moonlight shines And as a march sounds in the morning breeze I look up and even my national flag is the hinomaru.

The final stanza says it all, lining up the empty maru ○ in the various contexts (soldier, unit, occupied territory, unnameable mission, helmet, and the natural state of the moon) with the red, round, rising sun of the hinomaru (the rising sun national flag). To censor oneself and to submit oneself to be censored, to be the maru maru bushi (the OO soldier) is naturally to be patriotic. In the period after the crackdown on redaction marks had begun, the patriotism of the song poking innocuous fun at short redactions likely saved it from the censors. The playful uses of the redaction marks may well be fun, but they are far from resistant to state ideology. Even if these cases of X-play were rare exceptions, they would still tell us something about the more common instances of X, where writers do not seem to be consciously playing with extra meanings provided by the X, but merely using X as a stand-in for something else. These cases of play remind us that no matter how X was intended, it may always have been taken to imply X—not lack or absolute presence but a presenting. And it is from this positive possibility of X having a value in and of itself that the postwar nostalgia for fuseji was born. Although nostalgia masks itself as a longing for the kind of fuseji that seemed to successfully skirt the censors, such longing in fact represents the rise of a fetish for redaction qua redaction, the positive value of redaction.  

Frigid De-signs: Metonyms for Unnaming the Unnameable X dwells in a temporality of the immediate. The X that seems to delete and block at every moment, deferring meaning, actually presents a referent to the eyes of readers upon contact. The X (even when it also refers to a clear meaning beneath or behind it) floats before its readers’ eyes as if immediately connecting the historical event of censorship to the event of reading. It is both a horizon that connects censors, writers, and readers and a point de capiton that stitches together the signifier and the signified. Like the tactile arts in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s distinction between the

226    /    Redaction tactile arts and narrative, which stipulates that the tactile arts are experienced and the narrative arts intellectualized, the impact of the X is felt even before its meaning can be reasoned. Is this not the first or surface meaning of the redactionary X that can never be entirely purged? Like names, which seem to rigidly connect the intangible infinitudes of a person with a word from the moment they are conferred, X stands as a commemoration of its baptismal conferral at the instance of censorship. What X-play highlights is the need for a better understanding of the linguistic function of X-names or unnames. There are at least two separate categories of unnameables: first, there are big unnameables, with various deictic nonnames such as I am that I am, Yahweh, the Other, the Real, an outside always to come, and so on; second, there are other, more everyday unnameables, in the sense of that which can be, but ought not to be, named.6 On the other hand, these two ways of talking about the unnameable are never unrelated. The relationship of the name of God to blasphemy provides one common example in which maintaining a strict separation between the two modes becomes impossible. Though blasphemy has often been considered a phenomenon localizable as “Western” or “Judeo-Christian,” it is not far from the most essentialized part of Japanese culture. That is, blasphemy is ever so nearly the same as taboos regarding the emperor. So the unnameable in this sense might refer not to that which cannot be publicly named or declared (thoughts of murdering Hirohito and ending the Shōwa period, for instance), but to that which is able to be unnamed, able to be erased, effaced, or masked, however incompletely.7 Redaction is more concerned with this process of unnaming than with the nonnames of God or that which is beyond the possibilities of language to express. What X marks for us repeatedly is that there are no simple deletions that result solely in a lack, because the marker of the lack (like the word lack) has an inscribed materiality of its own. There is no lack without the name lack; lack never lacks lack. We can state this simply as a chiasmus: as there is no X without deletion, there is also no deletion without X. What is this unnaming? And (how) does it differ from naming? The unname X allows us to question not only notions of rigid designation first raised by a philosopher whom we shall provisionally call K, but also recent, presumably poststructural musings on K. K’s often cited N and N has become a locus for recent considerations of the signification of names of political entities and the singularity presented in a name, and as such it provides a flashpoint for thinking about the politics of unnaming.8 K

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    227 benefits from the common sense of received experience and succeeds in dismantling a variety of earlier notions of names labeling sets of descriptions or properties. Writing in the 1970s, K claimed that within the possible world in which N did not win the election to be President of the United States, N is still N. If you take away one property (that of winning the election), N continues to be N. N continues to signify as N in that other possible world. But a problem in K’s thinking arises at this point. Only if the person to which the N is attached in that world is the same as the person to which the N is attached in this world would it be true that N is not the sum of his properties. But if the person N is the person N no matter what properties they may possess, then we fall into the old trap of assuming a transcendental signified. Surely the signified itself has changed in the transfer between worlds; so the person N there who was never president is not the same as the person N who was here, even though the unname N is the same. It should be noted that this is radically different from saying that N is the sum of his properties; N is not equal to his properties, nor are all possible Ns equal. All Ns are more than the sums of their individual properties (N = N+n). Change a property and we have a radically different contingent N. But even an N with the same properties in an alternative possible world is not the same N, by virtue of its existence in another world. To contradict K, if N had not won the election, he could not have been the N we know. The very fact that we need deixis to understand the other possible worlds with other possible Ns suggests the backwardness of the transcendental signified. The fact that certain figures may lack the very properties for which they are most known may be true in the alternative postmodern possible world that has become ours (B was President despite having lost his election, O is the first African American President but does not descend from slaves and is therefore not in that sense African American); but in normal circumstances, K’s understanding of names as rigid signifiers that no matter what stick to their signifieds seems rather at odds with how names function. In short, K’s argument that a proper name always hits its mark regardless of the properties (descriptions) of the named because it “rigidly designates” the named from its baptism fails to move beyond reliance on a transcendental signified. Further, K’s line of thinking is made ludicrous by the consideration of how unnames function. Unnaming as a moment subsequent to baptism when a specific name is forbidden, removed, excised, or expurgated reveals the problem with K’s notion of “transworld identity.” 9 The unname, the X, never quite hits its mark because an unname always refers to more than the

228    /    Redaction named: it also refers back to the name it unnames. Consider, for example, the allegorical film Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (The spiriting away of Sen and Chihiro, 2002), in which Chihiro crosses over into another world and is unnamed with the appellation Sen. Sen, the slave in a bathhouse, is most certainly not the same person as Chihiro, the innocent and loving young daughter of piggish parents; indeed, the entire film hinges on the fact that, given enough time, all ties between Sen and Chihiro will dissolve and the unnaming will become complete in its displacement of the unrecoverable name. Yet the unnaming stitches the two worlds together as it helps to demarcate them. For while of course they are not the same, the unname Sen (千; literally, a thousand) shares a connection with the name Chihiro (千尋; bottomless; literally, a thousand fathoms) through a common kanji character. In a similar way, my unnaming of Saul Kripke as K temporarily and thinly masked the identity of the person and the discourse identified as Kripke’s. In doing so, the unname has shown us that (like the name) it never refers only to an individual person alone. Kripke and K both refer at once to the person and the discourse on and by Kripke. Kripke is not merely Kripke the person in our possible world. There is an unspoken necessity within Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, the necessity of deixis to his formulation. The fact that Kripke must specify which Nixon with relational pointers such as “this man” with the name of “Nixon” that did or did not win the election suggests that the two Nixons are not the same.10 The X-ing or unnaming of Kripke (or, more precisely, the K-ing of Kripke) highlights what is already in effect in the name itself. Like the name, the K must refer not only to Kripke the philosopher but also to Kripke, the name of the work of the philosopher. And the unnaming as K supplements both of these Kripkes with something more, the taint of a critique. In this way, K (the unname) is not simply a new rigid designator of a person called Kripke, but variably designates the man, the identity, the work, the naming of the man, and the event of unnaming the man. But the unnaming that X perpetrates is at an even further remove from signification than these unnamings (Sen for Chihiro and K for Kripke), which, happening outside the context of censorship, are really renamings. Censorship perpetrates an identity theft in the X-ing of names, which simultaneously cancels a specific naming and renames it as unnameable. A lengthy study of both the yomibito shirazu (composer unknown) poems of premodern Japan and modern pennames would be necessary to determine, for instance, which unnamings were for lack of knowledge, which for the purposes of avoiding blame and responsibility, which for fun, which for

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    229 protection of self and family from public scorn and ridicule, and which for escape from police, arrest, torture, and fines. But even if all of this could be settled in a hard and fast way, reading these unnames along with fuseji would be a possibility already alluded to in the playful usages of unnaming fuseji. So X-ing might be called a de-signification: less a baptismal moment than a funeral rite for the signified, where X is a posthumous name like the funereal name conferred on the spirit in Japanese Buddhism. Like the okurina (literally, the conferred name), X is conferred at a funereal moment. X is always saturated in the belatedness of that never-final baptism. As in the case of Kripke’s originary baptism of rigid designation, the death name is always at least secondary to the event or it points to the fact that names are in process, always chasing their referent, never quite catching up and that there is no single event of naming as such, just a chain of events, a renewing process, and a cycle of appellation and interpellation; as with the unname, the okurina is secondary to another name, not to an already-existent transcendental subject. Unlike Kripke’s conception of rigid designation, the death name displaces another name, the living name; so the okurina is another name unnaming, not a person, but another name and, with it, an entire life. Like the X, the death name is an unname that intends to bestow virtue and ease at the beginning of an afterlife. As the death name bestows virtue not rigidly on the human body but on the slippery and varied (unvirtuous?) person in memoriam, the X does not refer rigidly to a single specific meaning but to a range of possibilities even as it archives and preserves on the page the trace of censorship. Like proper names, unnames (or improper names) do not have linguistic referents that are specifiable by way of a description or set of descriptions. What defines the unname is both what it cannot refer to (what it is fixed to in the moment of last rites, which is never an originary baptism) and itself. In this sense, redaction is also a commemoration not only of absent words but also of censorship, something that stands not as a reminder of the death of signification, but as a reminder of the already curtailed realm of the speakable even before a tangible office of censorship has begun its work. X is not something that needs to be repealed, smoothed over, or erased, not something that violently wrests meaningfulness from a text, but a scar that recalls the survival of the victim. The X and the death name or unname can refer, but never rigidly so; if designation is rigid, it ceases to be an X, which is both a variable and a negation. (Un-)names slip and can (and often do) miss their target. Never­ theless, there is one thing named rigidly in the unnaming that X performs:

230    /    Redaction the process of unnaming, of X-ing. This is what all variant Xs share in common. This sharing does not mean that all Xs give themselves up to a total X, but rather that they exist as a “being in common” in which singularities stand in relation, in which self and other are each one of many.11 This is the community of all Xs in different contexts—dare I say, in other possible worlds. This is the explicit concealment of explicitness or specificity that the X effects, though X specifies that the “missing” words should be treated as explicit. It is for this reason that the X is an improper name or an unname. In other words, X is not a rephrasing in other words. X is untranslatable, irreplaceable. And yet, historically X has been and is continually translated, substituted, rephrased, erased, and replaced by other words. As the death name cannot be said to mean or equal the living name, however, there is no description, no other name, and no entity that can fill in or translate the X, not even the canceled word itself. The X represents stricken words, words that have gone on strike, and words that work for new makers of meaning. These never-faceless strikers in lines of type represent the limits of censorial purview, even when not only the stricken but also the strikers themselves (the Xs) are disappeared, since their movement has already acted in the registered, material, legible, public space of discourse. The X was there (where else but on the page?) to be killed before it was killed. The historical presence of X represents the hope of resistance even when a specific X, an “X,” can no longer be written, not because it is seen as signifying something else offensive, but because an “X” has become offensive in and of itself. The strikes remind us that there is no meaning without fissure and fusion, without a tear from meaning and a stitching together of meanings. So, the “replacement” or “restoration” of words displaced or renamed by an X cannot obviate or resolve the lack, but rather will continue the concealment begun by the X and continued by the X-ing of the X. To simply replace X with a word, as has been done repeatedly at some point after a moment of X-ing (e.g., in postwar collections of Japanese literature), is to affirm a referent while denying the historical excision of that referent. This is another way of saying that X-ing creates a surplus of referents or meanings, a supplement that is only multiplied in the X-ing and un-X-ing of the X. If Derrida’s not-so-negative theology of deconstruction names an ethics, it is an ethics of a de-negation that begins with neither affirmations nor negations. This controversial beginning is never the end, leaving X forever undeterminable and action impossible. But the X, both in its legible form inscribed on a page and in its always-slippery signification, provides  

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    231 the very conditions for meaning and ethical response. The X dwells as the interminable solution to the very lack it suggests. The X, in its moment of inscription, fluctuates between referring to some chain of signification outside of the text and always referring to itself, the very interior of the text, X as X. So X may mark the spot where complicity, resistance, and responsibility coalesce and may name the only ethical response to the abyss between forgetting and remembering that which has been censored.

Nakano Shigeharu and the Language of Slaves We do not wish to speak hereafter in the language of slaves. At the instance when we are to speak, we cannot express ourselves even using the language of slaves.12

In his essay “The Selling of Writing and Other Matters” (1929), the proletarian writer Nakano Shigeharu referred to the contemporary overuse of circumlocutory writing (metaphor, innuendo, euphemism, and fuseji) with the phrase “the language of slaves” (dorei no kotoba). The eminent editor of the general-interest magazine Chūō kōron Hatanaka Shigeo used the same phrase to discuss fuseji in a postwar memoir and history of wartime publishing suppression published in 1965. The fact that the same phrase, however differently employed, carried weight across the war with two figures so intimately connected with the transwar publishing world makes it a useful point for mapping both the changing and the immutable ideological valences evoked by marks of redaction. Before examining Nakano’s long and complex interactions with redaction, it is worth thinking about Hatanaka’s more simple appropriation of the phrase decades later. Long after the heyday of fuseji, Hatanaka Shigeo’s recollection posited editors as bearing the sole responsibility for fuseji. While this may have been largely the case for nonfiction articles in major journals such as Chūō kōron, where Hatanaka was an editor, many of the examples cited in this book provide historical evidence to the contrary. Works that employ the meaning of X as an X, for instance, would simply make no sense were it not for the presence of covering characters, fuseji. In “Forbidden Language,” a section of his history of Shōwa period publishing suppression, Hatanaka reads fuseji as the language of slaves, because in his view, like a slave language necessary to conceal dissent from slave-owning oppressors, they covered something removed from vision; they were hints that would allow the “real intent hidden behind the page” to show through to astute readers.13 Hatanaka questions the efficacy of fuseji as a mode of dissent, suggesting that the language of slaves was entirely complicit with the war

232    /    Redaction effort of the imperial state. But he does not dwell for long on this possibility, backing out with the statement that “unfortunately, I cannot say anything right now in response to such questions.” 14 This dodge itself performs like fuseji, mentioning without mentioning the unmentionable: the difficulty for postwar leftists of examining their own wartime complicity. But the mention of complicity in relation to X-ing and the formation of the phrase “the language of slaves” to describe fuseji not only work against Hatanaka’s statement that only editors were responsible for X-ing, but also cover the possibility that there were moments when such a language of slaves did not merely cover or displace words but could be read in and of itself (as markers of taboo, illegal, unwritable thoughts and words). Even if writers and editors were complicit with the war efforts and with censorship, then responsibility for fuseji is divided, lying also with the various powers with which they were complicit. While it is important to recognize the agency of those who actually crossed out words on specific pages, it is also necessary to realize the extent to which this act was and was not their own. The X-ers, whether writers, editors, publishers, or censors, were all caught in a dynamic of text production that required the absenting of particular presences and permitted the presenting of particular absences. If the binary of absences and presences is blurred by the historical uses of the markers themselves and by this conceptual opening of fuseji referenced in the X, then the fundamental issue remains: When redaction is used, are writers saying something or not saying something? Are they communicating or barred from communication? Or under censorship do these become the same thing? Do they communicate the bar? “The language of slaves” was but a fleeting metaphor for Nakano Shige­ haru in 1929, capturing like a snapshot his shifting frustration with redaction learned over several encounters with censors. But for Hatanaka, the term had solidified into a simple critique of wartime circumstances of print production. Nakano’s use of the phrase is ambivalent because, caught in the cogwheels of history under a harsh and nameable censor, he understood writing in such a mode to be both reprehensible and ineluctable; but Hatanaka, with the benefit of postwar safety and hindsight, could be more broadly damning of the practice. But both uses have clearly negative overtones. And the insight provided by the phrase has wider applicability than to the local, historical context of censorship under the imperial government in Japan. To understand what Nakano meant by the phrase and its significance for reading redaction, two things need to be considered: first, Nakano’s continuing relationship with redaction; second, the long history and theo-

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    233 retical implications of the phrase “the language of slaves.” Nakano viewed fuseji as both a frivolous flourish and a necessary evil. But the positive value conveyed by his own usage of fuseji runs counter to his largely negative conclusions about the marks. So, how should such a language be taken? What we learn from Nakano’s use of the phrase can help to launch a critique not only of writing in the face of “persecution,” as Leo Strauss’s famed opus would have it, but also of dissent and responsibility in the face of a neoliberal power distribution that continues to draw on Strauss’s work for justification. One way to think about the numerous examples of redaction and censorship archived in this book, the multiple possibilities of agency behind the usage, and the various desires and politics ascribed to the uses is to push Nakano’s and Hatanaka’s metaphor further. By the end of the fuseji boom, the censors were not alone in beginning to regard fuseji as counterproductive; they were joined by a literati that felt increasingly dissatisfied with the compromised space for discourse, which continued to be policed as much by censors as by the writers’ and editors’ own anticipation of the censors’ actions. The covering characters were a symbol of this problem and the target of growing ambivalence. Among those who even before the end of the boom were not openly celebrating the newly touted methods for skirting the censors, Nakano articulated a conundrum: fuseji were both detrimental to communication and the only means through which taboo topics and truths could be intimated. In the aftermath of the publication of his heavily redacted poem “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” (Shinagawa Station in the rain), which first appeared in the February 1929 issue of Kaizō, Nakano reacted to critical scorn by publishing his thoughts on the dilemma of fuseji in various forms throughout the ensuing decade. After enduring yet another deletion in June of that year, he published an essay in September 1929 responding to comments on his excessive use of fuseji and elucidating the challenges faced by the writer under censorship. Then, six years later, again in Kaizō, he returned to the problem of fuseji in the form of a slightly veiled novel fittingly titled The Novelist Who Couldn’t Write a Novel. These works present a microcosm of the issues with fuseji. Through them, Nakano’s relation to redaction clearly reveals both the historical constraints on writing in the context of censorship and the continued legacy of those problems for the survival of censored texts even today. Nakano’s awareness of the problem of fuseji grounds in concrete practice an abstract theoretical understanding of fuseji, of how they were taken, and of how they should be taken. “Shinagawa Station” lies at the heart of many historical discussions on the futility of redaction marks. In the wake of the poem’s publication,

234    /    Redaction for instance, and in the foremost literary journal of the time, the critic Ōya Sōichi bemoaned the fact that “with poetry like Nakano’s that comes out in Kaizō, when you remove the fuseji, there’s hardly anything left.” 15 “Shinagawa Station” decries the forced return of Nakano’s Korean comrades, then residing in Japan, to the colony. The February 1929 issue of Kaizō that carried the poem marked several excisions that in retrospect can be seen to have dealt primarily with the emperor. Only four months after the publication of “Shinagawa Station,” Nakano had another run-in with censorship. In the collection Proletarian Arts Hand­book, Nakano published his essay “Politics and Art.” The essay is divided into three sections: (1) “The Unauthorized Artist”; (2) “The Cur­ rent State of Japanese Politics and the Position of the Proletariat”; (3) “Art as a Function of the Party.” 16 In a passage entirely deleted from the first section without redaction marks and left as a blank space on the page after censorial review, Nakano begins to elaborate a connection between cultural production and class consciousness during moments of conflict, crisis, and revolution. This passage does not exist in later reprints of the essay (neither in the numerous collections of proletarian literature nor in the Collected Works of Nakano Shigeharu), and there are no manuscripts known to contain it. Today the passage exists only in the single extant Home Ministry examination copy held in the Starr East Asian Library of Columbia University. At the time of publication, readers could have had only scant sense that something had been deleted at all from the blank space on the page. And the blank type may have seemed as easily connected to odd typesetting as to censorship, though the proletarian venue made the latter a more likely interpretation.17 The examination copy held at Columbia University allows us to consider the deleted text. Citing Karl Marx’s notion that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, as an “unauthorized writer,” was the creator of a new kind of art, Nakano argues that a new revolutionary class would require a new art form and, therefore, a new kind of artist, one not trained or educated by the bourgeois class, but rather one who had experienced the oppression of that class firsthand.18 The problem, according to Nakano, was that up to that point no such unauthorized artist of the revolutionary class had appeared. The deleted passage occurs at the point when Nakano connects revolutionary crises to finding just such an artist. Power shifts from one class to another are wrought with crises and incidents. Therefore “it is the great significance of all crises that they made manifest what was hidden; they cast aside all that is relative, superficial, and trivial; they sweep away the political litter and reveal

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    235 the real mainspring of the class struggle.” For in XX, the people upon whom everything rests rise up from some broken house, attic, nest, or hole and declare themselves to be citizens; and due to this, new voices spring up, artistically speaking out as representatives of that class.19

The fact that Nakano does not name Lenin as the author of the quotation within this passage suggests an internalization of censorship even before the submission of the volume for examination. Knowing that the name could attract the censor’s critical eye, Nakano may have tried to soften the impact of the quotation by leaving the source unnamed. And while this is in keeping with modes of citation at the time, it is significant to note that the far less politicized Lessing had been directly named only sentences before. In addition to this omission of Lenin’s name, the deleted passage also presents an instance of redaction. The use of the simple replacement XX for revolution (革命) in a passage that would be excised and replaced by a white space on the page might have been the trigger for Nakano’s rethinking of the uses for fuseji. The two marks replacing the word revolution may have attracted the eyes of the censors and provoked the larger deletion of the entire passage. If this is the case, here is yet another instance when the taboo marks multiply their offense in their outward ripple effects both spatially on the page and across history in the fact that no other extant copy contains this text. The examination copy leaves us with a text in flux, a text that presents us with an example of the process of censorship readable in the implicit lack of reference to Lenin, in the explicit XX, and finally in the deletion of the entire passage. Nakano followed his experiences of redaction by fuseji and deletion without fuseji with an essay published a few months later on the difficulties of making a living by writing under censorship. Published in the literary journal Shinchō when fuseji were de rigeur, “The Selling of Writing and Other Matters” opens with the rhetoric of slavery: “There are many issues upon which the have-nots can speak all the more truthfully than the haves. Slaveholders have never once even thought about liberty, and receivers of tribute never even once complained of the headaches over the essence of taxes.” 20 This claim, according to Nakano, gives him, as a poet who presumably lacks free speech and suffers unjust taxation, the authority to write on the issues of free speech and the tribulations of a writer who tries to make a living by his work during a time of censorship. To elucidate the traumatic and dismal position of writers, Nakano variously employs three metaphors for writing—Jintan, dancers, and Laconians. Jintan is the name of an innocuous pill that was ubiquitously advertised during the 1920s as a cure-all (and is now sold in Japan as a breath fresh 

236    /    Redaction ener).21 Nakano first equates writing that can be sold to Jintan, which is, he notes, “neither medicine nor poison.” With no lack of irony he writes, “even for me who places absolute faith in the effectiveness of Jintan, however, it is difficult to actually write Jintan-like prose.” 22 Here the polyvalent utility of Jintan is evident; although Nakano writes that he is a firm believer in Jintan’s effectiveness, he never overtly states whether he believes it to be effective as a medical cure or as a psychosomatic palliative. However, in the context of his analogy between the wildly successful pharmaceutical and sanitized prose, it is clear that Nakano believes Jintan to be effective as a placebo and as a functional remedy for bad breath, rather than as a remedy for actual maladies such as stomach ailments. In short, market pressures combined with censorship to produce minty-fresh but still diseased writing. According to the essay, the market requires writers to seek new truths, like scientists who do not re-prove truths that were already proven thousands of years ago; but in writing, more often this market drive for the new leads to the avoidance of truth altogether. The truth is a problem for sales not only because something true may have been said before but also because of censorship.23 Nakano writes, “In writing, our difficulties stem not from speaking too much, but from the fact of having to cut off discussion of that which should be spoken.” 24 Both the pull of the market and the pressures of censorship curtail the means of circulation for the writer, requiring him to couch old or offensive truths in fresh new words in order to be published at all.25 This position of having to write only through circumlocution leads Nakano to his second metaphor for explaining the predicament: “Prostitutes may ask for love. But what do those dancers who are not prostitutes seek? It is sad, but the dancer who lacks the power to become a prostitute, she too probably seeks love. So just like the dancer . . . I seek truth in my Jintan writing.” 26 The claim here is that the job of a dance-hall girl is contradictory because it is supposed to be about one thing only (the dance) but actually skirts around the real issue (love). Similarly, the job of a writer is to make a commodity for sale and distribution, but the real issue, which is danced around, is the truth. The market and censorship necessitate the delicate dance. Finally, Nakano alludes to the fact that writing has necessarily become laconic. So when I transfer from writing to be bought to writing to be read, what happens? I am fine with just crawling antlike toward the truth. We could phrase it like the Laconians. It is naked love. It is ponds. It is

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    237 rivers. Flowers, Grass, Clouds, Waves. The delight of all of nature. This joy is like the joy of revenge. But I must quit this Jintan-like writing. The more people want to talk about what they love, the more they end up silent on the issue.27

Far from laconic, this dense passage proposes that in shifting the mindset from the market to the message Nakano becomes all the more circumlocutory. And surely the style of this passage accrues from the mixing of metaphors (ants and Laconians), as the essay does in its mix of Jintan, dancers, Laconians, and slaves. Signaling that he has yet again fallen victim to the very thing he is critiquing—silence—Nakano calls himself back to forthright writing from his Jintan-like tendencies. But rather than dissolving into spare speech or silence, the passage displays the very essence of circumlocution; to write under the pressures of the market and censorship is to speak in tongues. Long before the erasure of redaction marks that would be stipulated by both imperial and Occupation censors years later, Nakano argues for a straightforwardness to writing, outside of using fuseji or its circumlocutory, minty, seductive, terse stand-ins. Where the censors would likely have preferred silence, Nakano dreams of straight talk. Yet his struggles to write directly without use of metaphor here show the impossibility of doing so. And by combining this surface argument against circumlocution with the rhetorical employment of a number of circumlocutions, Nakano stages the scene of writing. He ends the section of the essay on the subject of silence as the crux of the problem with writing today. For Nakano, the three descriptors—minty, seductively alluring, terse—that can be extracted from his three metaphors for writing for a mass print culture patrolled by censors ultimately describe the last possibilities for language to communicate before utter silence will reign. Nowhere is this clearer than when Nakano turns to fuseji and labels all these forms of writing “the language of slaves.” In the essay’s second section, “Fuseji,” Nakano works against some of the critical reception of his redacted poetry while admitting that such poetry was the product of a lamentable state of affairs. He begins by responding to precisely the sort of criticism Ōya Sōichi had made regarding the “Shinagawa Station” poem earlier that year.  

 

 

 

A critic said, “These days writers must deal with many problems that invite the deletion of lines or fuseji. This is a true pain for readers who receive works suffering from deleted lines and fuseji. So from now on, authors must make efforts to write without fuseji.” . . . This is in my opinion completely frank, but only half of the true story. . . . It is not

238    /    Redaction the case that from now on writers must make efforts to write without fuseji, because writing that avoids fuseji will necessarily continue. . . . Rather than writing by avoiding fuseji, we must write without fuseji altogether.28

So here the very writer who had only months before been singled out as unreadable because of an excessive use of redaction marks openly rails against such usage. Rather than simply being hypocritical here, Nakano wavers between two antipodal views of fuseji. In fact, still a proletarian writer himself, he goes on to elaborate the selfishness of the proletarian editors who employ too many fuseji. The notion that writers write and readers read is just what Lenin called Oblomovist commercialism. . . . The relationship between writers, their work, and all those who the work touches cannot be bound by a single rope. When you see the recent ban on Senki, you see how completely reckless they are. They waste ten or even thirty lines. Between cutting and not cutting of course, not cutting is better.29

Although the “they” of this passage could be read as taking to task both the editors of the proletarian organ Senki and the state censors, it clearly displays Nakano’s frustration with the state of affairs in which fuseji are made to stand in for large swaths of texts. And his previous mention of the editors certainly helps to identify them as the “they.” The passage implies that when fuseji are unreadable as anything other than fuseji they are pointless. But in the end, the performativity of the essay—which itself draws heavily on highly metaphoric language and obscure references to Marx, Rodin, and Heine—shows precisely how impossible it is to write in an “Adamic language” that tells or names things as they are, in plain and straightforward prose. The overt exoteric message and the method are simply at odds. Later in the essay, Nakano describes the dire predicament of the writer by referring directly to the often-cited “best bit” of Heinrich Heine’s Ger­ many: A Winter’s Tale, where the “censor’s scissors do to the poet’s body what they usually do to texts”:30  

 

The shears are clicking in his hand He plunges like a possessed one Upon the body—hacks the flesh— Alas! that part was the best one.31  

 

Nakano remarks: In our view, literary works are not for ourselves alone. And, of course, they are not for our reputations alone. We could become like Heine at

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    239 any given moment. And then what could he do, considering that the censors went so far as to wield scissors on his body? We do not wish to speak hereafter in the language of slaves. At the moment of speaking, we cannot express ourselves even using the language of slaves.32

Just as Freud in his Introductory Lectures (1916–1917) draws the connection between the empty spaces of blank type in contemporary political newspapers in Europe and Heine remarks that the best bits (“die beste Stelle”) had been removed from a work, Nakano draws a direct connection between fuseji and violence to authors in his time. For Nakano, the significance of this reference to Heine is overdetermined by his own anticensorship poem, written two years earlier. The poem, titled simply “Laws,” appeared in the “Fight against the Evil Censorship System” special issue of Proletarian Arts magazine, which was itself a protest against the changed system where publishers could no longer consult with censors about the passages requiring fuseji.  

Laws eyes and ears caked with mud nose mutilated tongue seized at the root by pincers entire face mashed to a pulp both arms as if loosened in their sockets covered in mud, covered in blood33

We can read in the poem an attempt to write in a variation of the language of slaves, one that avoids using fuseji, but therefore speaks in terms all the more displaced. Blood and mud appear as inadequate coverings for an ugly brutal truth of violence to the body, as fuseji cover and reveal the wounds to discourse inflicted by censorship. It is not the case that this metaphor solidifies the distance between violence to the body and to the text: the two are simply not alike. But the analogy does bring them together: they are one and the same. This assertion of the consonance of censorship and torture foreshadows what will happen with the final, fatal torture of Koba­ yashi Takiji that would five years later finally stop the proletarian writer’s pen. That ultimate silence echoes Heine’s statement that what begins as the burning of books inevitably ends in the burning of bodies.34 Nakano’s poem “Laws” and his reference to the language of slaves connect the body with the text and freedom of movement and of mind with freedom of the printed word. The dualities between success and failure, complicity and dissent, and text and body are conflated in the phrase. The phrase “the language of slaves” unites those who are forced to

240    /    Redaction work with their bodies and those who are forced to write in a particular language. For Nakano, to speak in the language of slaves is to employ circumlocutory writing in order to signify at two levels: the superficial, external, exoteric, surface public one and the esoteric, submerged, secret one. In his attempt to highlight that the purpose of writing is beyond a private language for the self alone and beyond a coterie of knowing likeminded slaves who claim that literary works are “not for our reputations alone,” Nakano suggests that slavish locution which only other slaves in the know can possibly understand—and not entirely—is no solution to the problem of censorship. One can only use the language of slaves for expression, yet one cannot express oneself in that language. This paradox is for him intolerable. His own texts testify to the ineluctability of the problem. But what the surface of Nakano’s creative work denies is the possibility that the two levels (exoteric surface and esoteric deep layer) may come together in the mark and become one and the same. Tracking the origin of the phrase “the language of slaves” and its antecedent uses in philosophy and criticism helps us understand the apparent contradiction in Nakano’s opinions and usage.  

 

Slavish Tongues: Lenin, Hegel, and Strauss The history of the phrase “the language of slaves” clarifies the usefulness and limits of the metaphor. Although Nakano presents the term as though he is quoting Heine, there is no known use in Heine’s oeuvre of a similar phrase.35 Given Nakano’s recent study of Lenin, it is more likely that he was referring obliquely to Lenin’s preface to the Russian edition of Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism written in 1917, in which he wrote, “I had to speak in a ‘slavish’ tongue.” 36 Lenin notes that at the time of his book’s original publication he could not write directly about Russia and had to rename it “Japan” as a cover: “I was forced to quote as an example—Japan! The careful reader will easily substitute Russia for Japan, and Finland, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia or other regions peopled by non–Great Russians, for Korea.” 37 Lenin writes of using a “slavish tongue” in an entirely negative light, also dubbing it “that accursed Aesopian language.” Nakano’s co-opting of the phrase “the language of slaves” recalls the fact that even the revolutionary Lenin felt the limitations of censorship.38 Lenin’s switching between slave and Aesop, however, recalls the even longer history of the idea that prefigures Nakano’s ambivalent understanding of redaction. Lenin most assuredly borrowed “slavish tongue” from Hegel. In his discussion of Aesop, Hegel prosaically proposed in the Lectures on Aesthetics  

 

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    241 that “prose begins in the slave.” 39 This reference also seems negative at first blush, though in Hegel it contains the seeds for an alternative reading. As inferior and hybrid as the form of prose in which the slave Aesop was supposed to have worked, higher forms for Hegel required this lower form in the way that the Master requires the Slave for his power according to Hegel’s own scheme. This possible underlying understanding recognizes the power of slave language in its integral relationship with status quo, straight-talking, Adamic languages. Rather than a neutered language that cannot convey real dissent, the language of slaves in this reading becomes a cause for hope as it encompasses the relational necessity of state power. Dissent is seen as the very grounds for the possibility of complicit speech and the necessary grounds for change. This understanding would find a home in the twentieth century in Paul de Man’s reading of Bahktin’s dialogism, which celebrated the dissenting possibilities of writing as a slave.40 A similar celebration can be found in Lev Loseff’s notion of Soviet dissent writing as “Aesopian Language.” 41 In fact, we can now identify two views of the same issue: circumlocutory writing as negative and as positive. As opposed to the literal language of Adam that calls things as they are seen immediately and unproblematically, the language of slaves, or Aesopian language, refers specifically to an allegorical linguistic means available to those confronted with external writing pressures. Expressing oneself in anything other than Adamic language or the language of the state yields two possibilities: either writing will fail and force writers to miscommunicate what they intend (the negative result associated with slaves) or it will succeed and allow an encoding and decoding that will circumvent the eyes of the censor (the positive result associated with Aesop). But, of course, the two terms (slave language and Aesopian language) are often used synonymously to name this continuum between success and failure; after all, Aesop was the slave of whom Hegel was writing. Recognizing a continuum between the more negative (the language of slaves) and the more positive (Aesopian language) poles does not create a new dichotomy that will result in some future Hegelian synthesis, but merely recognizes the ontology of the continuum of possibilities for circumlocutory writing produced by censorship. The continuum teaches us that there is no speaking in a successful circumlocution without also being open to failure. As Mark Sanders argues in reference to Apartheid, ethical response and responsibility are always somewhat contaminated by complicity; even the most responsible surreptitious writing is open to failure and capitulation, and, indeed, it already contains within it the seeds of this failure.42

242    /    Redaction Nakano’s understanding of fuseji recognizes this continuum. Whether the use of fuseji results in a successful Aesopian evasion or a slavish, complicit, and failed evasion depends on the interpretive community receiving the fuseji as much as it does on the implied readership of the text that presents the marks. This understanding is implicit in Nakano’s rejection of both public writing for reputation and private writing for oneself. He rejects both on the grounds that the readerly community, though it clearly determines the style in which works are written, cannot, no matter its size, determine whether writing is worthwhile. In short, for writing between the lines to be successfully read, there needs to be a group of readers capable of reading between the lines. Like Homi Bhabha’s notion of sly civility exhibited among the colonized who could in the exoteric language of empire express their underlying esoteric discontent, the promise of slave language is that it could be spoken by one slave and understood by another without the master quite understanding.43 An intellectual perversion of this construction about slaves is apparent in the philosopher Leo Strauss’s and the literary critic Paul de Man’s understandings of submerged language as the public language of intellectuals. Though jailed, enslaved, or otherwise persecuted, the intellectual, philosopher, or poet could fool the masters by speaking in a doubled voice. Strauss and de Man took such esoteric writing to be powerfully successful because in their view the intellectual elite would be able to read between the lines.44 But this view of writing is clearly a problem for proletarian intellectuals whose very reason to write is to stir the hearts of the masses and not a small coterie of knowing intelligensia. This Straussian perspective on circumlocutory language smacks of the very elitism that Nakano critiques in proletarian writers and editors who overuse fuseji and “hacks that boast” about their deft use of fuseji: “We scorn euphemistic works. Hacks boast that ‘our use of fuseji makes our work all the more effective,’ thinking they are satirizing the censor. But the thought that they can voice satire about the censor is really the only satirical thing about it.” 45 Annabel Patterson attempts to counter de Man’s and Strauss’s promotion of the super-reader and the elite by opening up the receiving end of language in more egalitarian ways. She argues for a reading education not for a cultured elite but for everyone, consisting of close reading, critical thinking, and searching for meaning behind the marks. But the notion she proposes—that education make reading between the lines accessible to all—entirely undermines the very possibility of surreptitious writing. For if everyone can read underlying meanings, writing can no longer skirt anyone, let alone an educated censor. So in the end,  

 

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    243 Patterson’s vision is the ideal dream of being able to write from a position unencumbered by censorship, which is ultimately the dream of an Adamic language. By contrast, as ethically reprehensible as Strauss’s elitism is, it does contain elements of logic. It is true that a limited readership is necessary, for instance, for any reading between the lines to take place. For, if everyone already knows the secret code, the code is no longer secret and becomes general parlance or everyday ordinary language. If we conceive of the marks of redaction solely as replacements for something else not on the page, then as a strategy for circumventing a persecutive censoring authority, reading between the lines is always open to failure and miscommunication. Rather than reconciling the egalitarianism of direct speech and the elitism inherent in circumlocution, we should recognize Peirce’s and Saussure’s old claims that the cognition of linguistic signs always requires some fitting of signifiers with signifieds and that the recognition of a sign always requires interpretation and meaning-making. So the ability to read signs is dependent on decoding, because reading lies on this continuum between words naming things as they are and words substituting for other words. All language is the language of slaves because language itself bars us from telling things straight; Adamic language is an impossibility. Posing a more fundamental critique of the issue, Jacques Lacan with his emphasis on self-censoring and on the linguistic structures of the psyche perhaps better understands the myriad ineluctable risks of speaking such a necessarily circumlocutionary language. Rather than solely reaffirming the elitist position that lauds ideal readers, Lacan suggests that we are all slaves even before being persecuted: “The subject, while he may appear to be the slave of language, is more the slave of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at his birth, if only in the form of his proper name.” 46 For Lacan, all languages are already slavish. We all dwell—even before any elite training (Strauss) or any mass education (Patterson)—in the double bind of language, and for Lacan this linguistic predicament trumps any later actual imprisonment, censorship, or persecution.47 So what for Nakano is a particular historical circumstance of writing becomes for Lacan the place of writing more generally. And in this way Lacan’s understanding accounts for the “nothing changes” lament Nakano made after the war against the occupiers and Occupation sympathizers. With this sense of its discursive history in theory, we can ask again what is the linguistic and discursive function of the phrase we have been examining through Nakano, Lenin, Hegel, Strauss, Patterson, and Lacan. In the end, the very term “the language of slaves” appears as a redaction or  

 

244    /    Redaction

1. names Adamic language exoteric/literal rigid signifiers statist/status quo

E

F

C

3. renaming Aesopian language (+) esoteric/success elite (trained) audience resistant

2. unnaming language of slaves (-) esoteric/failed no audience/private language complicit

A

D

B

4. nonnames pure relationality the unnameable transcendent/sublime silent redaction

A.fuseji for which we have lost a once present at hand piece of knowledge with which to disambiguate the

Figure mark fuseji9.2.  for whichSquaring we have lost athe once X present at hand piece of knowledge with which to disambiguate

the mark - tell it like it is and is entirely complicit -- fuseji alone... point incontrovertibly to censorship and nothing else. B. most common form, we discover archival material, recover information generally unknown at the time fuseji that is legible as successfully pointing to another word/s but that also seems just to be point to an elsewhere???? hmm

a covering term that names without naming an entire web of possible connected positions onthenthe meanings of redaction and ultimately the meanings C. something both replaceable and now = writing between the lines in a completely readable way= of censorship that(inmight be mapped using Greimas’s semiotic square. (See surface, accepted euphemism the dictionary) D. something neitherThe replaceable then or now = just fusejior continuums between the binary poles figure 9.2.) lettered unities writing that appears to point to something else, but is too vague for us to know -- we lack context, text isin not specific enough figured the numbered ovals are relevant for elaborating the possible Pure silence implications of writing the language of slaves, because the corner poles E. a distinction only possible with regardin to readership communities, proles knew maybe and censors didn't but this risked breaking down at any moment... the ultimate risk of fuseji of the square are unattainable ideals thecensorship/ connections between them telling it like it is and only gesturing toward something. fuseji aswhile the name for deletion, but also as the gesture towards something else. are the extant possibilities. So an example of the unity connecting the F. replaceable now and again a distinction between of reading, the scholar who has antinomies ofunreplaceable “Adamicnow... language” and “thecommunities language of slaves” represented done the archival work vs. the lay reader who comes at the text without the appropriate context with which to disambiguate. Here the scholar elite is in the position of the proletariate reader in the then position. And the lay reader by line A could be an X that points to itself alone: like Adamic language, is in the position of the dupe or censor. sly civility homi bhabha strauss ultimate risk of fuseji -- something that is both overtly radical and complicit itthe is as it appears simply and is nothing more than a signifier of a signifuseji that is read in a community dependent way and therefore a style/aesthetics. fied (a deleted word or character); but like the language of slaves, it risks saying nothing but X (a truly emptied signifier). The unity of Aesopian language and the unnameable of line B can be thought of as Xs that refer to something unrecoverable, Xs that seem to skirt the censor by conveying some underlying meaning, but an underlying meaning that is beyond apprehension. The positive deixis C could be an X that is easily deciphered, which is written between the lines in such a completely readable way that the surface is a simple substitute (a euphemism that is already explained in a standard dictionary would be one way of understanding this). The

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    245 negative deixis D represents an X that completely fails, writing that might be so subtle that it fails even to appear to gesture to something else. But it is the final two unities, the lines labeled E and F which form the X, that are both the most difficult to elaborate and the most helpful. E is the unity between labeling something and the label as pure referentiality as in “I am that I am”; a story about a Mr. X might best personify this continuum. F is the unity between successful skirting of the censor and unsuccessful skirting of the censor; this is best thought of as fuseji in the 1930s that at once marked the deletion of offensive content and, in doing so over time, became offensive to the censors. The question remains of how we take the Straussian incongruity of saying one thing on the surface and communicating another between the lines in Nakano’s essay “Selling Writing and Other Things.” Does the dissonance of the essay’s lambasting of circumlocutory writing even as it employs it in its metaphors make the case for reading between the lines here and digging out an esoteric message beneath the exoteric shell? Is it possible that Nakano is not arguing against fuseji, the hacks that use it, or the editors that overuse it, as the surface argument might appear, but actually in favor of it? What if it both evades the spectator and is always seen as incongruous? The very possibility that we might be meant to read the essay in this ironic way, but that we can never know with certainty, highlights the ultimate message of the essay, which is that there is a heightened sense of ambiguity about the ability to say anything under censorship. The dialogism here perfectly performs the contortions that the conundrum of writing under censorship provokes from writers. Writers are simply caught in a double bind. They “do not wish to speak hereafter in the language of slaves. At the moment of speaking, we cannot express ourselves even using the language of slaves.” And yet the language of slaves is all that is possible.

Crossing Words: The Ethics of Skirting the Resistance-Complicity Dichotomy Seven years after his essay decrying fuseji as the language of slaves, Nakano published The Novelist Who Couldn’t Write a Novel. Following his prison sentences and political conversion from communism, the novella gives an internal glimpse of the continued authorial concern surrounding deletion marks. Nakano uses the marks satirically, as if all that was left was to attempt to be satirical, the very position he had critiqued in 1929 was all he could muster by 1936. By 1936, readers of a leftist leaning had come to expect and even desire the marks; meanwhile, the publishers and

246    /    Redaction the Nakano-like protagonist, a reformed proletarian novelist named Takaki Takakichi, worried about using too many fuseji because they were already known to raise the ire of censors. The following long passage combines worries about the audience’s desire for fuseji and about publishers’ and critics’ fretting over too many fuseji to set up the way the passage actually will use the marks. Occasionally when he wrote, he used so many fuseji that it couldn’t be understood at all. However, he understood that for readers who enjoy novels, places that had no fuseji were no less than uninteresting. This was a conundrum for the journal editors. Takaki didn’t want to die at the hands of the authorities, so it was no use. He was a person that had apologized, saying he’d never do it again, and for this had been pardoned. However, one has to take care with this sort of person. . . . They [the editors] could not compensate this kind of man who might get banned and such. . . . And because there were too many fuseji, Takakichi himself was concerned about whether the editors would think of it as too vain. This was the influence of the words of a critic who had written, “This month’s piece by Mr. Takaki Takakichi has too many fuseji and is dull. The magnificence of his uncompromising attitude can be sensed, but it is a device that should be reproached for a writer today.” He had to write concretely about his betrayal. And to do that, he revolution-

had to write about what he had betrayed. He betrayed the ********** revolution

ary organizations and the Japanese movement for ********** . So he had to write about it. He also considered the fact of censorship. It seemed as though there would be no problem areas. All he would write was of the crimes

******

ecutor

judge

judge

of the police, the examining ***** , the head ***** , and even the

pros****

******,

but all this was already ­public. Rather, those guys got ahead of Takakichi even in knowledge and expression. Hadn’t the newspapers already written about the arrests of the “reds” and such? They only headlined with the conversions and the whereabouts of the converters.48

Nakano’s fiction about the concerns of Takaki anticipates the secret police meeting several months later that identified the problem of fuseji making meaning for readers. The novelist who cannot write is concerned not that the fuseji will communicate too much about the content of his personal life, which is already circulating, but rather that fuseji will communicate too much about his state of conversion (tenkō): he is a compromised man made untouchable by his previous brushes with the law who continues to view his experiences with a kind of vain nostalgia. The fictionalized author’s own anxiety about a surplus of fuseji anticipates what

Unnaming and the Language of Slaves    /    247 happened after the critics and Publishing Police decided to crack down on fuseji; but the text’s use of fuseji in the story performs his character’s fears in a tangible way that makes the concerns leap from the world of the fiction into that of the reader. The actual use of simple-word substitution with fuseji in this passage directly following the novel’s discussion about the use of fuseji displays the problems for readers in a way mere commentary on the marks could not. Regardless of whether or not Nakano intended the marks to do so (whether or not the marks can be said to be Nakano’s, an editor’s, or the censor’s), the exposition of the difficulty of writing directly followed by the marks of deletion that perform that difficulty shows an absurdist, ironic humor or tragic pathos: “he had to write about what he revolution

 ary organization.” The necessity of betrayed. He betrayed the ********** writing and the impossibility of freely doing so are so neatly conveyed in this brief passage, regardless of who originally inserted the deletion marks. If in their sheer materiality of textual presence on the page the fuseji connote something there for us (taboo or censorship itself), then there is no need for reading behind or between the lines. Faced with the fact of the ubiquitous existence of fuseji-like language that can be used to comply and to circumvent the censor, we have an ethical duty to respond in a way that is at least sensitive to the history of the text as well as to the transhistorical function of language. Reading this passage highlights that even in the very year in which the practice of using fuseji was slated for erasure by the censors, Nakano was conflicted about its usefulness, seeing it as both reprehensible and necessary. What Nakano’s overt struggle with this problem suggests is that we can avoid committing yet another act of erasure by drawing attention to the inevitability of deletion, since negation and deletion are a fecund origin of writing. The phrase “crossing words” in the title of this section names not only the canceling of what has been written, but also a bringing together and re-production of new meanings in doing so.49 The crossing of words stands at an uncrossable threshold between the writable and the unwritable. The cross may be imposed from outside or it may emerge from within the mind of a writer or reader. This is why the cross—a mark of censorship—may mark complicity with the censor and also a resistance to censorship. In this way, the cross repeats the function of a censorship that, in censoring, names that which it seeks to pronounce unnameable, its own existence. Like the X, a common form of the cross, censored discourse also names the unnameable but is not itself unnameable. A metonym or synecdoche for censored discourse, the cross, as implied in its figure of the X, should be read as a chiasmus: the marks intend to block words from meaning, while  

 

248    /    Redaction the blocking of the words marks meaning. This chiasmus is not the end result of the ethical dilemma presented by the X but the very condition under which the ethical may be, must be broached. And Nakano does just this in his practices and theories of redaction. He shows that the writer of resistance can and must have it both ways: first, lamenting the necessity of the marks; second, using them to perform just such a statement lamenting their use.

Coda

10.  Redaction Countertime The Literary Casualties of Empire

This book has suggested that stories of preservation, production, and redaction under censorship drawn from a brief period of Japanese history are instructive for a broad range of issues outside of that moment and place, and that the Japanese case is illustrative of something that exceeds the particular yet will never approach the universal. Typically, when made within a humanities discipline such as history or literary studies, the premise that the history of a seemingly faraway culture is still relevant in other places today is so obvious that it goes without stating; today, however, there is a necessity to reiterate the premise in a different way, to convert the underlying premise into an overt argument. Unbridled tendencies toward so-called historicizations and new historicisms that seek to locate an event or cultural product exclusively within its own time and place have been used to justify the continuation of the old-school exoticizations and disciplinary border controls of area studies under the dubious claim of historical rigor and cultural sensitivity. The injunction to “always historicize” has been misappropriated with the desire to cordon off discrete ways of understanding that are already endemic to the boundaries and methods of old-fashioned area studies.1 In short, contemporary historicizations themselves need to be historicized. And this work has already begun. For instance, Harry Harootunian’s critique of the origins of Asian Studies highlights “how area studies were complicit in keeping the outside on the outside.” 2 The continued fetishistic treatment of the Asian object of critical attention as an other wholly removed from the rest of the world fundamentally contradicts the necessity Harootunian outlines: “we now must acknowledge a different arrangement that locates practice immanently within the temporality of a modernity embracing new cultural forms that are developing everywhere that demand 251

252    /    Coda to be considered as coexistent equivalents with the ‘West,’ despite the apparent historical differences among them.” 3 So, even at the risk of flattening nuanced understandings of cultural and historical specificity, we must try to open the hermetically sealed space of Asian Studies in order to arrive at an understanding that neither abandons the worthwhile particulars of one time and place for some gray universalism nor repeats the problems of cultural essentialism. The claim that an object over there cannot be considered together with or read in terms of this object here may well be a necessary first step toward the disciplining of knowledge. But the next step must be to render the comparisons inherent in such divisions explicit: to explain the foreign object to a domestic audience requires a preliminary belief in the foreign as unknown, the domestic as known, and both as unitary and separable. These comparative assumptions—which are veiled because revealing them would undermine the authority of the interpreter—seem as dubious as the Great Humanist Tradition which believes that all societies are fundamentally the same and consequently that studying a culture means uncovering the sameness underlying the veil of difference. Claiming that an event or object is specific to a time or place is different from claiming that it is unlike any others and absolutely different or incomparable. Ultimately, comparisons are inevitable, so at least there is something more honest about engaging with comparisons up front, and in addition they can bring to light more broadly pervasive processes. This fundamental logic is no more applicable to the “singular modernity,” readily identified in its late capital form of globalism today, than it should be for a vivid understanding of premodernity.4 If historicism was an answer to humanism, then by now it has led us to understand its divisive and ultimately flawed extreme repercussions. For to be more historical may have the benefit of revealing the contingencies of past decisions and mutabilities of the present, but ultimately crass historicization in its area studies manifestations has sunk back into understanding the disconnected past as contingent alone without the immediacy of the necessary component, connecting those pasts to present situations. This is not a presentist view which unwittingly views the past as the same as the present or in terms of the present, but a recognition that even historicism has an important functional role today.  

 

X  ＊  X  ＊  X   ＊  X

The first two parts of this book season the Japanese examples with comparative historical examples from America to convey a flavor that could not be described as peculiarly Japanese and to reveal the similarity of historical

Redaction Countertime    /    253 processes while remaining sensitive to the cultural specificities of both societies. The third part of the book, however, avoids such comparison in favor of simply telling the complex story of deletion marks in Japan, showing them as tools both for controlling information and for resisting censorship. Having shown how redaction has been central to commenting on censorship and to information control in Japan, we can now ask questions of broader significance about marking redaction beyond Japan and beyond the transwar period, about the implications of thinking about censorship as productive with regard to issues of privacy, libel, information control, and freedom of expression. What about the world outside of Japan? What about periods beyond the mid-twentieth century? In short, if censorship’s productive capacity is not particular to Japanese history and also not universal, we need other instances of information control outside of transwar Japan for comparison. Several comparative counterpoints can provide a set of interventions necessary for resituating the products of censorship in ever expanding frames. A first step in escaping the prison house of the historical could be to find a comparable moment in the same culture beyond the period. The Japanese libel case in which the magazine Shūkan bunshun in 2004 unsuccessfully sought to circumvent offense by using fuseji in reporting the divorce of the daughter of Tanaka Makiko, a former foreign minister and herself the daughter of the former prime minister Tanaka Kakuei, seems like a fitting end, bringing the notion of communicating through suppression (in this case a court injunction) up to date. The case differed from historical uses of fuseji because the offensive word in question, divorce, was not generally offensive outside of the specific right-to-privacy stipulations that applied to the daughter of the public figure.5 Similarly, what the law purported to protect in this case was neither morals nor order, but the rights of an individual. And this difference between the “guarantee” of the public right of free speech and “respect” for the individual right to privacy—perhaps the primary difference between cases of literary censorship in Japan before the war and after—does necessarily go a long way toward showing what is gained in the transition across the war and adding significantly to our understanding of wartime and postwar Japanese cultural production and its relation to the state.6 But it fails to explain what continues—the use of redaction—and thus turns a blind eye to what is produced through a deeper and wider view of the historical processes of information control.  

 

 

 

X  ＊  X   ＊  X  ＊  X

254    /    Coda This temporal jump to contemporary Japan disrupts the idea that fuseji were specific to transwar Japan. A second essential step would take the analysis out of that geographic locale. Certainly the Japanese X has much to do with the Western asterisk, that star which has been used not only to brighten the segues between two related though separate passages of text, but also to blind readers to certain words that might be said to lie in a space outside the text.7 A spatial jump to transwar culture in the United States reveals a fitting comparison. Emboldened by widespread support among American intellectuals, James Branch Cabell used asterisks in his Figures of Earth (1921) to at once negotiate the sex taboo for which his novel Jurgen (1919) had been censored by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and indict the prudery of the day. When the two main characters decide to have a child, they go about it in a rather scriptural way: “nobody objects to the baby in itself, now that you are a married woman. The point is that the babies of the Philistines are brought by stork; and even an allusion to the possibility of misguided persons obtaining a baby in any other way these Philistines consider to be offensive and lewd and lascivious and obscene.” . . . Standing there, he put his arms about her and kissed her. Then he placed the five black stars in a row,— ***** —and went over to the next line.  

 

The stork having been thus properly summoned, Manuel recalled to the bird the three wishes which had been promised when Manuel saved the stork’s life: and Manuel said that for each wish he would take a son fetched to him by the stork in the manner of the Philistines.8

The asterisks summon the stork, providing a kind of landing light within the diegesis, and also stand in for the kind of sex scene that would offend those “Philistines” who had opposed Jurgen. In context, the marks help to elaborate Cabell’s rage against the censors, which begins in the preface and repeats in his equating of those from Philistia with the Comstockery of real-world censors. So like the fuseji, the asterisks seemingly defy the confines of discourse demarcated by the censors, at once adhering to and mocking the censors. This method is also employed by the American in Paris Robert Carleton Brown in his collection Gems: A Censored Anthology, “a book of beauties which the eye cannot see but may easily imagine,” published in 1931. The book, “privately published in Paris,” comprises an essay opposing Puritanical censorship and bowdlerization and a series of well-known pieces of

Redaction Countertime    /    255 literature humorously redacted, including the following line from Shakespeare: “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to ▊▊▊▊.” 9 In both American and Japanese letters, efforts to circumvent the censor that employed redaction marks subversively spurred a desire and later nostalgia for the marks. Historically, censors and readers alike recognized the potential of the sign of redaction to impart too much mystique to what it had replaced. Censors thought that “it is unhealthy to be stimulated by asterisks” and that asterisks may “create attitudes towards sex which are akin to fetishism,” to which we might add that they do the same toward certain political views.10 For their part, readers often lamented the presence of asterisks: “Perhaps we should be encouraged by the fact that Lady Chatterley and her lover are now allowed to circulate in the land of the Puritan with their naked language partly clothed. But after all why clothe it at all?” 11 But, as we have seen in Japan, not just the covered but covering itself was ultimately fetishized, giving rise to a nostalgia for X after the supposed passing of particular forms. In the article “Sex: Without the Asterisks,” the columnist Dorothy Parker satirically laments the passing of the days when sex scenes were full of obscurantist asterisks: “Certainly no one wants to complain about sex itself; but I think we all have a legitimate grievance in the fact that as it is shown in present-day [1958] novels, its practitioners are so unnecessarily articulate about it. There is no more cruel destroyer of excitement than painstaking detail.” 12 X  ＊  X  ＊  X   ＊  X

A more radical jump, out of both Japan and the mid-twentieth century, shows how far the lessons of the modern archival structure of Japanese imperial censorship are exportable from their historical and cultural milieu. Issued in November 2001, Executive Order 13233—or what the president of the American Historical Association referred to as “The President’s Book of Secrets”—bestowed upon the president the right to withdraw ­papers from public scrutiny indefinitely.13 In other words, it explicitly placed archival control in the hands an authority who might well be threatened by the release of the documents. This presidential order led to the accretion of what has come to be euphemistically referred to as “redaction” in papers released under the Freedom of Information Act, and this usage of the term has informed my own appropriation of the term throughout this book. Certainly differences abound between the redacted US government documents and the myriad writings littered with fuseji under imperial censorship in Japan. The US government archive is open but restricted, the readership is limited, and the material is curtailed; redaction occurs today  

 

256    /    Coda in official documents released by the officials themselves. Whereas fuseji were used by the literati in mass publications to cover up phrases that could potentially offend an outside authority, today these government officials are censoring their own material. In cases of literary censorship around World War II, recalcitrant authors were conveying resistance through redaction, by speaking of the censor through the censor; in cases after 9/11 and EO 13233, government officials were using redaction to evade public censure and, perhaps, trial. Put differently, many of the markings of deletion in the mid-twentieth century gave meaning by pretending to block it. These instances in the early twenty-first century taunt by pretending to give without giving and, thus, inadvertently give. But the useful point of similarity is that the material negations surrounding both World War II and 9/11 remind us of the modern and contemporary conundrum of presentation through requisite negations. No sooner had redacted documents begun to trickle out from the executive branch than creative artists started to use redaction to speak out against its seemingly new mode of information control. Although humorous reactions reigned in the popular media—for example, Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column from July 23, 2003, “Weapons of Mass Redaction,” followed by the Onion article “CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black High­ lighters All These Years”—more serious reflections on the prevalence of redaction in public documents will likely characterize the overall response.14 Jena Osman’s Essay in Asterisks (2004) contemplates the role of redaction in the consolidation of power before and after 9/11. Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings, 2004–10 simply enlarges and colorizes images of actual documents released about torture and the war in Iraq. And Brian De Palma’s film Redacted (2007), a fictional account of a rape in Iraq, supposedly presents a truthful, unredacted view of an historical event that could not be recounted in popular nonfiction media such as the televised news. Serving as both historical counterpoints to fuseji and cases that prove the necessity of understanding the broader issues involved in redaction, these recent creative responses to censorship, biased embedded press reports, and archival control are but another chapter in the story of archive fever and redaction frenzy that continue to accompany imperial overstretch. Osman’s poetry collection, though published in 2004 after the executive order, draws from government material from before and after 9/11. For example, “Procedure: Erasing Gray (Deletion as Protection)” displays her performative redaction of a landmark Supreme Court ruling which found that even redacted documents were inadmissible evidence if the words covered were able to be inferred without other context; in other  

 

 

Redaction Countertime    /    257 words, the ruling insisted on unreadable redactions. In 1998, Kevin Gray appealed his conviction on beating a woman to death with Anthony Bell, who later confessed to the crime. Bell confessed that he, Gray, and a third man were involved in the killing of the victim. During the joint trial of Gray and Bell, Bell’s confession was entered into the record with Gray’s name redacted; however, in the context of the trial, jurors were sure that the blank spaces and numerous appearances of the inserted word deletion referred directly to Gray. The Supreme Court determined that the redacting had not gone far enough to obscure the question of Gray’s involvement.15 Osman quotes directly from the appeal verdict, but redacts it even further in a by now familiar way: “Anthony Bell confessed to the police thXt he, petitioneX [X] Xnd XnotheX mXn pXXticipXted in the beXtinX thXt cXused Stacy Williams’ deXth. . . . The State Xlso intXoduced X wXitten copX of the confession with the two nXmes omitted, leXvinX in theiX plXce blXnks sepXXXted by commXs.” 16 By unnecessarily X-ing nearly every word Osman draws attention to X-ing and reading through Xs. Where Osman further redacts the court’s demand for more redaction, Holzer’s Redaction Paintings manipulate already-redacted government texts in format alone. Copying, colorizing, and enlarging through silkscreen select documents with interesting patterns of redaction or with compelling information, Holzer in this way also emphasizes the ridiculousness of redacted documents, not by augmenting or redacting further, but simply by presenting larger than life versions. The effect is stunning. The marks speak for themselves. Handprints found scribbled over actual handprints (presumably of a detainee) in government documents (one of which is reproduced in figure 10.1) finds a perfect reception in Holzer’s work. Like the fictional character Yosarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), who experimentally censors everything out of particular love letters except “I love you,” the redactors here have left the juiciest bit unredacted: that the detainee has a Social Security Number and is perhaps a citizen or at least a lawful resident of the United States. As the detainee’s handprint records their identity—preserving it, presumably so that the individual can be connected to a crime, the redactor seems to scorn the public eye by casting an open hand at us, imploring us to stop our gaze and cutting us off from connecting with the detainee. Holzer’s work reverses this cutting-off, forcing us to contemplate the process by which the redactor is able to block our gaze, highlighting a parallel in violence between the handprint coerced from the detainee and the blocking of our will to knowledge, reconnecting us to the detaining of the detainee if not to the particular detainee, and revealing how meanings will always be  

258    /    Coda

Figure 10.1.  Jenny Holzer’s “Right Hand” from The Redaction Paintings

made even out of the halting meaning. Osman’s and Holzer’s works use redaction to work against redaction; the sheer presence of redaction is pitted against the absenting of the absent. The point of these works is clearly to disseminate and publicize the mode of publication in which redaction is normalized or, in the case of the Supreme Court decision, deemed not to have gone far enough. Their work suggests that what is being released in redacted form is only a tangible trace of something unarchivable. But the question remains whether these forms of drawing attention to negation resolve the issue of what is negated or can only, as a mode of strategic silence, be used to militate against the irrationality of the process of negation. If exposing the redactions of the redactors is all that is left to be done or that is possible in the wake of EO 13223, then this strategic silence is the only possibility. Here I think Brian De Palma’s film released in 2007, though heavyhanded, is particularly illustrative. The film presumes to fill in the silence, to show its audience that which has been hitherto redacted from widely circulating versions of the Iraq war, the true story of a incident in 2006 in which a member of the US forces in Iraq raped a young woman in Mahmudiyah. If the true point of the film were to shift the viewpoint of the US citizenry outside of the embedded reporting narratives of the early 2000s, nearly the entirety of the film could perhaps have been more fittingly titled Unredacted. To understand how the film works, though, we do better to look at the actual redactions within the film. The only two uses of redaction in De Palma’s film occur in the opening few minutes and

Redaction Countertime    /    259 the closing coda. Before the title fades up and the credits roll on the film, the screen is filled with a standard legalistic disclaimer: This film is entirely fiction, inspired by an incident widely reported to have occurred in Iraq. While some of the events depicted here may resemble those of the reported incident, the characters are entirely fictional, and their words and actions should not be confused with those of real persons.

Almost as soon as they appear on screen, the words of the disclaimer are redacted in real time before our eyes. Fun is being played with the very notion of redaction. The word fiction is the first word to fall victim to the black marker. Next fictional. Then the conditional may, and so on until all that is left are the letters spelling out the title of the film: r-e-d-a-c-t-e-d. While this is a cute way of introducing the title of the film, it also seems at least in the initial instant of blotting out to suggest what the film will attempt: that is, to present a truth of war through the fictionalization of one of its events. The blurring between fiction and reality signaled in the disclaimer and in this redacting of the disclaimer is repeated in the style of the film, which is shot to look like found documentary footage from security cameras and a soldier’s personal video diary. The second redacted portion of the film appears in its closing moments and also revolves around the issue of representing truth. Presumably this portion of the film is not covered by the initial disclaimer that proclaims the film’s fictionality. After the denouement of the diegesis and the plot of the story are concluded, a title appears on screen: “Collateral Damage.” As if in a slide show, still images of the Iraqi corpses and casualties of war flash on screen. The faces of the corpses have their eyes blacked out, missing in redaction. Presumably in an effort not to victimize the victims again, De Palma redacts the identities of the victims, as if, as another standard disclaimer might have it, the identities have been redacted to protect the victims. The individual identity erased from bodies creates a unified sense of dead bodies, connected only in their faceless and nameless deaths. The redactions foreground the lack of specificity in death tolls: Are they Sunni or Shiite? Insurgents or innocents? Why would it matter? The faces crossed out achieve a powerful facelessness or namelessness. As opposed to the blackened words in the documents that protect presumably US entities, names, and identities from blame, the blackened faces in the film protect the dead. Or perhaps they exploit them, using the cheap histrionics of sensationalism in the context of the mainstream image of the drone proxy war that is devoid of corpses, theirs and ours. Viewed in this way,

260    /    Coda the film does not reverse or subvert the redactive modes of representation perpetrated by the redacted government documents as much as repeat them to an opposing political end, fictionalizing and defacing what might have been. X  ＊  X  ＊  X   ＊  X

The recent excision of key names from archival material to cover the truth of the regime shares much with the thought of he who has been touted the grandfather of the neoconservative thinking that gave rise both to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s and to the more contemporary war on terror, Leo Strauss.17 Contemporary US redactions suggest that those who are in-the-know know and those who are not can stare at black boxes. Two major targets of Strauss’s critique were historicism and the continued reading of surface meanings in texts that contained buried esoteric meanings. Recent attempts have been made to make sense of these two strains of thought, which seem at odds, one lambasting the relativism and reductionism of assuming that meaning comes only from rigorously locating a text in its historical context, and the other arguing that to understand the philosophical texts of the ancients we must remember that, in their historical circumstances of writing under persecution, they often could not mean what they wrote.18 The seeming diametrical opposition of these two points can be brought together if we understand the neocon reading of Strauss to be ultimately flawed, based solely as it was only on his exoteric, surface meanings.19 In fact, Strauss could not have meant what he wrote, and his contradictions give us license (according to his own esoteric reading method) to “read between the lines,” to read his entire schema against itself. Just as Strauss suggested the necessity of historicizing historicization, we must read between the lines of Strauss’s own compulsion to read between the lines proffered in his Persecution and the Art of Writing. This is why the contemporary originator of much of the historicism at the center of Strauss’s critique, Alexandre Kojève—the philosopher from whom Strauss’s student Francis Fukuyama would extract his idea of “The End of History” (purportedly Hegelian)—responded with such alacrity to Strauss’s esotericism in a festschrift dedicated to Strauss. With “much intellectual sport and philosophic amusement in the ironical art of writing,” Kojève, like the subject of his essay, Emperor Julian, appears to support the revelations of the day (in this case Strauss’s thesis about the necessity of reading between the lines), but gives hints that perhaps he should be read in another way.20 In the final paragraph of his essay, Kojève drops his biggest hint that we need to do  

 

Redaction Countertime    /    261 this to Strauss: “Telling of Julian’s art of writing, I hope I have not betrayed his secret—nor, for that matter, anyone’s secret.” 21 If the expansive pronoun anyone here is read as a substitution for the name Strauss, the meaning of Kojève’s essay must shift to poking fun at the surface Strauss, who clearly misses or meticulously avoids the revelation that some philosophers like Emperor Julian engaged in esoteric writing as much to avoid persecution as for sport. Here Kojève raises the possibility that Strauss might himself be playing a game or having a laugh at his exoteric readers’ expense. Annabel Patterson’s observation that Strauss takes without citation the very notion of esotericism from John Toland (1670–1722) without the anticensorship position from whence it emerged is important here not simply because it is “ironic” as Patterson calls it, but because Strauss claims that we are justified in looking for an esoteric argument beneath an exoteric surface at moments of contradictions, such as when a scholar overtly contradicts himself or when a scholar who should be citing one source meticulously avoids it.22 That any “reasonable,” “elite,” and “trained” scholar could find the reference to Toland suggests that the omission was conscious and not simply a mistake. In other words, in the context of making the argument for esotericism, it seems we must at least entertain the notion that his uncited reference to Toland (near plagiarism in Patterson’s account) itself was intentional, which gives us license to read the argument askew. How might our doubting of Strauss’s overt message in his argument for an elitism and esotericism relate to how we read his arguments on historicism? If his work as a teacher and interpreter of secrets might reveal the kind of buried and egalitarian antithesis to the surface and elitist thesis of Persecution and the Art of Writing, does his own historical distinction between the ancients and the moderns, which underpins his identification of esotericism, hold or not? In other words, if Strauss is writing between the lines in his essay on writing between the lines, is his open critique of historicism also subversively a return to historicity? And further, how do the two issues of esotericism and historicism impact what we have come to know about the products of censorship and their archival traces? Is it good that we have redactions that allow some elite or trained readers to read between their lines despite deletion, substitution, and negation? Or are the products bad because they suggest that communicability is defeated by censorship? This is surely the binary to which the exoteric Straussian line of thinking leads; but a deeper look throws into question the degree to which Strauss as a former colleague of Walter Benjamin and Gershon Scholem strayed from his Marxist and Freudian cohort. Just as Strauss’s critique of historicism is too broad, lumping together  

 

262    /    Coda as it does historical materialism (Benjamin) and telling history as it was (Ranke), area studies scholars have in the name of Jameson’s brand of historical materialism ended with the notion that they are telling history as it was. But if this “as it was” brand of historicism, which stands in contrast to Jameson’s imperative to historicize, inevitably empathizes “with the victor” in history, then it is not surprising that narratives of the history of censorship in Japan have tended to smile more kindly on the American Occupation’s censorship than on the imperial regime’s censorship system.23 The positive existence of censored materials is but one instance in which Benjamin’s suspicion of the archive holds; there is no archival document of civilization that is “not at the same time a document of barbarism” because a document has to endure the taint of the victor’s control of the archive in order to survive. Strauss and Benjamin agree then that historicism is bad. But where Strauss lumps historical materialism with historicism, Benjamin’s distinguishes between them. According to Benjamin, historicism is a kind of reductionism or relativism that will always support history’s victors in a narrative of progress and will always aspire to tell history as it is (from the documents left in the archive today that have been sifted by the violence of war). Historical materialism in Benjamin’s view is more religious or transcendental, because it is consciously engaged today in a struggle “based on a constructive principle.” So if there is something redeemable about either Strauss’s praise of esoteric practice or his critique of historicism, it may be that he might not have been wholly serious about either of them, that we may agree with his esotericism and his critique of historicism without taking them to the extremes that his surface arguments suggest. By revealing the secrets of the ancients, Strauss shows himself to be far more egalitarian than his surface argument might allow and far more historicist than his stark critique of historicism would permit. So while we may find it useful to try to read between the lines, it may be that the meaning behind is less important than the meaning on the page. Or while we may agree that crass historicism is reductive, this does not mean that all historicizations are subject to the same critique. That Strauss could be so easily mistaken by a neoconservative right and that his theory of esotericism’s hidden message could have been overlooked brings us to the core of the problem of writing between the lines, of redaction, and of discussing the products of censorship. The question of censorship or writing and reading between the lines, whether framed as a problem of interpretation (Gadamer), an effect of production (Kojève), or a figure fundamentally of cognition (Lacan), is the question of the limits of communicability. Censorship in this light is but one of a myriad of

Redaction Countertime    /    263 structures of mediation that police produced and received meaning. At the level of critical approach to censorship, the question cannot be solved by choosing between theory or practice, formalism or historicism, but by finding a method for integrating them. So censorship appears as an historical event that is determined on the basis of a formal reading; in that moment, the text is said to contain something offensive. The problem of censorship leads, therefore, to the ethical necessity of taking history and form together. The critic does not have the power to choose one or the other, because we are always doing both. The challenge for area studies is whether to recognize this openly and engage with both or to continue to privilege the historical and geographical instead of critiquing the theory that underpins that privileging. If Strauss’s “reading between the lines” already begs the reader to move away from the language on the page as it directs its gaze to the “empty” spaces between the lines of inked words and to what is not said, then redaction, a negating or “negative space” incorporated into the line itself, makes clear what was always the case even in Strauss: that any “reading between the lines” is only a pretense to reading what is materially present more deeply. To read between the lines is to read the unwritten not from the empty space but from the blanking of space provided by the words set on the page and in the line, to understand what is written as but one instantiation of the possible. Redaction makes clear what is true of writing that appears to be free of excision, persecution, and censorship. X  ＊  X  ＊  X   ＊  X

We might finally lay to rest the conundrum of judging which censorship produced and which destroyed by offsetting the binary that “thinking the gap” entails: the binary between presence and absence, or more specifically, the binary of censorship between production and destruction.24 A new semiotic square could multiply the terms outward to generate more nuanced understandings of reality, but, as Frederic Jameson has consistently shown, while this charting of terms is useful, it remains ultimately disconnected from its intended totality of meaning.25 The square could be an important heuristic device for representing the difficulties of approaching the unapproachable, the unrepresentable totality, or the Lacanian real that will necessarily resist any such modeling. It would reveal what was always foreclosed in the very subject approached, that the topic of historical censorship necessarily raises the seemingly ahistorical question of self-censorship. The square would throw back at its subject a map of how the subject is already cordoned off outside the truth of that subject.

264    /    Coda Figure 10.2 is one configuration of such a semiotic square. In the unity of the “complex term” between the poles represented by production and censorship, we can place Michael Holquist’s recognition that censorship is ineluctable or simply that “censorship is.” 26 On line A, which represents that recognition, we could place authors such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (chapter 5) and Nakano Shigeharu (chapter 9) whose careers were affected by successive encounters with censors. On the “neutral term” of line B, which represents the continuum between the antinomies of the archival and the unarchivable, we can imagine what this book has been claiming about the value of censored material in the archive: that it is but a reminder of all the immaterial literature never published, censored, or written. The notion that there is a canon untouched by censorship and silence, that speaks sheer presence, can be mapped onto the “positive diexis” of line C. The narrative of literary history represented here places supposedly apolitical authors such as Hori Tatsuo (chapter 7) on this line. In opposition to this placement, on the “negative diexis” of line D, where censorship and silence coalesce, might be mapped the ultimate negation form, the murder by the police of Kobayashi Takiji (chapter 7). And to do so here would be to engage in a version of literary history as fantastical as that of the “positive diexis,” a literary history that is the history of silences, that is a counterfactual history of the career of an elder Kobayashi Takiji, had he lived beyond the age of thirty. What remains to be thought are the lines that cross in the middle of the square. The continuum between writing and silence, line E might be imagined in the kind of avant-garde “nonsense” writing that appeared in the shadows of censorship, in the intentional use of the ellipses for aesthetic purpose, or even Kaneko Mitsuharu’s poem “Three Points” (chapter 8). But we can also place on this line the kind of critique proffered by Etō Jun, who proclaimed Yoshida Mitsuru’s career as a writer (chapter 5) to have been stopped before it began because of his encounter with GHQ censors. The archives of the censors’ books held at the Library of Congress, the University of Maryland, the National Diet Library, and various others collections in Japan and the United States (chapter 1), the indexes of banned books (chapter 2), and the essays on censorship (chapter 3) can be placed on the converse, intersecting line F connecting preservation and censorship. So by mapping the vectors of censorship and (in no small part) the chapters of this book thus, the question remains whether a certain totality has been captured. Ultimately, these containers for the mess of the archival material reality are exceeded by the materials themselves, none of which fit quite so

Redaction Countertime    /    265

A

1. write/produce

E

2. censor/destroy

F

C

3. preserve/archive

D

B

4. silence/vanish/absent unarchivable

A. postmodern recognition of the scene of writing = censorship is = writing under censorship (complex term) B. the sum total of the violence of censorship and self-censorship = the way that archive helps us imagine the unarchivable (neutral term) C. the not censored = the canon (positive diexis) D. the ultimate negation = censorship destroys and silences for eternity (negative diexis) E. the written as silent = ... ellipses as the material form of silence F. censorship and archiving on a continuum connected by selection and exclusion

Figure 10.2.  A Semiotic Square

easily in the containers into which the previous paragraphs forced them. Although the square generates new terms from the pernicious binaries, the new terms should neither be conceived of as holding new realities revealed nor should the parts of this book (preservation, production, and redaction) be thought of as some sort of Hegelian model leading to a new paradigm for censorship studies. Consideration of the products of censorship may insist that new words are needed to describe the newly conceived phenomenon. And this has been attempted elsewhere: we are no longer in the age of censorship but in the age of information control; no longer in the moment of history but in the time of the posthuman.27 The story of censorship in Japan across the

266    /    Coda war navigates continuities between seemingly disparate modes of censorship and archival preservation. The two regimes, from the perspective of censorship, are not as bifurcated as has been assumed. We need to let the X at the center of the square ultimately point both to a possible conclusion here in this book and to something forever beyond its possible conclusions. Or to put it another way, this book is but a riddle on the subject of the censor that has yet to find its answer; as the censor Tachibana Takahiro said of fuseji, “They are riddles that expect to erase and to ignore the power of observation of the censor and so must be a great adventure from the start.” 28

Notes

Introduction 1.  See, e.g., Richard H. Mitchell, Censorship in Imperial Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984); Gregory James Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and James Huffman, Creating a Public: People and Press in Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997). Although the publishing laws were publicly known, their changing enforcement was misunderstood by the public and the publishing world. The censor’s office periodically would redefine standards in secret memos and these policy shifts would seem arbitrary to producers of cultural material. See, e.g., the 1930 Mid-Year Overview Report of the Publishing Police, which elaborates standards for censorship that include both the obvious protections against incitement and agitation for revolution and the restraint on introducing methods of abortion as well as the less clear stipulations against “defaming the prestige or honor of foreign dignitaries” and “arousing allure for the red-light districts and other bad areas.” In a section on “special standards,” the report also notes other circumstances that the censor should take into consideration, such as the “scope of readership,” “number of copies issued and the social impact,” “timing of the issuing,” “locality of distribution,” and “number of improper passages.” “Shōwa go nenjū ni okeru shuppan keisatsu gaikan” (1930), reprinted in Shuppan keisatu gaikan, ed. Naimushō keihokyoku, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1988). 2.  See, e.g., Kamei Hideo’s portrayal in “Tokunōgorō to ken’etsu,” in Tokushū hisenryōka no gengo kūkan, special issue, Bungaku 4.5 (2003): 87. See also Taniguchi Akihiro, “Dazai Osamu zenshū no seiritsu: ken’etsu to honbun (Tokushū senryōki no ken’etsu to bungaku),” Intelligence 8 (April 2007): 24– 34, quote on 27. 3.  Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).  

 

267

268    /    Notes 4.  From the Library of Congresses “Censored Japanese Serials of the Pre1946 Period” collection scheduled for microfilming and return to the National Diet Library and designated with the MOJ76.689 designation. Call Number: CLC Ser Z6958.J3.N3 PN4705 Japan. 5.  Taki Yōsaku “Sonae yo! Toki da,” Puroretaria shishū 2, reprinted in Nihon Puroretaria Bungakushū (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1987), 39: 225–26. 6. Etō Jun, Jiyū to kinki (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1984), 287–88. 7.  Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 53. 8.  Honda Shūgo, “ ‘Mujōken kōfuku’ no imi,” Bungei, September 1978. Jay Rubin, “From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the Allied Occupation,” Journal of Japanese Studies 11.1 (Winter 1985): 71–103. 9. Katō Norihiro, Haisengoron (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997); Nishio Kanji, GHQ no funsho tosho kaifū (Tokyo: Tokuma shoten, 2008). 10.  This apparent contradiction is easily resolved by a consideration of Etō’s own flirtations with Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who writes, “Censorship is one of those convenient words which are widely used today because they allow people to seem, with a minimum of effort, decent and right-thinking, the same as everyone else these days. The Left, the Right, and the Centre all agree that one should be anti-censorship, anti-war, anti-racism, pro-human rights or freedom of expression.” Cited in Helen Freshwater, “Towards a Redefinition of Censorship,” in Censorship and Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age, ed. Beate Muller, Critical Studies 22.1 (October 2003): 237. For an example of Etō’s early tendencies, see, e.g., Etō Jun, Natsume Sōseki, Sakkaron shiriizu (Tokyo: Raifusha, 1956), passim. 11.  See tape-recorded radio address by Byron Price and J. H. Ryan, February 20, 1943, National Archives Identifier: 116629. See also “Private Snafu: Censored,” in Army-Navy Screen Magazine 31 (1944), National Archives Identifier: 36197. 12. Etō Jun, “The Sealed Linguistic Space: The Occupation Censorship and Post-War Japan, Part I,” ed. and trans. Jay Rubin, in Hikaku bunka zasshi: Annual of Comparative Culture 2 (1984): 11. See also Etō Jun, Tozasareta gengo kūkan: Senryōgun no ken’etsu to sengo Nihon, Bunshun bunko E-2–8 (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1998), 58–59. 13. Etō, “The Sealed Linguistic Space,” 14. See also Etō Jun, “The Constraints of the 1946 Constitution,” Japan Echo 8.1 (Spring 1981): 45. 14.  Nagai Kafū, “Kyakuhon ken’etsu mondai no hihan,” Shin engei, September 1922, reprinted in Kafū zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962), 27:106–7. 15.  The January 1930 issue of the Publishing Police Report lists several means of controlling what was issued (sashidome) that would precede any ban, including jitatsu (instruction), keikoku (warning), and kondan (meeting). These procedures were neither legislated nor generally explained outside the secretive confines of the office of censorship.  

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   /    269 16.  These meetings were variously known as bungei kondankai (arts colloquium) and konwakai (forum for discussion). Other means of mitigation included a system of kanpu (returns) under which producers could lodge formal requests for the return of seized books on the condition of cutting or revising them before release. 17.  Toshio Nishi, Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1982). 18.  Edward W. Said, “An Interview with Edward W. Said,” boundary 2 20.1 (Spring 1993): 21. 19.  Pierre Bourdieu, “Censorship and the Imposition of Form,” in Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Ramond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 138. 20.  Karatani Kōjin, “Ken’etsu to kindai Nihon bungaku,” in Sai toshite no basho, Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996), 108. For a discussion of Karatani’s argument, see chapter 1. 21. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 36. 22. Edward W. Said, “Criticism between Culture and System,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 221. 23.  Michael Holquist, “Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship,” in Literature and Censorship, special issue, PMLA 109.1 (1994): 22. 24.  See Rubin, “From Wholesomeness to Decadence”; and the proceedings of the International symposium in Tokyo, November 21, 1982, in Takakuwa Kokichi, Etō Jun, Jay Rubin, Isoda Koichi, Yamamoto Shichihei, “Kokusai shinpojiumu ‘Nihon senryō kenkyū’: Makkāsā no ken’etsu,” Shokun! 15.4 (April 1984): 141–46. Rubin presented an English version of the talk at the University of Washington as “Japanese Literature under Two Censorships: Prewar and Postwar” on January 21, 1983. A truncated English-language version is available at the Harvard-Yenching Library in Box 1 of the “Professor Jay Rubin research materials, censorship (Meiji period-pre-war).” 25.  Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 225–44. 26.  See particularly proclamations 358 and 451 of 1868 and 1869. These precursors to the publication laws of the 1880s and 1910s established the institutions that continued to police the Japanese publishing industry even under the auspices of Occupation censorship after the war. 27.  My periodization was to a great extent influenced by the groundbreaking work of John Dower that examines transwar continuities. See, e.g., John Dower, “The Useful War,” in Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 9–32. But I want to distance myself from some of his conclusions, which have been published in his mainstream Englishlanguage narrative of the Occupation, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). Though many of Dower’s various narratives of Japanese complicity with their own occupation appear to  

 

 

 

270    /    Notes have nothing to do with the dominating power of the United States per se, they do not displace the underlying modes of power domination that also and most significantly led to an embrace of defeat. 28.  Ronald Schleifer, Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the Power of Language (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Chapter 1 1.  The National Diet Library Law issued on February 9, 1948, stated clearly that the institution was “established as a result of the firm conviction that truth makes us free and with the object of contributing to international peace and the democratization of Japan as promised in our Constitution” (emphasis added). See the “Kankei hōki” and “Shinri ga warera o jiyū ni suru” pages on the National Diet Library website. 2.  Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xi, 57–63; Alexander Gelley, Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 2. 3. Inamura Tetsugen, “Hakkin tosho mokuroku: 1945 nen izen no igi, ‘Shuppan no jiyū’ no shōgen mono toshite,” Sensō to toshokan shiryō (tokushū) Toshokan zasshi, ed. Nihon toshokan kyōkai, 74.8 (1980): 380–81. 4.  Many of these seized books were destroyed by violence: the warehouse in which they were stored was bombed in January 1945. Yoshiko Yoshimura, ed., Censored Japanese Serials of the Pre-1946 Period: A Checklist of the Microfilm Collection (Ken’etsu Wazasshi [1945-Nen Izen]: Maikurofirumu Chekkurisuto) (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1994), 221n7. 5.  In a realization of Roger Chartier’s notion that “the fear of obliteration” spurred on the preservation of writing, the point of this new policy was clearly to preserve the books through any future tragedies. Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), vii. 6.  For instance, the July 1931 Police Report explains that a proletarian book, Senryaku senjutsu ketsugi roku (Record of agreed-upon strategies and tactics), was banned because it exactly repeated the content of another banned book from April 1930. Odagiri Hideo and Fukuoka Seikichi, eds., Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō (Kawasaki: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankōkai, 1981), 1:213. 7.  Umehara Hokumei, ed., Kidan chinbun dai shūsei: Meiji Taishō (Tokyo: Bungei Ichibasha, Shigakkan Shokyoku, 1931); Umehara Hokumei, ed., Kindai sesō zenshi (Tōkyō: Hakuhōsha, 1931). 8.  “Hatsubai hanpu kinshibon no yukue Shōwa 15 nen,” Daigaku no toshokan 16.1 (1997): 1. 9. Yoshimura, Censored Japanese Serials, vii.  

 

Notes   /    271 10.  Edward J. Drea, Researching Japanese War Crimes Records: Introductory Essays (Washington, DC: Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, 2006). 11.  Wada Atsuhiko lists six schools involved in the program: Northwestern University; Claremont University; University of California, Berkeley; Yale University; and University of Michigan. Harvard’s nonparticipation reveals the fluidity in the interlibrary book trade regardless of origin and history. Wada Atsuhiko, Shomotsu no nichi-bei kankei: riterashī-shi ni mukete (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2007), 196. 12.  Otaki Noritada, “Senzenki Shuppan Keisatsu Hōseika No Toshokan: Sono Etsuran Kinshibon Ni Tsuite No Rekishiteki Sobyō,” Sankō shoshi kenkyū 2.1 (1971); Otaki Noritada and Keiji Tsuchiya, “Teikoku toshokan bunsho ni miru senzenki shuppan keisatsu Hōsei No Ichi Sokumen,” Sankō shoshi kenkyū 12.3 (1976). 13.  Asaoka Kunio, “Ken’etsu hon no yukue: Chiyoda toshokan kura ‘Nai­ mushō itakubon’ o megutte,” Chūkyō daigaku toshokan kiyō 29 (2008): 1–21. 14. Yokote Kazuhiko, “1940 nendai bungaku e no shironteki kōsatsu: gunjiteki heiiki, sakusha, hyōgen, ken’etsu seidō (kindai bungaku ni okeru ‘sakusha’),” Kokugo to kokubungaku 77.5 (2000): 148–58. 15.  Shuppan keisatsuhō, 41 vols. (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1981); Shuppan keisatsu shiryō, 15 vols. (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1982); Shuppan keisatsu kankei shiryō shūsei, 8 vols. (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1986); Shōwa nenchū ni okeru, shuppan keisatsu gaikan, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1988). 16.  Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Religion and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 52. 17.  Though some banned works from the period before the earthquake exist in the current collection, most of those were banned retroactively in the postquake period. Of the more than 1,700 banned books still held at the Library of Congress, only 41 were first published before 1923. Of the more than 1,800 banned titles now held at the National Diet Library, only 22 date from before the quake. 18.  See “Home Ministry Keihokyoku censorship collection” in the Library of Congress Catalog; “特500” and “特501” in the NDL-OPAC Catalog; Odagiri Hideo and Fukuoka Seikichi, Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō, Zōhōban ed. (Kawasaki-shi: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankōkai, 1981); Yokote Kazuhiko, “Ichiranhyō senzen senjiki hiken’etsu bungaku sakuhin shobun risuto,” Heiwa bunka kenkyū 23 (2003): 153–76; Yoshimura, Censored Japanese Serials; Yoshiko Yoshimura, ed., Japanese Government Documents and Censored Publications: A Checklist of the Microfilm Collection (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1992); Atsuhiko, Shomotsu no nichi-bei kankei, 183–213; Yui Masaomi, ed., Shuppan keisatsu kankei shiryō kaisetsu, sōmokuji (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1983), 58; Yoshimura, Japanese Government Documents, 221. In addition, and perhaps most significantly for literary study, the numbers represent only banned books, not serials, though periodicals were the major venue for literary debuts in the period and were banned with fervor.  

 

 

 

272    /    Notes 19.  Tetsugen, “Hakkin tosho mokuroku,” 380. 20.  Yoshiko Yoshimura notes the absorption of many volumes into the general collection, many of which were cataloged with the subject heading “Home Ministry keihokyoku censorship collection.” These are retrievable with computer searches. These 1,115 titles are known. However, of the 5,046 volumes first brought to the United States, only 2,209 titles have been cataloged as banned (the 1,115 still held at the Library of Congress and the 1,094 returned to the National Diet Library). So in theory at least 2,837 (5,046 minus 2,209) books have been integrated into the Library of Congress general collection without reference to their having been censored or having come from the Home Ministry archive. See Yoshimura, Censored Japanese Serials, 220. See also the introduction to Kokuritsu kokkai toshokan shozō hakkin tosho mokuroku: 1945-nen izen (Tokyo: Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan, 1980). 21.  According to the NDL catalog, 940 books exist with the 特500 (Special Collection 500-) call number, which referred to the examination copies returned from the United States. There are 874 books that have the 特501 label, which refers to duplicate copies of banned books originally submitted to the imperial archive and held today at the NDL before the return of some of the censor’s archive collection after their sojourn in the United States. And according to Kokuritsu kokkai toshokan shozō hakkin, an additional 372 books have been absorbed into the general collection after being cataloged as having been banned. From this we get the total of banned examination copies at the NDL to be 2,186. In addition, if we add to this the 1,115 books that were neither microfilmed nor returned to the NDL (the books that were missing in summer 2003 when I first requested them), we get a total of 3,301 cataloged books. 22.  See University of Maryland Libraries Staff with Japan Staff National Diet Library, eds., Guide to the Gordon W. Prange Magazine Collection (New York: Norman Ross Publishing, 2001); Eizaburō Okuizumi, ed., User’s Guide to the Gordon W. Prange Collection: Microfilm Edition of Censored Periodicals, 1945–1949 (Tokyo: Yūshōdō Booksellers, 1982); and www.prangedb.jp. See also the account of the collection and cataloging in Sara Christine Snyder, “Odyssey of an Archive: What the History of the Gordon W. Prange Collection of Japanese Materials Teaches Us about Libraries, Censorship, and Keeping the Past Alive” (master’s thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2007). 23. Yokote Kazuhiko, Hi senryōka no bungaku ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Musashino Shobō, 1995); Yokote Kazuhiko, Hi senryōka no bungaku ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Musashino Shobō, 1996). More recent work on the Prange casts its net even wider than censorship alone to the entirety of Occupation materials held there. See Yamamoto Taketoshi, Kawasaki Kenko, Toeda Hirokazu, and Munakata Kazushige, eds., Senryōki zasshi shiryō taikei: Bungaku hen, 5 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009); Yamamoto Taketoshi, Ishii Hitoshi, Tanikawa Takeshi, and Harada Ken’ichi, ed., Senryōki zasshi shiryō taikei: Taishū bunka hen, 5 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2008).  

Notes   /    273 24.  See Okuizumi, User’s Guide, passim. 25.  Even Ann Laura Stoler, who continues the fetish and fever of the archive in new ways, displays that it is less our ability to collect or preserve the archive than our ability read the archival grain and against the archival grain that will best drive us toward understanding. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Prince­ton: Prince­ ton University Press, 2009). 26.  Karatani Kōjin, “Ken’etsu to kindai Nihon bungaku,” in Sai toshite no basho, Kōdansha gakujitsu bunko (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2000), 108. The article was originally published in 1981; the parenthetical is in the original. The term closed space comes directly from the work of Etō Jun. 27.  Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 130. 28.  Judith Butler, “Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post, Issues and Debates Series 4 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), 249–50. 29.  For a prolonged discussion of taking and giving offense, see J. M. Coet­ zee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), passim. 30.  Graph derived from data in Odagiri Hideo and Fukuoka Seikichi, eds., Shōwa shoseki, zasshi, shinbun hakkin nenpyō, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Meiji Bunken, 1965); Yokote Kazuhiko, “Ichiranhyō,” 153–76; and Yoshimura, Japanese Government Documents. 31.  See Katō Norihiro, Amerika no kage: Sengo saiken (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995), particularly part 1, which deals with the literature on high growth. 32.  Franco Moretti, “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History,” New Left Review 24 (November-December 2003): 72. 33.  See Peter F. Kornicki, “Nishiki no Ura: An Instance of Censorship and the Structure of a Sharebon,” Monumenta Nipponica 32.2 (Summer 1977): 153–88; Peter F. Kornicki, “The Enmeiin Affair of 1803: The Spread of Information in The Tokugawa Period,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42.2 (December 1982): 503–33. 34.  Graph derived from statistics in Shuppan nenkan from 1926–1943 and Nihon Shoseki Shuppan Kyōkai, ed., Nihon shuppan hyakunenshi nenpyō (Tokyo: Nihon Shoseki Shuppan Kyōkai, 1968), 1064–65. See also Yui, Shuppan keisatsu kankei, 39. 35.  Running a standard mathematical correlation between the literature published over the period as a percentage of the total books published and the literature banned as a percentage of total literature banned, I have derived a statistically insignificant correlation coefficient of -0.26. A mathematically insignificant correlation between the heightened bans and the amount of literary books actually published during the period, even when we account for the changes over the period in publications, in general helps to make the case  

 

 

 

 

 

274    /    Notes that bans had a negligible effect on the quantity of literature published for the period. 36. Werner Hamacher, “One 2 Many Multiculturalisms,” in Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 311. 37.  Moretti, “Graphs, Maps, Tree,” 67–68. 38.  David Greetham, “ ‘Who’s In, Who’s Out’: The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (March 1999): 2. 39.  The revised, second edition, which was also censored, is available in the NDL Home Ministry collections. 40.  This term, shizen funsho (自然焚書), was suggested by the literature scholar Komori Yōichi in a personal conversation on June 11, 2002. 41.  Nishio Kanji, GHQ no funsho tosho kaifū (Tokyo: Tokuma shoten, 2008). 42.  See, e.g., Hasegawa Ryō, Nichibei kaisen no shinsō (The facts about the outbreak of war between Japan and America), Dai-Nippon Shuppan; Araki Sadao, Teikoku no gunjin seishin (The spirit of the imperial soldier), Chōfūsha; Yamada Yoshio, Kokutai no hongi (Underlying principles of the national polity), Hō bunkan; Mushakōji Saneatsu, Daitōa sensō shikan (Personal impressions of the Great East Asian War), Kawade Shobo. 43. See Rengōkokugun sōshireibu kara bosshū o meizerareta senden yō kankōbutsu sōmokuroku: gojūonjun (General index of publications for propaganda purposes, subject to confiscation by the Directive of the SCAP) (Tokyo: Monbushō Shakai Kyōikukyoku, 1948). Senryōshi Kenkyūkai, GHQ no bosshū o manugareta hon: tosho mokuroku (Kamakura-shi: Sawazu shuppan, 2007). 44.  Among the books on the list to be confiscated are Itō Sei, Sensō no bungaku, Zenkoku Shobō; Watsuji Tetsurō, Nihon no shindō, Amerika no kokuminsei, Chikuma Shobo; Kikuchi Kan, Ni-sen roppyaku nen shisshō, Dōmei Tsūshinsha; Yanagita Kunio, Shintō to minzokugaku, Meiseidō Shoten. 45.  Bunka Hōkōkai, ed., Dai tōa sensō rikugun hōdō hanʾin shuki (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1943). 46.  Press, Publications and Broadcast Division, SCAP Civil Intelligence Section: Press, Censorship (Books), National Archives and Records Administration, NWCTM-331-UD1803–855, RG 331, UD 1803, Box 8655. Folder 10. 47.  Ozaki Shirō, “Hitobunshi no kokuhaku,” in Ozaki Shirō zenshū, vol. 12 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1965). 48.  Richard Burt, “Introduction: The ‘New’ Censorship,” in The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt, Social Text Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xvii–xviii. 49. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 141; Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), xxix.  

 

 

Notes   /    275

Chapter 2 1.  See, e.g., Shuppan keisatsuhō, 41 vols. (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1981); Shuppan keisatsu shiryō, 15 vols. (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1982); Shuppan keisatsu kankei shiryō shūsei, 8 vols. (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1986); Shōwa nenchū ni okeru, shuppan keisatsu gaikan, 3 vols (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1988). 2. Saitō Shōzō, “Shuppan keisatsu hō,” October 1928, reprinted in Shomo­ tsushi Tenbō (Tokyo: Yagi Shoten, 1955), 84–85. This was also reprinted in Gotō Kenji, ed., Saitō Shōzō Chosakushū (Tachikawa: Yashio Shoten, 1980), 5:84–85. 3.  Yui Masaomi, ed., Shuppan keisatsu kankei shiryō kaisetsu, sōmokuji (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1983), 58. 4.  In fact, the numbers suggest that in relation to the gains of other classifications, the increases in literature actually can be seen as relative decreases across the board. 5. Saitō Shōzō, ed., Gendai hikka bunken dai nenpyō (Tokyo: Suikodō, 1932), 4. 6.  Otaki Noritada has taken up the project since the 1970s and made indexing the work of the imperial censors his lifework, which he hopes to complete soon. Otaki Noritada, personal interview with author, July 10, 2008, Tokyo. 7. The figure does not include, e.g., the following other related works: Miyatake Gaikotsu, Hikkashi (Tokyo: Asakaya shoten, 1926); Haga Eizō, Meiji Taishō Hikkashi (Tokyo: Bunkōsha, 1924); Haga Eizō, Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa Hikkashi (Tokyo: Jissai kagakusha, 1927); Jō Ichirō, Hakkinbon hyakunen: Shomotsu ni miru ningen no jiyū (Tokyo: Tōgensha, 1969); Jō Ichirō, Yonezawa Yoshihiro, and Takahashi Yōji, Hakkinbon: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa, Heisei: Jō Ichirō Korekushon, Bessatsu Taiyō (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1999); Jō Ichirō and Yonezawa Yoshihiro, Hakkinbon II: Chikabon No Sekai, Bessatsu Taiyō (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001); Jō Ichirō and Yonezawa Yoshihiro, Hakkinbon III: Shugi Shumi Shukyo, Bessatsu Taiyō (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2002). 8.  For more on the relationship of the censor to onomastics, see chapter 9. 9. Saitō, Kindai bungei hikkashi (Tokyo: Sūbundō, 1924); Haga, Meiji Taishō Hikkashi; Akama Tōhō, ed., Kinshibon shomoku (Kyōto: Akama kōbundō, 1927); Tosho shūhō henshūbu, ed., Meiji Taishō hatsubai kinshi shomoku (Tokyo: Kotensha, 1932); Saitō Shōzō, ed., Gendai hikka bunken dai nenpyō; Itō Chikusui, ed., Meiji Taishō Shōwa bungei hikka sakuin, special issue, Ikamo no shumi, dai 4 tokugō (Tokyo: Suikodō, 1935); Odagiri Hideo, ed., Hakkin sakuhinshū (Tokyo: Yakumo Shoten, 1948); Odagiri Hideo, ed., Hakkin sakuhinshū, 2nd ed. (Tokyo: Hokushindō, 1956); Odagiri Hideo, ed., Zoku hakkin sakuhinshū (Tokyo: Hokushindō, 1957); Odagiri Hideo and Fukuoka Seikichi, eds., Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō, Zōhōban ed. (Kawasaki: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankōkai, 1981). For a cursory overview and pictorial of some of the covers of these titles, see Jō, Hakkinbon II, 152–57. For another list of research on banned literature contemporaneous with censorship, see Saitō’s preface to his list compiled in 1932.  

 

 

276    /    Notes 10. Odagiri, Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō, 1:158. 11.  Ibid., 1:510. 12.  See Edward Thomas Mack II, “The Value of Literature: Cultural Authority in Interwar Japan” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2002), 165–89. 13. Saitō, “Jijo,” in Gendai hikka bunken dai nenpyō, 3. 14.  Carol Gluck, “The Fine Folly of the Encyclopedists,” in Currents in Japanese Culture: Translations and Transformations, ed. Amy Vladeck Heinrich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 243. Inamura, Tetsugen, “Hakkinbon mokuroku no shūhen,” in Kindai hon ni okeru hakkinbon to sono shūhen tansaku tokugō (Osaka: Naniwa shorin kōsho mokuroku, 1980), 10:12. 15.  Osatake Takeki, “Jo,” in Saitō, Gendai hikka bunken dai nenpyō, n.p. 16. Akama, Kinshibon shomoku, n.p., emphasis added. 17. Odagiri, Hakkin sakuhinshū, 3. 18. Akama, Kinshibon shomoku, n.p. 19.  David Greetham, “ ‘Who’s In, Who’s Out’: The Cultural Poetics Of Archival Exclusion,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (Spring 1999): 1–28. 20. Itō, Meiji Taishō Shōwa bungei hikka sakuin, n.p. 21.  Tachibana Takahirō, “Jo,” in Saitō, Gendai hikka bunken dai nenpyō, n.p. 22. Saitō, “Jijo,” n.p. 23. Osatake, “Jo,” n.p., emphasis added. For his views on banning, see Osatake Takeki, “Nihon tosho zasshi hakkinshi,” in Sōgō janarizumu kōza (Tokyo: Naigaisha, 1930–31). 24.  See, e.g., Etō Jun’s criticism of the list of banned books included in the Nihon kindai bungaku dai jiten (Great encyclopedia of modern Japanese literature), which though published years after the Occupation repeats what is for Etō the most important stipulation of that censorship system: that reference to censorship should not be made. Although Etō’s sharp criticism is well taken, after some statistical analysis one could possibly find that the relative lack of books listed as banned under the Occupation censorship may reflect the fact that statistically fewer literary books were actually banned during the three-year height of Occupation censorship than in the prior seventy years. Etō Jun, “Amerika wa Nihon de no ken’etsu o ika ni junbi shite ita ka” (1982), reprinted in Tozasareta gengo kūkan: Senryō no ken’etsu to sengo, Nihon, Bunshun bunko (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1994), 11–12. See also his early paper mentioning the collection: Etō Jun, “The Civil Censorship in Occupied Japan,” in Hikaku bunka zasshi: Annual of Comparative Culture 1 (1982): 3–4, reprinted in Etō Jun, “The Censorship Operation in Occupied Japan,” in Press Control around the World, ed. Jane Leftwich Curry and Joan Dassin (New York: Praeger, 1982), 238. 25. Akama, Kinshibon shomoku, n.p.. 26. Saitō, “Jijo,” 1–2. 27. Itō, Meiji Taishō Shōwa bungei hikka sakuin, n.p. 28. Ibid. 29.  He goes on to list many others including Aoyama’s novella 海辺の人  

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   /    277 (Seaside people) and Inoue Tatsuzō’s 男性解放 (Emancipation of men). Odagiri, Zoku hakkin sakuhinshū, 242. 30.  Odagiri, “Atogaki,” in Odagiri and Fukuoka, Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō, 3:1–2. 31.  Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (New York: Verso, 1993). 32.  Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 23. 33.  Some lists also add the author, date of first publication, and the reasoning (law) under which the ban took place. 34.  Walter Benjamin, “The Collector,” in The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 207. 35.  Odagiri’s coeditor Fukuoka Seikichi is here not to be forgotten, since it is he who seems to have done the lion’s share of the research while Odagiri’s name, clout, and determination certainly played a formidable role in the list’s eventual publication. 36. Saitō Shōzō, ed., Meiji bungei sokumenshō, vol. 1 (Yokohama: Jugaisha, 1916); vol. 2 (Los Angeles: Hakubundō shoten, 1916); vol. 3 (Tokyo: Sokumensha, 1916). According to the colophons of all extant volumes, the books were “not for sale” (非売品). 37. Saitō Shōzō, “Nihon hakkin bungei kō,” Amatoria, August 1958, 1–2. The anxiety of completeness is echoed in Saitō’s preface to volume 11 of his Hentai jūnishi (1927): “Even though this book was compiled as only one volume of the Hentai jūnishi collection, it was banned from being sold and distributed before it was published. And in the end the complete book could not be seen, so we endeavored to preserve the galleys; nevertheless, we could not get from page 2 up through 53 of the total 150 pages; so it is all the more incomplete.” Reprinted in Jō, Yonezawa, and Takahashi, Hakkinbon: Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa, Heisei, 83. 38. Odagiri, Zoku hakkin sakuhinshū, 240–41. 39.  Odagiri and Fukuoka, Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō, 3:3. 40. Akama, Kinshibon shomoku, n.p. 41. Saitō, “Jijo,” n.p. 42.  Osatake, “Jo,” n.p. 43.  We would do well to remember, along with the unprecedented publication of the “complete” works of Marx and Engels, the banning of certain other works by Marx (not to mention those by Engels, Lenin, and others) in the years during the publication of the set: Karl Marx, Jiyū bōeki mondai, trans. Tobari Hiroshi (Kyōto: Kōbundō Shobō, 1928); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Kyōsantō sengen, De Riyazanofu hyōchū, trans. Ōtaguro Kenkyūjo, 4th ed. (Tokyo: Kasai Shoten, 1932); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marukusu Engerusu “shiteki yuibutsuron” shū (Tokyo: Kibōkaku, n.d.); Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, et al., Marukusu shugi no shūkyō hihan: Marukusu, Enge­ rusu, Rênin, Purehanofu, Buharin ronshū, ed. Asano Kenshin (Tokyo: Daitō Shuppansha, 1931); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Kyōsan shugi to wa nanzo  

 

 

 

278    /    Notes ya, trans. Sakai Toshihiko (Tokyo: Hakuyōsha, 1931); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marukusu Engerusu kisō XXX sengen (Tokyo: Nihon Puroretaria Kagaku Dōmei, 1933); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marukusu Engerusu shiteki yuibutsuron taikei, ed. Heruman Dounkeru, trans. Inomata (Tokyo: Kōshinsha, 1932); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marukusu Engerusu Kyōsantō sengen, trans. Ōura Kiyomitsu, Riyazanofu hyōchū (Tokyo: Puroretaria Shōbō, 1931); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Shakai shisō zenshū, vol. 18 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1928). 44.  Miriam Rom Silverberg, Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 165. One could even look at the confiscation of the early publication by the old NAPF (Nippona Artista Proleta Federacio) of the Nakano Shigeharu shishū during this period as proof of the anomaly that the publication of the Marx collection represents. It also gives an idea of the sporadic nature of censorship, which had overlooked the Nakano poems at first when published individually before the seizure. For more on the seizure, see Tsuboi Shigeji, “Bunka tōsō to ken’etsu seido ni tai suru ronsō” Puroretaria bunka, February 1932, reprinted in Tsuboi Shigeji zenshū, ed. Tsuboi Shigeji Zenshū Henshū Iinkai, Shohan ed. (Tokyo: Seijisha, 1988), 215; Akiyama Kiyoshi, Hakkin shishū (Tokyo: Chōbunsha, 1970), 130–38. 45.  We should also note Arai Tetsu’s view that though in theory some things should be banned, in practice it is easy for them to fall through the cracks. Arai Tetsu, “Ken’etsukan to kataru,” in Arai Tetsu no zen shigoto: Uchino Kenji jidai o fukumu teikō no shi to hyōron (Tokyo: Arai Tetsu Chosaku Kankō Iinkai, 1983), 285. 46. Itō, Meiji Taishō Shōwa bungei hikka sakuin, n.p. 47. Odagiri, Hakkin sakuhinshū, 1. 48. Odagiri, Zoku hakkin sakuhinshū, 239. 49. Saitō Shōzō, Hakkinbon ōrai (Tokyo: Shochiōraisha, 1960), 3. 50.  Publications and Broadcast Division SCAP Civil Intelligence Section: Press, Censorship (Books), National Archives and Records Administration, NWCTM-331-UD1803–855, RG 331, UD 1803, Box 8655. The offending selections were a letter to Mukyu Kimura and a collection of marching songs by Kozaka Kukoku and Kodama Kagai. 51.  It also happens to be the last year that statistics for banned books were printed along with statistics of books published. 52. Etō is not the only one for whom this is true. Katō Norihiro and Nishio Kanji follow in his steps. See Katō Norihiro, Nihon no mushisō (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001); Nishio Kanji, GHQ no funsho tosho kaifū (Tokyo: Tokuma shoten, 2008), passim.  

 

Chapter 3 1.  Tosaka Jun, “Ken’etsuka no shisō to fūzoku” (1936), reprinted in Tosaka Jun zenshū (Tokyo: Keiso shobō, 1966), 5:80.

Notes   /    279 2.  Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), 231; Gregory James Kasza, The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 35. 3.  See, e.g., Chūō kōron 43.10 (October 1928) and 43.12 (December 1928); Kaizō 8.10 (September 1926); Shuzai ken’etsu seido hihan kōenkai (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun, 1929); Kindai hikka bunkengō, special issue, Bungei shijō 2.11 (November 1926); and Futō ken’etsu hantai tokugō, special issue, Puroretaria geijutsu 1.3 (September 1927), among others. 4.  For example, on November 16, 1932, the fourth volume of Hosokawa Karoku’s A Course in the History of the Development of Capitalism was banned not only for “praising the Marxist and Leninist dialectal materialism” but also for the seditious “passages that lavish praising interpretations on previously banned publications.” Shuppan keisatsuhō (Tokyo: Ryūkei Shosha, 1932), n51. As early as the January 1928 Publishing Police Report (Shuppan keisatsu hō), the calls for reform of the censorship system were noted as objectionable by the censors. The December 1934 issue lists recent problems with leftist thought, including increased demands for freedom of expression. The following volume in the Library of Congress collection of examination copies was banned for an article that called for the end of the censorship system in 1934: Hisaita Eijirō and Ikeda Seiji, Engeki undō no atarashiki hatten no tame ni (Tokyo: Nihon Puroretaria Engeki Dōmei Shuppanbu, 1934), 49. The September 1935 issue of the Publishing Police Materials (Shuppan keisatsu shiryō) lists a number of publications about the controls on the press. The July 1936 issue cites an article on freedom of the press in Chūō Kōron. 5.  I have elected to quote from the nonstandard “original” rather than the canonically collected version of the text available in the zenshū and various translated editions, for reasons that will become apparent in the following section, “Of Fuseji, Fug, and other Fig Leaves.” Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Kappa,” Kaizō March 1927, digitized from reprint in Kappa: Aru ahō no isshō (Tokyo: Ōbunsha, 1984), available at the Aozora bunko website. See also Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Kappa,” in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1978), 8:314. 6.  Akutagawa, at the Aozora bunko website; see also Akutagawa, “Kappa,” 8:325. 7.  See Karl Marx, “On Freedom of the Press,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975) 1:132–81; Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1960), 21:166; Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition, 8:5; Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography (Chicago: Playboy, 1965); Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009). 8.  Uchida Roan, “Bungei sakuhin no hatsubai kinshi mondai: ‘Yaregaki’ hatsubai kinshi ni tsuki tōrosha oyobi kōko ni tsugu” (1908), reprinted in  

 

280    /    Notes Odagiri Hideo, ed., Hakkin sakuhinshū, 2nd ed. (Tokyo: Hokushindō, 1956), 13–25. 9.  Uchida, “Bungei sakuhin no hatsubai,” 19. 10.  See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 59–68. 11.  Uchida, “Bungei sakuhin no hatsubai,” 19. 12.  Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” 166. 13.  Fujimori, “Hatsubai kinshi no mondai nit suite,” Kaizō, September, 1926, 107. Fujimori’s is the most adamantly against censorship of all the essays considered here, though even he recognizes that the abolition of censorship at the present moment would be impossible, however desirable. 14.  We would do well to recall interrogation scenes in two fictional works: Kappa and Tanizaki’s “The Censor” (1921) both use interrogation scenes, one by a psychologist, the other by a censor, for ironic effect. In “The Censor,” the Tanizaki-like artist is given the initial K, while the censor (ken’etsukan) is called T. Tosaka, Tosaka Jun zenshū, 7:483; Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, 242–43. While the mixings of author-censor and censor-author refer to a mutual relationship where the author is called into being and the censor defines the identity of the state through censorship, the argument that constitutes the majority of the story posits the censor as a misinterpreter of literature. See also the film Warai no daigaku (University of laughs), dir. Hoshi Mamoru, 2004. Also worth mentioning here is that epigonen is of course a Greek word adopted by Marx, but under the influence, no doubt, of K. L. Immerman’s humorous Die Epigonen. Nii Itaru, “Hikka saiban,” Bungei shijō, November 1926, 24. 15.  Ken’etsu seido hihan, Asahi minshū kōza 13 (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1929). At the time, this was a buzzword on issues ranging from economics and politics to household organization and hygiene. Sheldon M. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State In Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 128–33, 172–74. 16.  Ōya Sōichi, “Daikan seiji toshite no ken’etsu seido,” in Ōya Sōichi zenshū (Tokyo: Sōyōsha: Hatsubai Eichōsha, 1980), 277. Originally published February 1929 by Tokyo Asahi shinbun in the collection Shuzai ken’etsu seido hihan kōenkai. 17.  Ibid., 279. 18.  This is, in fact, what happened with the censorship reform movement mentioned in Rubin and Matsu’ura. See Odagiri, Hakkin sakuhinshū, 269–93, for a reprint of the pamphlet. 19.  Heywood Broun and George S. Chappell, eds., Nonsenseorship: Sundry Observations Concerning Prohibitions, Inhibitions and Illegalities (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922). 20.  Ibid., iii. 21.  Miki Kiyoshi, “Ken’etsu no sekinin” (1940), reprinted in Miki Kiyoshi zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1968), 16:468–69. Masamune Hakuchō similarly turns the tables on the government in an article about censorship,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   /    281 accusing the Ministry of Education of pirating literary works in their textbooks. Masamune Hakuchō, “Hatsubai kinshi ni tsuite” (1924), reprinted in Masamune Hakuchō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1967), 89. 22.  Karl Marx, “Comments on The Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction,” in Works of Karl Marx 1842, originally published in Anekdota zur neuesten deutshen Philosohpie und Publicistic, book 1, 1843, available on the Marxists Internet Archive website. 23.  This common characterization is evident in Kozakai Fuboku’s essay on the psychology of the censor: Kozakai Fuboku, “Ken’etsukan no shinri,” Shimi, March 1927, reprinted in Kozakai Fuboku zenshū (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1930), 12:82. 24.  Shiratori Seigo, “ ‘Satsuriku no dendō’ to iu shi,” Kindai hikka bun­ kengō, special issue, Bungei shijō 2.11 (November 1926): 34. 25.  While calling for a more sensitive censor, Miki identifies the hypothetical difficulties that a change in censorial standards would entail for writers. Miki, “Ken’etsu no sekinin,” 469. Tachibana also discusses the unchanging nature of the standards for censorship in light of changing times and places and the personal tastes and fancies of the censor. Tachibana, “Jo,” 8. Ōya writes of the discrepancies in how the censor confronts texts in different venues. Ōya, “Daikan seiji toshite,” 279. 26.  Ōya, “Daikan seiji toshite,” 277. 27.  Ibid., 281. 28.  Miki, “Ken’etsu no sekinin,” 468. 29.  Ibid., 469. 30.  Kobayashi Takiji, Kobayashi Takiji zenshū (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1982), 485. 31.  Tsuboi repeatedly uses this epithet in varying figurations. Tsuboi Shigeji, “Bunka tōsō to ken’etsu seido ni tai suru ronsō,” Puroretaria bunka, February 1932, reprinted in Tsuboi Shigeji zenshū, ed. Tsuboi Shigeji Zenshū Henshū Iinkai, Shohan ed. (Tokyo: Seijisha, 1988), 216. 32.  See, e.g., early Shōwa issues of Yūmoa magazine for oblique jibes at the censor in cartoon form. 33.  Adachi Gen, “Puroretaria gejutsu to ero guro nansensu,” Kindai ga­ setsu 15 (2006): 20. 34.  For more on reform of censorship, see the pamphlet of this league opposing censorship: Ken’etsu seidō kaisei kisei dōmei chōsa iinkai, “Wareware wa ikanaru ken’etsu seidō no shita ni sarasarete iru ka,” reprinted in Odagiri, Hakkin sakuhinshū, 269–93. 35.  Shimizu Keimokurō, “Kakaru ken’etsu seido kaisei seyo!” Kaihō, January 1928: 95. 36.  Michael Holquist, “Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship,” Literature and Censorship, special issue, PMLA 109.1 (1994): 16 37.  Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition, 8:5.  

282    /    Notes 38.  Karatani, “Hyūmoa,” Hyūmoa toshite no yuibutsuron, Kōdansha gaku­ jutsu bunko 1359 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999), 140–41. 39.  Ōya Sōichi, “Daikan seiji toshite no ken’etsu seido,” Tokyo Asahi shinbun shuzai ken’etsu seido hihan kōenkai, February 1929, reprinted in Ōya Sōichi zenshū (Tokyo: Sōyōsha Hatsubai Eichōsha, 1980), 279, emphasis added. 40.  Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 77. 41.  I have adapted these terms from Frederick Schauer, “The Ontology of Censorship,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post, Issues & Debates Series 4 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), 147–68. 42.  Here I intercede and rewrite Derrida’s notion that the “concern for death . . . is another name for freedom.” Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15. 43.  Samuel Roth, “The Censor,” in Stone Walls Do Not: The Chronicle of a Captivity (New York: William Faro, 1931), 2:187–92. 44.  Onchi Terutake [Kimura Shigeo], “Ken’etsuri ni,” in Nihon puroretaria bungaku shū (Tokyo: Shin nihon shuppansha, 1987), 28:198. This was originally published in the February 1931 edition of Puroretaria shi. 45.  These cases are telling exceptions to the discourses from which they are wrenched. See also Onchi Terutake, “Yume to hakkotsu to no seppun,” in Onchi Terutake shishū (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shijinsha, 1961), 16–37. 46.  The suicides of these periodicals should be contrasted with the valiant survival in the face of censorship of the French Canard Enchaîné through World War I and beyond described in Allen Douglas, War, Memory, and The Politics of Humor: The Canard Enchaîné and World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 47.  John Sayer, “Art and Politics, Dissent and Repression: The Masses Magazine Versus the Government, 1917–1918,” American Journal of Legal History 32.1 (January 1988): 44. 48.  Art Young, Art Young: His Life And Times, ed. John Nicholas Beffel (New York: Sheridan House, 1939), 322. 49.  The “credo” of the magazine read, “This magazine is owned and Published Co-operatively by its Editors.” Quoted in Sayer, “Art and Politics, Dissent and Repression,” 44. 50.  Max Eastman, “The Post Office Censorship,” The Masses, September 1917, 24. 51. Was The Masses killed or did it commit suicide? The Masses’ suicide by post reiterates Derrida’s claim of postcards; “je me trie———je me tue (I sort myself/I kill myself).” Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 16. 52.  In the masthead of each issue of Kokkei shinbun. 53.  Kokkei shinbun, August 20, 1908. 54.  “Jisatsu gō” Kokkei shinbun, October 20, 1908, 173. 55.  Thomas E. Gould, “ ‘A Tiny Operation with Great Effect’: Authorial  

 

 

 

 

Notes   /    283 Revision and Editorial Emasculation in the Manuscript of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls,” in Blowing the Bridge: Essays on Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls, ed. Rena Sanderson and Robert H. Walker (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 79; Okunari Tatsu, Okazaki Hideo, and Toneri Eiichi, eds., Fuseji bungaku jiten: XX o tanoshimu hon (Tokyo: Ōtakushinpōsha, 1977), 3–22. 56.  Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory, Warwick Studies in European Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2000), 9; Margaret DiCanio, The Encyclopedia of Violence: Origins, Attitudes, Consequences (New York: Facts on File, 1993). 57.  Raymond Williams, “Violence,” in Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 329–31. 58.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 34. 59.  In fact, the scars may be sites of not only infamy but also desire, pleasure, nostalgia, and freedom.  

 

Chapter 4 1.  Tachibana Kōshiro [Takahiro], “Hikidashi no yubiwa,” Hanzai kagaku, February 1931, 179. 2.  Ibid., 180. 3.  Tachibana Kōshiro [Takahiro], Kore ijō wa kinshi: aru ken’etsu kaka­ richō no shuki (Tokyo: Senshinsha, 1932), 205–6. 4.  The May 1932 edition of Hanzai kagaku (3.6) was banned for obscenity according to Shuppan keisatsu hō, 44:79. 5.  Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, Theory and History of Literature 14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); V. F. Calverton and Samuel Daniel Schmalhausen, Sex in Civilization (New York: Macaulay, 1929). 左翼と>性慾の交響楽 cited in Tanizawa Eiichi, “Ero guro nansensu: ‘Kafe no jidai,’ Umehara Hokumei nado,” in Nihon bungaku kenkyū shiryō sōsho: Shōwa no bungaku, ed. Nihon Bungaku Kenkyū Shiryō Kankōkai (Tokyo: Yūseidō Shuppan, 1981), 74. 6.  These were Shikijō hanzai seiyoku no shinpi; Sekiaku no zasshiō: Noma Seiji no hansei; Kami nagara no Nihon seishin; Chijō hanzai torimono hiwa; Shūmi no hōritsu ura hyō; Shibai zange; Nankai no jōnetsu; Ajia henkyō ibun; Nanpō no seikatsu kagaku; Heitai seikatsu; and Yomikiri adauchi shōsetsu shu. 7.  Tachibana Takahiro, Kore ijō wa kinshi, 55; F. L. Wheeler writes that the “modern generation” has “a virus in their blood—the virus of universal chaos consequent upon war; of a world of spiritual, intellectual, and economic principles in a state of flux.” F. L. Wheeler, Modernity (London: Williams & Norgate, 1929) 65. 8. Kōjimachi Kōji and Kita Sōichirō, eds., Modan yōgo jiten (Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 1930). Facsimile version republished in Kindai yōgo no jiten shūsei, vol. 13 (Tokyo: Ōzorasha, 1995).  

 

 

284    /    Notes 9.  The phrase the “period of three Ss” (san S jidai) referred to speed, sports, and screen in the early 1930s and not “sports, screen, and sex” until the postwar era when the US occupiers were said to have brought in a “3S policy” (san S seisaku). For examples of the “period of three Ss” referring to speed, sports, and screen, see “San esu jidai” (1932) and Kyōdo fūkei (1933); “San esu jidai,” Fujin kurabu 13.8 (1932) and Kyōdo fūkei (Tokyo: Kyōiku Bijutsukan Shuppanbu, 1933), 58–59. For more on the postwar “three S policy,” see Ian Buruma, Inventing Japan, 1853–1964 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), 135. Also note that Tokayer and Swartz write about the evils of “sex, screen, sports” being the influence of Jews in Japan. Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews during World War II (New York: Paddington, 1979), 141. 10.  See, e.g., the numerous volumes of Kōji Kōjimachi and Kita Sōichirō, eds., Modan yōgo jiten (Tōkyō-shi: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 1930), reprinted in Kindai yōgo no jiten shūsei, vol. 13 (Tōkyō: Ōzorasha, 1995). 11.  Gertzman borrows these terms from Max Weber. Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 23, 28, 37–38. 12.  Tanizawa Ei’ichi, “Ero guro nansensu: ‘Kafe no jidai,’ Umehara Hokumei nado,” in Nihon bungaku kenkyū shiryō sōsho: Shōwa no bungaku, ed. Nihon Bungaku Kenkyū Shiryō Kankōkai (Tōkyō: Yūseidō Shuppan, 1981), 74. 13.  Yamaguchi Masao, ‘Zasetsu’ no Shōwa shi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 349. See also Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque : The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 184, 191. See also the “XX bungaku no yakata: zasshi shiryō Kamashasutora” webpage. 14.  See “Erosu no kaitakusha: Umehara Hokumei no shigoto,” Erochika 42 (1973); Jō Ichirō, Hakkinbon zoku, Fukutake bunko (Tokyo: Fukutake shoten, 1991); and Umehara Masaki, “Umehara Hokumei sono ashiato,” in Dokyumento Nihonjin, ed. Muraoka Kū (Tokyo: Gakugei shorin, 1968), 6:220–41, passim. 15.  Masaki, “Umehara Hokumei sono ashiato,” 226. 16.  Ibid., 227. 17. Joshua Kunitz, “Albert Rhys Williams: A Biographical Sketch,” in Through the Russian Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), passim. 18.  A. R. Williams, Roshia daikakumeishi, trans. Umehara Hokumei and Uyama Asatarō (Tokyo: Asakaya shoten, 1925), n.p. This was a Japanese translation of Through the Russian Revolution, published in 1921. 19.  Umehara Hokumei, “Dankikan hishi: sayokuha ero no kaidendō kindai yōkiteki hyakkaten,” in Nichibunken Pamphlet Collection UC71Um (Tokyo: Dankikan shokyoku,1930), n.p. 20. Umehara, “Mirabō haku no chinpon” [Dr Mirabeau’s rare books], Gurotesuku 1.1 (1928): 146–9; Umehara Masaki, “Umehara Hokumei sono ashiato,” 232–37.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   /    285 21.  See Jō, Hakkinbon zoku; Umehara Masaki, “Umehara Hokumei sono ashiato.” 22.  For more on this burgeoning discourse and its relation to the nationstate, see Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, Colonialisms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), passim. 23.  He may have even published under Yoshikawa Eiji’s name during this time, though this is in dispute. Isogai Katsutarō, “Daisaku no keifu: Yoshikawa Eiji to ‘tokkyū Ajia’ Umehara Hokumei no daisaku ka,” Taishū bungaku kenkyū 4.94 (1991): passim. 24.  Umehara Masaki, “Umehara Hokumei sono ashiato,” 235. 25.  Ueno Chizuko, “Ratai no ‘roshutsudo’ to sono ‘seijisei,’ ” in Hatsujō sōchi: erosu no shinario (Tokyo: Chikuma shōbō, 1998), 42. 26.  Umehara Masaki, “Umehara Hokumei sono ashiato,” 230. 27. Suzuki Ryōzō, “Shinbunkishajidainokare ‘Hito wo kutta otoko’ no hyōden,” Gurotesuku, January 1930, 306. 28.  For more on the Takebashi incident, see also Umehara Hokumei, ed., Kinsei bōdō hangaku henranshi (1931; Tokyo: Kaien shobō, 1973), 79–126. For more detailed documentation on Hokumei’s insurrectionary concerns, see also the afterword to the republished edition by Kano Masanao, “Tenka jōran e no kitai,” passim. Kaneko Yōbun, “Umehara Hokumei to Bungei shijō,” in Bungei shijō fukkokuban bessatsu, ed. Susumu Odagiri (Tokyo: Nihon Kindai Bungakukan, 1976). 29.  Umehara Masaki, “Umehara Hokumei sono ashiato,” 232. 30. Jō, Hakkinbon zoku, 103. 31.  Cited in Ōuchi Tsutomu, “Eroguronansensu,” in Fashizumu e no michi (Tokyo: Chuō kōronsha, 1967), 458. 32.  See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–318. 33.  Hirano Ken, “Seiji to bungaku” (1946), reprinted in Hirano Ken zenshū (Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 1975), 1:115–21, passim; Ara Masahito, “Bungakuteki ningenzō,” Kindai bungaku, March 1946; Odagiri Hideo, Shakai bungaku, shakaishugi bungaku kenkyū (Tōkyō: Keisō shobō, 1990), 4168–75, passim. G. T. Shea, Leftwing Literature in Japan (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 1964), 328–37. 34.  Aramata Hiroshi, Puroretaria bungaku wa monosugoi (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2000), passim. See also Shimamura Teru, “Ero, guro, nansensu,” in Korekushon modan toshi bunka: 15 Ero guro nansensu, ed. Shimamura Teru (Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 2005), 627–36; Adachi Gen, “Puroretaria geijutsu to ero guro nansensu,” Kindai gasetsu, 2006, 15. 35. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds, 23. 36.  Or as Barbara Foley claims more simply, “the literary proletarians were part of modernism.” Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941, Post-Contemporary Inter 

 

 

 

 

 

 

286    /    Notes ventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). See also Miriam Silverberg, Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense: the Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), passim. 37.  This chapter was reprinted as Hokumei, “Kagiana no shibai kenbutsu,” Bungei shijō 2.7 (1926); Umehara Hokumei, Satsujin gaisha: Akumashugi zensei jidai (Tokyo: Akane shobō, 1924), 272. 38.  Ibid., 309. 39.  Ibid., 310. 40.  Ibid., 315. 41. Jō, Hakkinbon zoku, 108. 42. Yamaguchi, ‘Zasetsu’ no Shōwa shi, passim. Driscoll also employs the rhetoric of an outside. 43.  Umehara Hokumei, “Ichiyazuke no kakumeiyasan,” Bungei shijō 3.1 (January 1926): 46. 44.  Azuma Tairiku [Umehara Hokumei], “Shōrei to sekkō hei,” in Aikoku buyū tantei kaiki jitsuwa kessaku shū, Shinnengō furoku, special issue, Kōdan kurabu, January 1939, 88–111. 45.  Quoted in ibid., 88, emphasis added. 46.  Ibid., 88. 47.  Gershon Legman, Love and Death: A Study in Censorship (New York: Breaking Point, 1949), 19. 48.  Attributed to Gershon Legman in Mikita Brottman, Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor (London: Routledge, 2004). 49. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol.1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978), 157. 50.  Yano, Kan’ichi “Sayoku bungaku kara sensō bungaku e,” in Kindai sensō bungaku jiten, Izumi jiten shiriizu 3 (Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 1996), 1:292–93. 51.  By my count, fewer than ten such books exist in the archives of the Home Ministry censors. 52.  Sari Kawana, Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), 148–70. 53.  Ueno Chizuko, Nationalism and Gender, trans. Beverley Anne Yamamoto, Japanese Society Series (Melbourne: Trans Pacific, 2004), 161. 54.  The banning on both grounds of sedition and obscenity of the humorous comic book Heitai seikatsu (1944) with its satirical vision of the life of soldiers in training, including jibes at their sexual jaunts, is an example of how these two categories could be conflated in times of war. 55.  Ernst Friedrich, WAR against WAR! (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1987), 233. This book was published originally as Krieg dem Krieg. 56. I was pleased to find this connection confirmed in Kanno Satomi’s recent work on the age of “perversion.” Though my original research on the subject, presented at Mid-Atlantic Regional Association of Asian Studies Conference in October 2004, did not benefit from Kanno’s insight, I have since  

 

 

Notes   /    287 found corroboration in her linking depictions of violence to the “perverse” spirit of the mid-1920s. See Kanno Satomi, ‘Hentai’ no jidai, Kōdansha gendai shinsho 1815 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2005), esp. 157–63. 57.  Hokumei’s antiwar views can be read in his preface to his wartime translation of Otto Paust’s Volk im Feu, in which he warns that postwar Japan might become what Germany became after World War I. See the Japanese translation: Otto Paust, Hi no naka no kokumin (Tokyo: Shōbunkaku, 1943), 1–4. 58.  Nihon Sayoku Bungeika Sōrengō, ed., Sensō ni tai suru sensō: Anchi miritarizumu shōsetsu shū (1928; Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1984). 59.  Yano Kan’ichi argues that war narrative derived its penchant for realistic detail and conveyance of the facts “as they really are” (aru ga mama) or “direct records of experience” (chokusetsu no keiken no ki) from leftist literature. Yano Kan’ichi, “Sayoku bungaku kara sensō bungaku e,” in Kindai sensō bungaku jiten, Izumi jiten shiriizu 3 (Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 1996) 1:292– 93. In this regard, also note that the examination copy of one of the rare books to have been banned both for reasons of morals (fūzoku) and sedition (annei), Secret Stories of Blind Love, Crime, and Arrest (Chijō hanzai torimono hiwa), has pencil markings of the censor around several passages relating to war. Sections dealing with war are titled “Out of War Great Murderers Arise,” “The Ravages of War: Powerless Antiwar Treaties,” and the like. Chijō hanzai torimono hiwa (Osaka: Yūbunkan, 1939), 19, 203, and 430. The call number of the examination copy is NDL 特501–503. 60.  Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 14.  

 

 

 

Chapter 5 1.  Samuel Weber, “Wartime,” in Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 91. 2.  Nishitani Osamu, “Sekai sensō,” in Sensōron, Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko 1342 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2001), 17. 3.  Here I am drawing on J. M. Coetzee’s important observation that “undesirable” is not that which cannot be desired, but that which ought not to be desired. J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), viii. The term administration here is meant to refer both to Richard Burt’s terminology in The Administration of Aesthetics, which stems from Adorno, and to the Japanese word gyōsei (行政), which can mean strictly governance, but is also used in conjunction with the arts to refer to the ways in which large institutions (corporate, government, and otherwise) influence the production of art. Richard Burt, “Introduction: The ‘New’ Censorship,” in The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 4.  What seems important to recall is that despite the temporality of Alt­ husser’s story of an empowered individual (the police) calling out to an under-

288    /    Notes privileged individual (a citizen), the there is an always-already simultaneity in hailing, an unceasing process. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 1994), 110–11, 131–32. Perhaps the most straightforward example of this plurilocal phenomenon has been called the “Banned in Boston Principle,” which is where a book that is banned in Boston is instantly transformed into a best seller everywhere else. 5.  Edward Thomas Mack, Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value, Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 6.  See John Guillory, “The Ordeal of Middlebrow Culture,” Transition 67 (1995): 82–92. See Komori Yōichi, “Kindai Nihon bungaku to ōdeiensu,” in Karuchuraru stadeizu to no taiwa (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1996), passim. 7.  This was compiled by comparing the list of novelists serialized in the Asahi newspapers in Chiezō 2000 bessatsu furoku: Asahi Shinbun rensai shōsetsu no 120 nen [Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2000] with the list of extant censor’s examination copies in the NDL and LOC collection, the index in Hakkinbon III, and Odagiri Hideo and Fukuoka Seikichi, Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō, Zōhōban ed. [Kawasaki-shi: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankōkai, 1981]. 8.  This was compiled by comparing the list of novelists serialized in the Asahi newspapers in Chiezō 2000 bessatsu furoku: Asahi Shinbun rensai shōsetsu no 120 nen [Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2000] with the list of extant censor’s examination copies in the NDL and LOC collection, the index in Hakkinbon III, and Odagiri Hideo and Fukuoka Seikichi, Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō, Zōhōban ed. [Kawasaki-shi: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankōkai, 1981].) 9.  Though the novel was to have been published after the consultation system officially ended in 1927, it appears from the presence of two examination copies that the publishers had been in consultation with the Home Ministry censors, or at least that they resubmitted the second, X’ed copy in the hopes that it might pass. 10.  The two at the NDL are held as 特500–105. The Prange Collection copy has been thoroughly studied by Yokote. Though I have not had a chance to review the actual text, Yokote provides a line-by-line commentary and transcription version in his Hi senryōka no bungaku ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyū: ronkō hen (Tokyo: Musashino Shobō, 1996), 209–42. 11.  See Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 63–64. 12.  Kuroshima Denji, A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings, trans. Zeljko Cipris (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 168; Kuroshima Denji, Kuroshima Denji zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1970), 3:34. 13. Kuroshima, A Flock, 142; Kuroshima, Kuroshima, 9–10. 14. Kuroshima, A Flock, 153; Kuroshima, Kuroshima, 20.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   /    289 15. Kuroshima, A Flock, 150; Kuroshima, Kuroshima, 17. 16.  Kurihara Sadako, Black Eggs: Poems, ed. and trans. Richard H. Minear, Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies 12 (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies University of Michigan, 1994). 17.  See, e.g., Jin Itakura, Jū toru hima ni (Chiba: Takitsubo, 1939), which was banned for relating the homosexual experiences between two soldiers. 18.  See the Kōdansha’s Nihon gendai bungaku zenshū (vol. 73). The novel was subsequently included in the Chikuma shobō Gendai Nihon bungaku taikei (vol. 56) in 1971, the Chikuma gendai bungaku taikei (vol. 38) in 1978, and the Nihon puroretaria bungaku shū (vol. 9) in 1984. And if we needed further corroboration of its delayed canonization, the year 2005 has seen the publication of its translation into English, one guarantor of canonicity or at least of changing attitudes in the land of the censor. Gathered from a search of Gendai nihon bungaku zenshū sōran (Tokyo: Nichigai Asoshieetsu, 1999), CD-ROM. 19.  Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, Fiction (New York: Holt, 1984), 967. 20.  Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Edward Seidensticker, “Tanizaki Junichiro, 1886–1965,” Monumenta Nipponica: Studies in Japanese Culture 21.3–4 (1966); Van C. Gessel, “Infatuation with Modernity: Junichiro Tanizaki,” in Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata (New York: Kodansha 1993); Gwenn Boardman Petersen, The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1979); Keene, Dawn to the West; Ken Ito, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Itō Sei, Sakkaron (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1961); Noguchi Takehiko, “Kokyō toshite ikyō: Kansai ijū to ‘koten kaiki’ o megutte,” in Nihon no sakka: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, vol. 8 (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1991). 21.  See Andō Hiroshi, “ ‘Ippan katteinin ni tai shi aku eikyō’: Dazai Osamu Hanabi,” Hakkin Kindai bungakushi, special issue, Kokubungaku 47.9 (July 2002): 106–10; Inose describes how, unable to publish in magazines, Mishima used his family connections to secure paper to privately publish some of his early wartime writings. Inose Naoki, Perusona: Mishima Yukio den (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1995). 22.  Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle: Washington University Press, 1984); Ken Ito, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 186, 190; Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1968), 23:7, hereafter abbreviated as TJZ; Donald Keene, Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture (Palo Alto: Kodansha International, 1971), 313. 23. Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, 138–39. Ito, Visions of Desire, 186, 190. 24.  TJZ, 16:293. 25.  Image reproduced from TJZ. 26. Honor Tracy, Kakemono: A Sketch Book of Post-War Japan (New  

 

 

 

290    /    Notes York: Coward-McCann, 1950), 140. This is also discussed and translated into Japanese in Matsuura Sōzō, Senryōka no genron dan’atsu (Tokyo: Gendai Jānarizumu Shuppankai, 1969), 131. See also Marlene Mayo, “Civil Censorship in Occupied Japan,” in Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan (Washington: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996), 143. 27.  Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel speaks of the word being excised from textbooks. See Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel’s comments in “Panel Discussion: literature and the arts,” in The Occupation of Japan: Arts and Culture, The Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium sponsored by the MacArthur Memorial, October 18–19, 1984, ed. Thomas Burkman (Norfolk: General Douglas MacArthur Foundation, 1988), 241. 28.  TJZ, 17:12. 29.  TJZ, 16:286. 30.  Odagiri and Fukuoka, Shōwa shoseki, zasshi, shinbun hakkin nenpyō, 3:1009; Nichigai Asoshiētsu, ed., Nihon choshamei sōmokuroku 27/44 (Tokyo: Nichigai Asoshiētsu, 1990), 476. 31.  Elaine Scarry, “Injury and the Structure of War,” Representations 10 (1985): 1. 32.  Ibid., 1–55, passim. 33. Etō Jun, Ochiba hakiyose, reprinted in 1946 nen kenpō: Sono kōsoku, sono hoka, Bunshun bunko (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1995), 354. 34. Etō Jun, “Amerika ha nihon de no ken’etsu o ika ni junbi shite ita ka,” in Tozasareta genron kūkan: Senryōgun no ken’etsu to sengo nihon, Bunshun bunko E28 (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū, 1998). 35.  Komori Yōichi, “Yuragi” no Nihon bungaku (Tokyo: Nihon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 1998), 279–80. 36.  This marked passage is taken from a quotation from Jō Ichirō’s discussion of the editorially suppressed portions of the book in Jō Ichirō, Hakkinbon (Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten, 1991), 87. My original research on this topic was done before the publication of Haruko Taya Cook’s in depth study, which draws from the wartime version held at the National Diet Library in Haruko Taya Cook, “The Many Lives of Living Soldiers: Ishikawa Tatsuzō and Japan’s War in Asia,” in War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, ed. Marlene Mayo and Thomas Rhimer (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 149–75. This translation is modified from Cipris, who translates a postwar edition without reference to the Xs and textual particularities of wartime editions: Zeljko Cipris, “Radiant Carnage: Japanese Writers on the War Against China” (Ph.D diss., Columbia University, 1994), 293. His published translation also omits mention of the fuseji. Tatsuzō Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, trans. Zeljko Cipris (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), passim. All quotations were also checked against the postwar Shōwa bungaku zenshū (1988), which does not acknowledge passages that received fuseji, and the Chūkō bunko version from 1999, which marks where the wartime deletions were with sidebar emphasis marks. Ishikawa, Tatsuzō, “Ikiteiru heitai,” in  

 

 

 

Notes   /    291 Shōwa bungaku zenshū, vol. 36 (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1986); Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Ikiteiru heitai (Tokyo: Chūo Kōronsha, 1999). 37. As quoted in Suzuki Masao, “Mugi to heitai to Ikiteiru heitai no Chūgoku ni okeru hankyō ni kan suru oboegaki,” Yokohama shiritsu daigaku ronsō 50.2 (1999): 14. 38.  See ibid., 12. Translation itself may signal canonization. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 73, 75. 39.  Translation modified from Cipris, 262; Shōwa, 651; and Chūkō bunko, 47. 40.  Barley and Soldiers led to Earth and Soldiers (Tsuchi to heitai) (apparently written earlier than Barley and Soldiers), Chocolate and Soldiers (Chokoretto to heitai), Flowers and Soldiers (Hana to heitai), and “Cigarettes and Soldiers” (“Tabako to heitai”). For a description of the degree to which Hino’s work penetrated wartime Japanese cultural production, see David Martin Rosenfeld, “Unhappy Soldier: Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War Two Literature” (Ph.D diss., University of Michigan, 1999); David M. Rosenfeld, Unhappy Soldier: Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War II Literature, Studies of Modern Japan (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002). Also note that, though Rosenfeld identifies the “unhappy soldier” as Hino’s major trope, he does not acknowledge that this trope itself was both canonical and censored. See particularly the following censored poem “Claws” (Tsume; 爪) of Hino’s poem collection “Blue Fox” (Aogitsune; 青狐), published in 1943. Upon Soldiers, Soldiers despair! All day long, through violent attack they rule. Upon Spring, Soldiers do despair, timelessly Flowers bloom; taste the Fragrance of Flowers only from a distance! Upon Night, Soldiers do despair, in Dreams visages spied, despised guns. Upon the Moon, Soldiers do despair, ’tis true, and now only guns have your Fragrance. Upon Soldiers, Soldiers do despair. No you, No Flowers, now even Dreams are finite enemies. Poem quoted in Jō Ichirō, Hakkinbon (Tokyo: Fukutake shoten, 1991), 1:120. See also Akiyama Kiyoshi, Hakkin shi shū (Tokyo: Chōbunsha, 1970), 251–53; Hino Ashihei, Aogitsune [Seiko]: shi shū (Tokyo: Rokukō Shōkai, 1943): pages are 111–16 removed from extant copies. 41. Translation modified from Rosenfeld, “Unhappy Soldier,” 113. See also Takasaki Ryūji’s reflection on this scene in comparison with the cruelties of Ishikawa’s text. Takasaki observes that Hino and Ishikawa have more in common than Ishikawa and the prewar proletariat literati. In the end he sees Ishikawa’s novel as “war affirming.” Takasaki Ryūji, Sensō to sensō bungaku to (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentâ, 1986), 72–74. This notion seems to have an origin in Ara Masahito’s claim that Ishikawa’s work was neither antiwar nor “opportunist literature,” but “literature of resistance.” Ara Masahito, “Kai 

 

 

292    /    Notes setsu,” in Nihon no bungaku, Iwanami gendai bunko (Tokyo: Chūo Kōronsha, 1966), 56:494, emphasis added. My point here is that even the censored is not necessarily anticanonical. 42.  Rosenfeld, “Unhappy Soldier,” 94; Shōwa, 712 (translation modified). 43.  Rosenfeld, “Unhappy Soldier,” 43; Shōwa, 719 (translation modified, emphasis added). 44.  Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, 30. 45.  Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Nihon no bungaku, 146. Cf. the canonical Into the Valley by John Hersey, which begins with this disclaimer: “The characters of this book all are or were real men, and any resemblance to characters of fiction is purely coincidental.” John Hersey, Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines (New York: Knopf, 1944), 4. 46. Trial remark cited in Yasunaga Taketo, Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō 41.10 (1976): 38. 47.  Hino Ashihei, “Mugi to heitai: Maegaki,” Kaizō, August 1938, 104. 48.  Ibid., 105. 49.  Rosenfeld, “Unhappy Soldier,” 27–52. 50.  Here I am considering only the first short story published in the February 1948 issue of Bungakukai, a portion of which would later be included in the full-length novel of the same name. 51.  Ōoka Shōhei, “Furyoki,” Manuscript 51686(003) held at the Kanagawaken Kindai Bungakkan, page 57. Used with the kind permission of Ōoka Harue. Hereafter abbreviated as “Furyoki” MS. 52.  Keiko McDonald, “Ooka’s Examination of the Self in A POWs Memoirs,” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 21.1 (April 1987): 20–24. 53.  Ōoka Shōhei, “Furyoki,” Bungakukai, February 1948, 15. 54.  Ibid., 17. 55.  Ibid., 18. 56.  Ōoka, “Furyoki” MS; Ōoka, “Furyoki,” Bungakukai, 20. The < > marks signify portions Ōoka added later and marked for insertion into the sentence with an arrow. The question marks in the translation are meant to show an attempt to translate partially legible words in the Japanese. The bracketed-off portion of text above was perhaps a marginal afterthought inserted into the body of the text with an arrow in the manuscript version. 57.  Ōoka, “Furyoki” MS. 58.  Ōoka, “Furyoki,” Bungakukai, 17. 59.  Ibid., 20. 60.  Ōoka Shōhei, “San Jose yasen byōin,” Chūō kōron 63.4 (April 1948): 47–55. Censorship report reproduced in Hisenryōka no bungaku ni kan suru kisoteki kenkyū: shiryō hen, ed. Yokote Kazuhiko (Tokyo: Musashino shobō, 1995), 37–38. 61.  James A. Michener Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Box I93, Folder 6, page 306. 62. It is probably not insignificant that Granville Hicks, the reformed socialist critic, was the one exception among the readers. Hicks thought the  

 

 

 

Notes   /    293 story contained the “heart” of the collection. James A. Michener, Voice of Asia (New York: Random House, 1951), 5. 63.  Ibid., 4. 64.  James A. Michener Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Box I93, Folder 6, page 306. 65. Michener, Voice of Asia, 3–12. 66.  Michener Papers, Box I93, Folder 6, page 307. 67. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 233. See Catch-22 for another humorous look at the haphazardness of the mail censor. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1955; New York: Scribner, 1989), 16. 68.  Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 96. 69. Ibid., 4. Said’s own stated preference for the dominant Western canon should be recalled. 70. Ibid., 19.  

Chapter 6 1.  Of course, the above (non-)passage could be taken to represent other literary blanks due to natural deaths, earthquakes that consume books in flames, or even the more mundane writer’s block. In a pathbreaking passage in Interpretation of Dreams, Freud discusses censorship in terms of the blocking of major roadways by “natural” disasters (“floods, for instance”), thereby displacing possible other conceptions of censorship arising from more “artificial” disasters also resulting in the blocking of roads (wars, for example). The connections between “acts of god” and the ungodly violence of human censors both of which may destroy lives and the lives of texts are then perhaps not so superficial, though the maintenance of their difference is essential. See Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1998), 569. 2.  Miyatake Gaikotsu henshū ehagaki ruibetsu daishūsei, Tōkyō Daigaku Meiji Shinbun Zasshi Bunko (Tōkyō: Keiyōsha, 2000), CD-ROM. 3.  Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), 10, 28, 246–47. 4.  The X may be considered a suture on the flesh that is neither spiritual nor material, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although some have gone so far as to consider Xs like “scabies” that need to be scratched and solved, the metaphor of a suture which also may itch seems more apropos of a sign that stitches meaning and closes off textual insides from other possible outsides. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139; Okunari Tatsu, Okazaki Hideo, and Toneri Eiichi, eds., Fuseji bungaku jiten: XX o tanoshimu hon (Tokyo: Ōtakushinpōsha, 1977), 3–22. 5. See points de capiton in Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 291.  

 

 

294    /    Notes 6.  D. H. McKenzie, Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind,” and other Essays (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 223. 7.  See Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, trans. Jane Bobko, Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik 31 (München: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommission, 1984). 8. Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals. See also the Kanda Zatsugaku Dai­ gaku webpage “Senzen Naimushō ni okeru shuppan ken’etsu,” part 2. 9. Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, 30. Later revisions to the legal regulation required more time to enforce. The revisions to the publishing laws that accompanied the National Mobilization Law of 1936 widened the responsibility of publication from publishers and authors alone to include printers as well. In addition, the actual punishments were increased to up to three years in prison and fines of 300 yen. Kanaya Hirotaka, Fuseji, ken’etsu, naietsu (Tokyo: n.p., 1976), passim (manuscript available from the National Diet Library special collections, number W461–3); see also Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, 28; Mat­su’ura Sōzō, Senryōka no genron dan’atsu (Tokyo: Gendai Jaanarizumu Shup­pankai, 1969), 40–72; Matsu’ura Sōzō, Senchū senryōka no masukomi, Matsu’ura Sōzō no shigoto (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1984), 2:200–6; Hatanaka Shigeo, Oboe­gaki Shōwa shuppan dan’atsu shōshi (Tokyo: Tosho Shinbunsha, 1965), 171–86. 10. Kanaya, Fuseji, ken’etsu, naietsu, passim. 11. Matsu’ura, Senryōka no genron dan’atsu, 41; Matsu’ura, Senchū sen­ ryōka no masukomi, 28–31. 12.  The meeting of Keishichō heads in 1936 is also referred to in the timeline in Kindai Nihon Bungaku Daijiten. Thereafter, fuseji are found less and less in print, according to Matsu’ura. Matsu’ura, Senryōka no genron dan’atsu, 40; Tokkō keisatsu kankei shiryō shūsei 38 (September 1936) (Tokkō gaiji keisatsu jimu uchiaikai, Kokkai kōbunshokan, Tanemura shi keisatsu sankō shiryō, record code A05020194400), 49:469–71. 13. Etō Jun, “The Sealed Linguistic Space: The Occupation Censorship and Post-War Japan, Part I,” ed. and trans. Jay Rubin, in Hikaku bunka zasshi: Annual of Comparative Culture 2 (1984): 11. See also, Etō Jun, Tozasareta gengo kūkan: Senryōgun no ken’etsu to sengo Nihon, Bunshun bunko E-2–8 (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 1998), 58–59. 14. Matsu’ura, Senryōka no genron dan’atsu, 44. 15. Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship. 16.  I say these questions are ahistorical and simple because they assume the process to have been a logical and not random one. 17.  The record of one historical reader, the censor, in a discussion on methods used to evade censorship lists fuseji along with using “other words to express the same meaning” (“dōimi o shimesu hoka no jiku o shiyō suru koto”). See Naimushō keihokyoku, ed., Shōwa roku nenchū ni okeru shuppan keisatsu gaikan (1931), 1. 18.  Nakano Eizō, “Fuseji kō,” Shomotsu tenbō 9.4 (1934): 67.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   /    295

Chapter 7 1.  Kawabata Yasunari, “Shiroi asa no kagami,” Kaizō 17.1 (January 1935), reprinted in Kawabata Yasunari zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1999), 24:98– 100. Translation modified from Kawabata Yasunari, Snow Country, trans. Edward Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1957), 37. 2.  Kawabata Yasunari, Yukiguni (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1948), 41–42, reprinted in Kawabata Yasunari zenshū, 10:33–34. Translation modified from Kawabata, Snow Country, 37. 3.  Ōya Sōichi, “Daikan seiji toshite no ken’etsu seido,” in Ōya Sōichi zenshū, February 1929, reprinted in Tokyo Asahi shinbun shuzai ken’etsu seido hihan kōenkai (Tōkyō: Sōyōsha Hatsubai Eichōsha, 1980), 279. This idea is repeated in the May 1929 issue of Shinchō by Nakamura Murao, who claimed that Kaizō was the cause of Kaneko Yobun’s “Akai Mizumi” (The red lake) receiving so many fuseji. 4. Kōno Kensuke mentions the case of this journal as being a true turning point for the censorship of literature as opposed to nonfiction. Kōno Kensuke, Kenetsu to bungaku (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 2009). 5. Kōno Kensuke gives a complete analysis of the version rife with fuseji. Kōno Kensuke, “Nakazato Kaizan ‘Yumedono’ to kiritori sakujo,” in Kenetsu to bungaku: 1920 nendai no kōbō (Tokyo: Kawade bukkusu, 2009), 174–205. Another history could be written using the Yale University copy, which has an intact version of the text lacking fuseji. The Yale copy of the September 1927 Kaizō comes from Naimusho keihokyoku collection. 6. Kōno Kensuke has taken a similar approach in his recent Kenetsu to bungaku. My idea for using Kaizō came from re-examination of an early chapter during discussion with Jay Rubin, James Dorsey, Melissa Wender, Karen Thornber, and Kirsten Cather held at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute in May 2009. 7. Kōno Toshiro, Shōji Hidaka, and Sendai Magokoro, ed., “Kaizō” jikihitsu genkō no kenkyū: Yamamoto Sanehiko kyūzō sendai magokoro bungakukan shozō, (Tōkyō: Yūshōdō Shuppan, 2007). 8.  Latter day estimates of print runs figure that the journal began with a circulation at 10,000 and ranged to as high as 100,000. Seki Chūka, Zasshi kaizō no yonjūnen: fu kaizō mokuji sōran (Tokyo: Kōwadō, 1977). 9.  See Kōno, Kenetsu to bungaku, 14–15, on free press. 10.  According to the chronology of banned books compiled by Fukuoka Seikichi, Chūō kōron was banned only once in the four years between 1932 and 1935, a period when Kaizō incurred over five bans. Odagiri Hideo and Fukuoka Seikichi, ed., Shōwa shoseki, zasshi, shinbun hakkin nenpyō, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Meiji Bunken, 1965). 11.  According to Yokote Kazuhiko’s list, Kuwabara Takeo’s piece was cited as referring to censorship in the February 1948 edition. Yokote Kazuhiko, Hisenryōka no bungaku ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyū, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Musa­ shino Shobō, 1995).  

 

 

 

 

296    /    Notes 12.  Hayashi Fusao, “Meijin meidai mandankai: fuseji mondai ni tsuite,” Shinchō 26.5 (June 1929): 134. 13.  Listed in Shuppan keisatsu hō, vol.14 (Naimushō keihokyoku, 1929). See also Kinshi shuppanbutsu mokuroku, October 18, 1929, 111. Okudaira cites this passage, but refers to the magazine as Numei jidai, Oct. 1929. Oku­ daira Yasuhiro, Political Censorship in Japan from 1931 to 1945 (Philadelphia: Institute of Legal Research, Law School, University of Pennsylvania, 1962), 68–69. Typo repeated in Richard H. Mitchell, Censorship in Imperial Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 14.  Shuppan keisatsu gaikan (Naimushō keihokyoku, January 1930), record number G1197, 237. See also Jay Rubin research materials, “censorship (Meiji period-pre-war),” notes by then Research Assistant Richard Torrance held in Box 1 at Harvard-Yenching. 15.  Recently, the literary scholar Kōno Kensuke has called Kaizō’s overuse of redaction an “excessive self-defense measure” (kajō bōei), but claims the high point of fuseji began with the coverage of the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923. Kōno further argues that this was mainly true for nonfiction articles and that it was not until Fujimori’s “Gisei” of 1926 that literature was deeply impacted by fuseji. Kōno Kensuke, Kenetsu to bungaku, 67. What historical anecdotes provide for a later time (1929 and 1930) and the more recent observations by Kōno anticipate (by associating it with the earthquake) is a sense of what the pages of Kaizō were giving to their readers of both nonfiction and fiction after 1926, a profusion of fuseji. Quantitative historical material available even to readers and censors at the time suggests that the real turn followed the dissolution of the consultation system in 1927. 16.  I counted fuseji, limiting my counts to years deemed important by other historical data such as the records of the secret meeting in 1936. Other years were 1943, 1938, 1931, 1923, and 1919. But even the method of counting fuseji, for determining what should qualify as fuseji, must always be held with some skepticism. For the project of counting, and for the sake of simplicity, I chose to count Xs, along with blank spaces, Os, emphasis marks, and ellipses regardless of their semantic values. 17.  The manuscripts of Ōoka Shōhei’s Furyoki may provide one example of this sort of change. Ōoka Shōhei, “Furyoki,” Manuscript 51686(003) held at the Kanagawa-ken Kindai Bungakkan, page 57. Used with the kind permission of Ōoka Harue. 18.  Like collected works, in D. H. McKenzie’s view, magazines have the benefit of destabilizing unifying concepts of intention with the presence of physical elements. D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind,” and other Essays (Boston: University of Massachussets, 2002), 209–10. 19.  This sort of fuseji is particularly well seen in the entry for May 8 in the novel’s diary. The symbol ○○ replaces place and division names. Kaizō, August 1938, 123. 20.  An article in the Yomiuri conjectured that the play was banned not only due to offenses of obscenity and sedition but for “marring the prestige of  

 

Notes   /    297 the police.” “Jōen o kinjirareta, ‘Aru keisatsushochō no shi’ ” Yomiuri shinbun, August 28, 1925, 5. 21.  Kurata Hyakuzō, “Aru keisatsushochō no shi,” Kaizō, September 1925, 62. 22.  Though highly unlikely, it is certainly possible that the XX here would not be referring to a proper name of an incident. Kōno Kensuke proposes the term conspiratorial plot (inbō jiken) in his mention of the play, probably because the word conspiracy (inbō) is used elsewhere in the play. But it would be odd if the term was printed in one part of the play and received fuseji in another. So it is more likely that possible candidates for filling in the fuseji here would be proper nouns naming a particular incident, since in the overwhelming majority of instances of a two character combination and jiken in the dictionary of record (the Kōjien, 6th ed.), the two character combinations preceding jiken are proper nouns. A similar example of a youthful flirtation with communist tendencies appears in Nogami Yaeko’s “Machiko” published in the August 1928 edition of the magazine. In that story a character is referred to as the “friend from the xx incident.” See Nogami Yaeko, “Machiko,” Kaizō, August 1928, 8, 28. Kōno, Kenetsu to bungaku, 88. 23.  Kurata Hyakuzō, “Aru keisatsushochō no shi,” Kaizō, September 1925, 64–65. 24.  Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Kappa,” Kaizō March, 1927, 1. 25.  Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), 141–48. 26.  Hattori Tetsuya and Fukawa Junko, ed., Gendai no baiburu: Akuta­ gawa Ryūnosuke “Kappa” chūkai, Kenkyūkai, Seikei daigaku (Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2007). 27.  Here, I have elected to quote from the nonstandard “original” rather than the canonically collected version of the text available in the zenshū and various translated editions. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Kappa,” Kaizō, March 1927, digitized from reprint in Kappa: Aru ahō no isshō (Tokyo: Ōbunsha, 1984), available at Aozora bunko website. See also Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Kappa,” in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1978), 8:325. 28.  The word of course may also be a joke on the ducklike physique of some modern renditions of the mythical Kappa. 29.  Seikei Daigaku and Kindai bungaku kenkyūkai, eds., Gendai no bai­ buru: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke “Kappa” Chūkai (Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2007). 30.  The original version with the fuseji has been digitized because, unlike the canonical anthologized versions, it is no longer protected by copyright. 31. Seikei, Gendai no baiburued. 32.  See, e.g., Mishima Yukio, “Fuseji” (1950), reprinted in Mishima Yukio zenshū, vol. 27 (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2003). 33. “Shōwa go nenjū ni okeru shuppan keisatsu gaikan,” reprinted in Shup­pan keisatu gaikan, ed. Naimushō keihokyoku (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 1988), 1:91. 34.  Odagiri Hideo and Seikichi Fukuoka, eds., Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō (Kawasaki-shi: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankōkai, 1981), 1:438.  

 

298    /    Notes 35.  Ibid., 1:420. See also Japan, Naimushō, Keihokyoku, Shuppan keisatsu gaikan: Shōwa 5–10-nen, ed. Fukkokuban (Tokyo: Ryūkei Shosha, 1981), 2:171. Details on the textual difference given in Kobayashi Takiji, Tō seikatsusha/ Chiku no hitobito/Numajiri mura, Aoki bunko 139 (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1953). This paperback version has significantly more detailed textual notes than the version in the Complete Works of Kobayashi Takiji. 36.  Mr. M. is probably a reference to the Kaizō editor Minowa Renichi. Kōno Kensuke in email exchange with author, November 9, 2009. 37.  Kanbayashi Akatsuki, “Fuseji,” in Kanbayashi Akatsuki zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1966), 10:324–25. 38. Kobayashi Takiji, “Kaidai,” in Tō seikatsusha/Chiku no hitobito/ Numajiri mura, 261. 39. Kobayashi, Kobayashi Takiji zenshū (Tokyo: Shin Nippon shuppansha, 1982), 4:257; Kobayashi, Tō seikatsusha/Chiku no hitobito/Numajiri mura, 10; Kaizō, April 1932, 61. 40.  Passage quoted with batsu glosses in Naimushō keihokyoku, Shuppan keisatsuhō 12.51 (December 1932; Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1981). 41. Kobayashi, Numajiri mura, 48; Kobayashi, Zenshū, 4:305; Kobayashi, Tō seikatsusha/Chiku no hitobito/Numajiri mura, 56; Kaizō May 1932, 37. 42. Kobayashi, Kobayashi Takiji zenshū, 4:515. 43.  Kobayashi Takiji, Numajiri mura, Nihon Puroretaria Sakka Dōmei Sōsho (Tokyo: Nihon Puroretaria sakka dōmei shuppanbu, 1932), 2:39; Koba­ yashi, Zenshū, 295; Kobayashi, Tō seikatsusha/Chiku no hitobito/Numajiri mura, 46. Kaizō, April 1932, 88. 44.  This phenomenon can also be seen in the fifty-sixth issue of the Publishing Police Records. The records on the banning of The Collected Works of Kobayashi Takiji in 1933 both replace some Xs rendering the characters glossed with Xs and giving some Xs as X. Shuppan keisatsuhō, 14.56:2. 45.  Tokuda Shūsei, “Moto no eda e,” Kaizō, September 1926, 217. See also Tokuda Shūsei, “Moto no eda e,” in Tokuda Shūsei zenshū (Tokyo: Yagi Shoten, 1997), 15:352. 46.  Tokuda Shūsei, “Sakuhin no kenetsu ni tsuite: futō na fuseji no mondai,” in Tokuda Shūsei zenshū (Tokyo: Yagi Shoten, 1997), 21:94–95. 47.  Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 14, 76, 135. 48.  Kanbayashi Akatsuki, “Fuseji,” in Kanbayashi Akatsuki zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1966), 10:324–25. 49.  Kishi Sanji, “Ko,” Kaizō, August 1933. Itō Jun has done a close textual comparison of the original manuscript and the Kaizō text. Itō Jun, “Puroretaria bungaku to Kishi Sanji: ‘Watashi no bungakushi’ o megutte,” Tokushima kenritsu bungaku shodō kan kenkyū kiyō (2000): 1. Also available at the “Kishi Sanji shiryōkan” webpage. 50.  See Kōno Kensuke, Kenetsu to bungaku. See also Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984).  

 

 

 

Notes   /    299 51.  The Naimushō copy of the banned edition held in the collection of Michigan State University was consulted for this finding. Though Michigan State University did not directly participate in the Sorting Project that resulted in the absorption of Naimushō volumes into American East Asian collections, it is likely that this copy was acquired through trades with University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which did participate. 52.  The acts are deleted and replaced with introductions and the fusejilike phrase “printing the rest of this plot is banned,” Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1926), 47:457. Then a note claims it was banned for referring to someone still living and potentially libelous, Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1926), 47:495. See the facsimile edition of Arasou futatsu no mono for details about Fujimori’s travels. Fujimori Seikichi, Arasou futatsu no mono, ed. Kuroko Kazuo, Shin-Puroretaria Bungaku Seisenshū (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2004). 53. Naimushō Keihōkyoku, Shuppan keisatsuhō 2.53 (February 1933; Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1981), 5; Fujimori Seikichi, Arasou futatsu no mono, ed. Kuroko Kazuo, Shin-Puroretaria Bungaku Seisenshū (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2004), 26. This latter book is a facsimile of the edition from 1933. 54.  Fujimori Seikichi, “Arasou futatsu no mono,” Kaizō, June 1932, 27. 55.  Edogawa Ranpo, “Mushi,” Kaizō, July 1929, 135. 56.  Ibid., 125. 57.  Ibid., 127. 58.  Edogawa Ranpo, “Mushi,” in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, Panorama tō kitan (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1978), 3:301. 59.  The strike-through mark in the passage represents what the postwar editions delete without a trace. 60.  Edogawa, “Mushi,” in Kaizō, 138; Edogawa Ranpo, “Mushi,” in Edo­ gawa Ranpo zenshū, 295. 61.  Edogawa, “Mushi,” in Kaizō, 138; Edogawa, “Mushi,” in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, 295. 62.  Edogawa, “Mushi,” in Kaizō, 141; Edogawa, “Mushi,” in Edogawa Ranpo zenshū, 298–99. 63.  Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 14, 76, 135. 64.  Tsukuda Takafumi, “Mitsu no ‘Manji’ hakkin ken’etsu no chūshin ni shite,” in Dōshisha kokubungaku (Kyōtō: Dōshisha Daigaku Kokubungakkai, 2008), 58–69, quote at 69. 65. Sabine Früshtūck, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 118–30; Elise K. Tipton, “Birth Control and the Population Problem,” in Society and the State in Interwar Japan, ed. Elise K. Tipton (New York: Routledge, 1997), 42–62. 66.  Odagiri and Fukuoka, Shōwa shoseki, zasshi, 165. 67.  Tsukuda, “Mitsu no ‘Manji,’ ” 65. 68.  Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, “Manji: sono 35,” Kaizō, April 1930, 106–7; Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, “Manji,” in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha,  

 

 

 

 

300    /    Notes 1982), 11:564–65; Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Quicksand, trans. Howard Hibbet (New York: Knopf, 1993), 219. 69.  Kanbayashi Atsuki, “Fuseji,” 10:322–23. 70. Kuroshima Denji, “Uzumakeru karasu no mure,” Kaizō, February 1928, 50–51; Kuroshima Denji, “Uzumakeru karasu no mure,” in Kuroshima Denji zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1970), 1:270–71. Translation modified from Kuroshima Denji, “Flock of Swirling Crows,” in A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Proletarian Writings, trans. Zeljko Cipris (Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2005), 91. 71.  Sugimoto Tsutomu, Nihon mojishi no kenkyū, Sugimoto Tsutomu chosaku senshū (Tokyo: Yasakashobō, 1998), 432. 72.  Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 253–309. 73.  Gregory P. A. Levine, “On the Look and Logos of Zen Art,” “Silenced by Aesthetics? A Conjectural Poetics of Art History and Ecology,” Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop, University of Chicago, January 28–31, 2009. See also Bruce Rutledge, ed., Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan (Seattle: Chin Music Press, 2004), passim.  

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 8 1.  Mishima Yukio, “Fuseji” (1950), reprinted in Mishima Yukio zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2003), 27:303–4. 2.  Noma Hiroshi, “Ken’etsu, Hakkin, Fuseji,” Gunzō 13.5 (1958): 236. 3.  Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Ikiteiru heitai (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1999), 206. 4.  Ishikawa Tatsuzō, “Fuseji sakka no ben: sakka no yuku michi,” Yomiuri shinbun September 19, 1937, evening ed., 4. 5.  Shuppan keisatsu hō, 111:64–79. 6.  Translation modified from Ishikawa Tatsuzō, “Ikiteiru heitai,” in Shōwa bungaku zenshū (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1986), 36:678; Tatsuzō Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, trans. Zeljko Cipris (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 336. See also Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Ikiteiru heitai, Chūkō bunko (Tokyo: Chūo Kōronsha, 1999), 133. 7.  Karen Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 190. 8.  Publications and Broadcast Division, SCAP Civil Intelligence Section: Press, Censorship (Books), National Archives and Records Administration, NWCTM-331-UD1803–855, RG 331, UD 1803, Box 8655. 9.  Odagiri Hideo, Hakkin sakuhinshū (Tokyo: Yakumo Shoten, 1948), 1. See also comments to the effect that no publisher would accept the manuscript for the list of banned titles from 1965, not so much because of the essence of the contents, but because of the issue of profitability, and to the effect that the idea of appealing to the Ministry of Education (Monbushō) for help with publication would run counter to the work which opposed the national authorities;  

 

 

Notes   /    301 see Odagiri Hideo and Fukuoka Seikichi, ed., Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō (Kawasaki-shi: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankōkai, 1981), 1:1. 10. Nakamura Mitsuo, “ ‘Ken’etsu seido’ no bōrei” (1951), reprinted in Nakamura Mitsuo zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1972), 12:538. In a similar vein, Tezuka Hidetaka laments the maintenance of a banned books archive in the Ueno Library into the postwar. Tezuka Hidetaka, “Hakkinbon no kura,” Shin Nihon bungaku (1950), reprinted in Tezuka Hidetaka chosaku shū (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1982), 2:419. 11.  Nakano Shigeharu, “Sokkuri sono mama,” Kaizō, March 1946, from the Gordon W. Prange Collection Magazines Microfiche, Gordon W. Prange Collection, East Asia Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland at College Park. 12.  From the uncataloged censorship report at the Gordon W. Prange Collection, East Asia Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park. 13.  Nakano Shigeharu, “Sokkuri sono mama.” 14. Ibid. 15. Andō Hiroshi, Tenbō Dazai Osamu (Tokyo: Gyōsei, 2009), 95–98. See also Kamiya Tadataka and Andō Hiroshi, Dazai Osamu zensakuhin kenkyū jiten (Tokyo: Benseisha, 1995); Andō Hiroshi, Dazai Osamu, Nihon bungaku kenkyū ronbun shūsei 41 (Tokyo: Wakakusa shobō, 1998). 16.  Dazai Osamu, Pandora no hako (Tokyo: Sōei shobō, 1948), censorship examination copy #5560, held in the Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland. Translation modified from Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1025. See also Andō Hiroshi, “Pandora no hako jihitsu kiakikomi hon no kōsatsu,” Shiryō to kenkyū 15.4 (2010). 17.  Phyllis Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 44–47, 150. 18.  “Dazai Osamu no 7 saku ni GHQ ken’etsu no ato, sakujo shiji mo, beidai ni shiryō,” Asahi shinbun, August 2, 2009; Akira Hatano, “GHQ Censored Prewar Values from Works by Dazai,” Asahi shinbun, August 3, 2009. 19.  See the parallel with the fifteen-years’ war in George A. De Vos, Socialization for Achievement: Essays on the Cultural Psychology of the Japanese (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 540; see also the connection with Kuno nenkan in Andō Hiroshi, Tenbō Dazai Osamu (Tokyo: Gyōsei, 2009), 95–98. 20. See Shuppan keisatsu shitsumu kokoroe ed.Naimushō keihokyoku, March 1935, 19–20. 21. Jō Ichirō, Kindan no sho: Sekai no hakkinbon korekushon, Kamenoko bukkusu (Tokyo: Shinhyōsha, 1972), 35–36. 22.  Keith Allen and Katie Buridge, ed., Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 115. 23.  While Latinizations have been common in English-language discourse  

 

 

 

 

302    /    Notes from at least the 1500s, the Puritan Vice Societies gave rise to various modes in the United States in the 1920s. To be language that has the possibility of meaning something, language must also have the possibility of dissolving into nonmeaning, into its pure materiality. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 7. 24.  Kaneko Mitsuharu, “Santen,” in Ga, Zenshishū taisei, Gendai nihon shijin zenshū, ed. Susukida Kyūkin and Kanbara Ariake (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1953), 95. 25.  Ibid., 95. 26.  Gennifer S. Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931, Twentieth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 27.  Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 29. 28.  Scott Richard Lyons, X-marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 29.  Tanikawa quoted in Nihon jikken eizō 40 nen shi (Osaka: Image Forum, 1994), 47. 30.  From Steve Clark Ridgley, Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 41–51. 31. Satō Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema (New York: Kodansha International, 1982), 35; Iijima Tadashi, Senchū Eigashi: Shiki (Tokyo: MG Shuppan, 1984), 202–4, 279–81; Mamoru Makino, Nihon eiga ken’etsushi (Tōkyō: Pandora hatsubaisho gendai shokan, 2003), 496. 32.  Tashima Tarō, Ken’etsushitsu no yami ni tsubuyaku (1938), reprinted in Saisentan minshū goraku eiga bunken shiryōshū, ed. Makino Mamoru (Tokyo: Yumani Shobō, 2006), 18:85–90. 33.  Fujita Motohiko, “Muhōmatsu no kōsei to tēma,” in Eiga sakka: Itami Mansaku (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1985), 171. Makino, Nihon eiga ken’etsushi, 498. 34. Makino, Nihon eiga ken’etsushi, 502. 35.  See Jonathan Abel, “Packaging Desires: The Unmentionables of Japanese Film,” in Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, ed. Keith Vincent and Nina Cornyetz (New York: Routledge, 2009), 272–307.  

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 9 1.  Alexander Gelley, Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 2.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 301–6, 435–68. 3. Tachibana Takahirō, Kore ijō wa kinshi: Aru ken’etsu kakarichō no shuki (Tokyo: Senshinsha, 1932), 133–34.  

 

 

Notes   /    303 4.  Yamanoi Ryō [Ebisudani Harumatsu], “Nikushimi no ekkusu,” Napf 6 (1931), reprinted in Nihon puroretaria bungakushū, vol. 38, Nihon puroretaria shishū (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1987), 1:377. 5.  Sakai Tokuzō [Seta Sanrō], “Fuseji” (1936), reprinted in Nihon Puroretaria bungaku shū, hyakuman’nin no kōshō (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1987), 39:534–35. See also partial reprint in Kodera Kenkichi, Hakkin shishū: Hyōron to shoshi (Tokyo: Nishizawa Shoten, 1977), 197–98. 6.  J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), viii. 7.  John Whittier Treat, “Beheaded Emperors and the Absent Figure in Contemporary Japanese Literature,” PMLA 109.1 (January 1994): 100–15. 8. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 90– 92; Karatani Kōjin, Tankyū (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1994), 2:52–67. See also Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 210–14; Azuma Hiroki, Sonzaironteki, yūbinteki: Jakku Derida ni tsuite (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1998), 119–46. 9.  K nearly admits this in practice when he writes that “the question of transworld identification makes some sense.” Saul A. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (Boston: D. Reidel, 1972), 271–72. 10.  Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 41. 11.  Jean Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Jean Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Theory and History of Literature 76 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 12.  Nakano Shigeharu, “Bunshō o uru koto sono hoka,” Shinchō, September 1929, reprinted in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1977), 9:268. 13.  Hatanaka Shigeo, Oboegaki Shōwa shuppan dan’atsu shōshi (Tokyo: Tosho Shinbunsha, 1965), 171. 14.  Ibid., 172. 15.  Ōya Sōichi, Hayashi Fusao, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kataoka Teppei, and Kaneko Yōbun,“Fuseji mondai ni oite,” Shincho 26.5 (May 1929): 134. 16.  Nakano Shigeharu, “Seiji to geijutsu,” in Puroretaria geijutsu kyōtei, ed. Chitarō Yohena (Tokyo: Sekaisha, 1929); Nakano Shigeharu, “Seiji to geijutsu,” in Nakano Shigeharu zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1977), 9:253–60. 17.  What readers of the postwar versions have encountered is more like a fuseji, an editorial comment that “five lines were deleted from the original” or “221 characters were given fuseji.” Nakano, Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, 9:254. This example is a complete reversal of the myth of deletion in Japan discussed in chapter 8; here the prewar edition suffered an unmarked deletion, while the postwar reprints carried marked deletion. But the degree to which the prewar deletion, which left a white space on the page, can be said to have been “silent” is debatable.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

304    /    Notes 18.  Karl Marx, “On Freedom of the Press: Freedom in General” (1842), available on the Marxist Internet Archive. 19.  Vladimir Lenin, preface to The Lessons of Crisis, Pravda 38 (May 6, 1917), reprinted in Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 24:213–16; Yokote Kazuhiko and Jonathan Abel, “Nakano Shigeharu ‘Seiji to geijutsu’—fuseji honbun to sono fukugen,” Bungaku Hihyō Josetsu 3.4 (November 2009): 138–49. 20. Nakano, Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, 9:264. 21.  Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, Asia, Local Studies/Global Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 229. 22. Nakano, Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, 9:264. 23.  Silverberg’s discussion of this essay emphasizes the commodity function of this essay because of her interest in connecting it to Benjamin’s idea on commodity and the reproduction of art. Miriam Rom Silverberg, Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 127–31. 24. Nakano, Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, 9:265. 25. Ibid. 26.  Ibid., 9:266. 27. Ibid. 28.  Ibid., 9:267. 29. Ibid. 30.  Michael G. Levine, Writing through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 28. 31.  Cited in ibid. 32. Nakano, Shigeharu zenshū, 9:267. 33.  Ibid., 1:101. For similarly brutal depictions of police activities, see Onchi Terutake [Kimura Shigeo], “Ken’etsuri ni,” Puroretaria shi, February 1931, reprinted in Nihon puroretaria bungaku shū (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1987), 28:198; Onchi Terutake, “Yume to hakkotsu to no seppun,” in Onchi Terutake shishū (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shijinsha, 1961), 16–37; Taki Shigeru, “Gōmon o taeru uta” (1929), reprinted in Nihon puroretaria bungaku taikei (Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1954), 3:462. 34.  Heinrich Heine, “Hassan,” in The Poetical Works of Heinrich Heine: Now First Completely Rendered into English Verse, in Accordance with the Original Forms (London: Villon Society, 1911), 247. 35.  So far as I can tell, Heine never used a similar phrase to discuss censorship. I’ve also consulted the Heine scholars Michael Levine and Kiba Hiroshi in search of any such reference in Heine’s works in German and Japanese but to no avail. 36.  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, preface to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline, available on the website of the Marxists Internet Archive 37. Ibid.  

 

 

 

 

Notes   /    305 38. Ibid. 39.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ästhetik: Mit Einem Einführenden Essay, ed. György Lukács, Klassisches erbe aus Philosophie und Geschichte (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955), 1:376. 40.  Paul de Man, “Dialogue and Dialogism,” in The Resistance to Theory, Theory and History of Literature 33 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 106–14. 41.  Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik 31 (München: Sagner, 1984). 42.  Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, Philosophy and Postcoloniality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 43.  Homi K. Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 132–44. 44.  Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952); de Man, “Dialogue and Dialogism,” 106–14. 45. Nakano, Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, 9:267. 46.  Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 414. 47.  See Annabel Patterson, “Postscript,” in Reading between the Lines (New York: Routledge, 1993) 325. 48.  Nakano Shigeharu, “Shōsetsu no kakenu shōsetsuka,” Kaizō, January 1936, 14–15; Nakano, Nakano Shigeharu zenshū, 2:135–36. 49.  My use of the word crossing is meant to evoke at least two meanings: first, the idea of cross-pollinating or interbreeding two disparate species; second, the action of crossing out, deleting, or X-ing.  

 

 

 

 

Chapter 10 1.  Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9. 2.  Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 22. 3.  Ibid., 16. 4.  Jameson’s later concept of a “singular modernity” is but one method of bracketing the injunction to always historicize to arrive at a new, more broad, and no less radical historicization. In fact, the return to the global in Jameson’s later work evokes precisely the call necessary for Asian Studies. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002). 5.  Tachibana Takashi, “Genron no jiyū” vs. “●●●” (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū: 2004), passim. 6.  One need only consider the case of Mishima’s After the Banquet and Yu

306    /    Notes Miri’s Fish Swimming in Stones to see this. See Philip Brasor, “A Responsible Attitude Needed toward ‘Privacy,’ ” Japan Times, April 4, 2004. 7.  Anne C. Henry, “Ellipsis Marks in a Historical Perspective,” in The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature 2, ed. Olga Fischer and Max Nänny (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001), 138–47. See also Carl Purington Rollins, “Not Many Asterisks,” Saturday Review of Literature 9 (November 12, 1932): 246: “It seems possible to hope that at no very distant day the asterisk will again return to its proper place as a guide to light and learning, and cease to be an obscurantist symbol.” 8.  James Branch Cabell, Figure of Earth (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1925), 178. 9.  Shakespeare “censored” in Robert Carleton Brown, Gems: A Censored Anthology (Cagnes-surmer: Roving Eye, 1931), 45. The Jimmy Kimmel Show’s This Week in Unnecessary Censorship—where deletions and bleeps makes puritan, straight-faced pundits and politicians appear to launch into sexual or subversive epithets—is to post-9/11 redaction what Robert Carleton Brown’s Gems was to censorship of the US press during World War I. That is to say, in the context of war and rigid overt censors, they call attention to the fact that censorship more dangerous, more funny. Today it seems like an old tired joke. 10.  Thurman Wesley Arnold, Fair Fights and Foul: A Dissenting Lawyer’s Life (New York: Harcourt, 1965), 176. See also Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (New York: Scribner, 1969), 244. 11.  Rollins, “Not Many Asterisks,” 246. 12.  Dorothy Parker, “Sex—Without the Asterisks,” Esquire 50.4 (October 1958): 102–3. 13.  Barbara Weinstein, “The AHA and Academic Freedom in the Age of Homeland Security, Revisited,” Perspectives, December 2007, available on web­site of the American Historical Association. 14.  Maureen Dowd, “Weapons of Mass Redaction,” New York Times, July 23, 2003; “CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years,” Onion, November 30, 2005. 15.  Gray v. Maryland Certiorari, “To The Court Of Appeals Of Maryland,” No. 96–8653, Supreme Court of The United States, Kevin D. Gray, Petitioner v. Maryland, “On Writ Of Certiorari To The Court Of Appeals Of Maryland,” March 9, 1998. 16.  Jenna Osman, Essay in Asterisks (Philadelphia: Roof Books, 2004), 13. 17.  If Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Lynne Cheney’s Telling the Truth share a common ancestor with the decision making of Clarence Thomas, Paul Wolfowitz, William Bennet, and John R. Bolton, it is certainly to be found in Strauss’s classroom. Michael A. Peters, “Leo Strauss and the Neoconservative Critique of the Liberal University Postmodernism, Relativism and the Culture Wars,” Critical Studies in Education 49.1 (March 2008): 11–32. 18. Arthur M. Melzer, “Esotericism and the Critique of Historicism,”  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes   /    307 The American Political Science Review 100.2 (2006). Here my argument is somewhat anticipated by Michael L. Frazer, “Esotericism Ancient and Modern: Strauss Contra Straussianism on the Art of Political-Philosophical Writing,” Political Theory 34.1 (February 2006): 33–61. 19.  “The problem with such a methodology [esotericism] is that it assumes philosophers are captive to the ideas of their time and place, the very sort of historicist thinking that Strauss (at least exoterically) opposes so adamantly in so many of his writings. The truly wise will break free from the opinions of both the masses and of the intellectual elite of their day, and come to embrace the truth as it really is. Since a student of Strauss is interested in reading esoteric texts written by the truly wise, we cannot develop a Straussian hermeneutic for these works until we have established which of the two accounts is (according to Strauss) the true account.” Frazer, “Esotericism Ancient and Modern,” 38. 20.  Alexandre Kojève, “The Emperor Julian and His Art of Writing,” in Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, ed. Joseph Cropsey (New York: Basic, 1964). 21.  Ibid., 162. 22.  Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines (New York: Routledge, 1993), 22–30, 322–25. 23.  Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken: 1969), 256. 24. Barbara Johnson, “Double Mourning in the Public Sphere: Prosopopoeia and Free Speech,” in The Wake of Deconstruction, Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory Series 11 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994) 38. 25. Frederic Jameson, Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 130–87; Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 254–83. 26.  Michael Holquist, “Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship,” Literature and Censorship Issue, special issue, PMLA 109.1 (1994). 27.  Raiford Guins, Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 28.  Tachibana Kōshirō [Takahirō], “Hatsubai kinshi no mandan: Nazo no fuseji,” Shomotsu tenbō 2.9 (September 1932).  

 

 

 

 

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342    /    Bibliography Umehara Hokumei. “Hongō hikka ki’nen ni dai suru.” Hentai shiryō 2.2 (1927). ———. “Ichiyazuke no kakumeiyasan.” Bungei shijō 3.1 (1926). ———. “Kagiana no shibai kenbutsu.” Bungei shijō 2.7 (1926). ———, ed. Kidan chinbun dai shūsei: Meiji Taishō. Tokyo: Bungei Ichibasha, Shigakkan Shokyoku, 1931. ———, ed. Kindai sesō zenshi. Tōkyō: Hakuhōsha, 1931. ———. “Mirabō haku no chinpon.” Gurotesuku 1.1 (1928). ———. Satsujin gaisha: Akumashugi zensei jidai. Tokyo: Akane shobō, 1924. Umehara Masaki. “Chichi: Umehara Hokumei.” In Bungei shijō kaisetsu, edited by Odagiri Susumu. Tokyo: Nihon Kindai Bungakukan, 1976. ———. “Umehara Hokumei sono ashiato.” In Dokyumento Nihonjin: Autorō, edited by Tanikawa Ken’ichi, vol. 6. Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin, 1968. ———. “Umehara Hokumei sono ashiato.” In Dokyumento Nihonjin, edited by K. u Muraoka, vol. 6. Tokyo: Gakugei Shorin, 1968. “Under the Censor’s Axe.” New York Times, September 26, 1920, 48. University of Maryland Libraries Staff and Japan Staff National Diet Library, eds. Guide to the Gordon W. Prange Magazine Collection. New York: Norman Ross, 2001. Van den Abbeele, Georges. “The Persecution of Writing: Revisiting Strauss and Censorship.” diacritics 27.2 (Summer 1997). Vanderham, Paul. James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Wada Atsuhiko. Shomotsu no nichi-bei kankei: Riterashī-shi ni mukete. Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2007. Wald, Alan M. Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics. London: Verso, 1994. Warai no daigaku. Directed by Hoshi Mamoru. Tōhō, 2004. Warhol, Robyn R., and Diane Price Herndl. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Watanabe Naomi. Fukei bungakuron josetsu. Hihyō kūkan sōsho 17. Tokyo: Ōta Shuppan, 1999. Watanabe Sumiko. Josei bungaku o manabu hito no tame ni. Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha, 2000. ———. Nihon kindai josei bungakuron: Yami o hiraku. Sekai Shisō Seminar. Kyoto: Sekai Shisōsha, 1998. Weber, Samuel. “Wartime.” In Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Weinstein, Barbara. “The AHA and Academic Freedom in the Age of Homeland Security, Revisited.” Perspectives (December 2007). Available on website of the American Historical Association. Weisenfeld, Gennifer S. Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905– 1931. Twentieth-Century Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.  

Bibliography   /    343 West, Rebecca. Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Doran & Company, 1931. Widdemer, Margaret. “Message and Middlebrow.” Saturday Review of Literature 9.31 (1933). Wilkinson, Marguerite, ed. New Voices: An Introduction to Contemporary Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1919. Williams, A. R. Roshia daikakumeishi. Translated by Umehara Hokumei and Uyama Asatarō. Tokyo: Asakaya Shoten, 1925. Williams, Linda. Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. ———. “Of Kisses and Ellipses.” In Screening Sex. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Williams, Raymond. “Violence.” In Keywords. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Winsor, Kathleen. Forever Amber. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Wolfe, Humbert. “The Limits of Obscenity.” Saturday Review of Literature 8.42 (1932). Yamaguchi Masao. “Zasetsu” no Shōwa shi. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995. Yamamoto Chie. Oikaze no onnatachi: Josei bungaku to sengo. Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1992. Yamamoto Yūzō. “Ani hatsubai kinshi nominaran ya.” Kaizō (September 1926). Reprinted in Yamamoto Yūzō zenshū, edited by Tsuchiya Bunmei and Takahashi Kenji, vol. 10. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1976. Yamanoi Ryō [Ebisudani Harumatsu]. “Nikushimi no ekkusu.” Napf 6 (1931). Reprinted in Nihon puroretaria bungakushū, vol. 38, Nihon puroretaria shishū 1. Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1987. Yano Hōjin. “Ryōsho konjaku monogatari hatsubai kinshi no shîkashū.” Nihon kosho tsūshin 41.6 (1976): 6–7. Yano Kan’ichi. “Sayoku bungaku kara sensō bungaku e.” In Kindai sensō bungaku jiten, vol. 1, Izumi jiten shiriizu. Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 1996. Yasunaga Taketo. “Ishikawa Tatsuzō no sensō taiken.” Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō 41.10 (1976): 34–40. Yokote Kazuhiko. “1940 nendai bungaku e no shironteki kōsatsu: Gunjiteki heiki, sakusha, hyōgen.” In Shōwa shoseki zasshi shinbun hakkin nenpyō, edited by Odagiri Hideo and Fukuoka Seikichi. Kawasaki-shi: Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankōkai, 1981. ———. Hi senryōka no bungaku ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyū. Tokyo: Musa­ shino Shobō, 1995. ———. Hi senryōka no bungaku ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyū. Tokyo: Musa­ shino Shobō, 1996. ———. “Ichiranhyō senzen senjiki hiken’etsu bungaku sakuhin shobun risuto.” Heiwa bunka kenkyū 23 (2003): 153–76. Yokote Kazuhiko and Jonathan Abel. “Nakano Shigeharu ‘Seiji to geijutsu’— fuseji honbun to sono fukugen.” Bungaku Hihyō Josetsu 3.4 (November 2009): 138–49.  

 

 

 

 

344    /    Bibliography Yoshimoto Takaaki. Kyōdō gensōron. Kadokawa bunko 5014. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1984. Yoshimura, Yoshiko, ed. Censored Japanese Serials of the Pre-1946 Period: A Checklist of the Microfilm Collection. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1994. ———, ed. Japanese Government Documents and Censored Publications: A Checklist of the Microfilm Collection. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1992. Yoshino Takao. Miyatake Gaikotsu. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō, 1985. Young, Art. Art Young: His Life and Times. Edited by John Nicholas Beffel. New York: Sheridan House, 1939. Yui Masaomi. Shuppan keisatsu kankei shiryō: Kaisetsu, sōmokuji. Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1983. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution.’ ” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004). ———. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. “The Parallax View.” New Left Review 25 (January-February 2004). ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

Index

Abe Jirō, Santarō no nikki (Santarō’s diary), 104 Adachi Gen, 71 Aesopian language, 240–42, 244 fig. See also “language of slaves” aesthetics: administration of, 287n3; Japanese, 191–92; of redaction, 155, 156, 177–88, 205, 210 airplane imagery, 123–24 Akama Tōhō, 49, 51, 52, 54, 57 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa, 63, 164–67, 280n14 Althusser, Louis, 287–88n4 Amenomiya Yōzō, 199 Andō Hiroshi, 204 Anthology of Japanese Proletarian ­Literature, 7 anti-imperialism, 118–19 antiwar sentiment, 109–11, 170–71, 186, 200 Ara Masahito, 101, 291n41 Arai Tetsu, 278n45 archival preservation, 20, 24, 264, 266. See also archives archives: Benjamin on, 262; of censor­ ship, 2, 9, 18, 25–27, 264; incomplete­ ness of, 20, 27, 28–30; metaphorical, 3, 9, 45; similarities with c­ ensors, 2–3; and understanding, 30, 273n25; of US public documents, 255–56. See also archival preservation; cen­ sors’ examination copies  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

area studies, 189–92, 251–52, 263, 305n4 Arts Market (Bungei shijō), 99 Asahi News: article on obscenity trial, 201–2; essays on censorship, 66; novels serialized in, 116, 117fig., 288n7 Asian Studies. See area studies asterisks, 4, 19, 254–55, 306n7. See also redaction marks (fuseji) Austen, Jane, 137 avant-garde film, 210–12 Azuma Tairiku (Umehara Hokumei), 99; “The Beckoning Spirit and the Scout,” 106–8. See also Umehara Hokumei  

 

 

 

 

 

Bahktin, Mikhail, 241 Bandō Tsumasaburo, 213 banned books: access to, 25; c­ ollections of, 24–27, 28–30, 271n17; from before the earthquake, 271n17; graphs of censorship activity, 33– 37; keywords in titles of, 46–47; lists of, 3, 39, 44, 45–49, 51–52, 59, 276n24, 300n9; missing from cen­ sor’s archives, 37–38; number of, 28–30, 33fig., 34, 93, 94fig., 271n18, 272nn20–21; survival of, 38–42 Banned in Boston Principle, 288n4 Bataille, Georges, 92 Baudrillard, Jean, 54–55  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

345

346    /    Index Bell, Anthony, 257 Benjamin, Walter, 55–56, 262, 304n23 best sellers. See mass circulation Bhabha, Homi, 242 bibliographers, 44, 55–56. See also banned books, lists of Bibliography Exhibition, 44 Binding, Rudolf Georg, “Unsterblich­ keit,” 124 birth control, 183–84 Boccaccio, Decameron, 97–98 “book burning,” 41–42 book production, 35, 36fig., 37fig.,45 Book Sorting Project, 26, 271n11, 299n51 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 210 Brown, Robert Carleton, Gems: A Censored Anthology, 254, 306n9 Bungei (Arts) magazine, 204 Bungei jihō, 173–74 Bungei shijō (Arts market), 99 Burleson, Albert, 79 Burt, Richard, 287n3 Butler, Judith, 32  

 

 

 

 

 

Denji’s Busō seru shigai, 117–19; of Proletarian Poetry, 4–7, 5fig., 6fig., 8fig.; of Kobayashi Takiji’s Numajiri mura, 168–173; unmarked entry into general collections, 27, 29–30, 272n20 censorship: calls for reform of system, 70–74, 73fig., 157, 279n4; censor­ ing of, 15; effects of, 14–15, 20, 31, 33; global components of, 13, 39– 40; implicit and explicit, 13, 31–32, 62, 131, 149; intention of destroy­ ing ideas, 42–43; irrationality of, 15–16, 65, 66–67, 71; periodization of, 2, 17–18, 39, 194–95, 197; pro­ ductive capacity of, 85, 91–92, 149; readers and, 218, 219–20, 242–43; standards for, 68, 70, 267n1; in the United States, 11–12, 13, 39, 67, 254– 60, 306n9. See also banned books; essays on censorship; internaliza­ tion of the censor; Occupation cen­ sorship; office of censorship; selfcensorship; traces of censorship; wartime censorship “censorship is,” 14–17, 74, 75, 264, 265fig. Central Intelligence Group (US), 26 Chaffee, Zechariah, 126 Chartier, Roger, 270n5 Chiyoda Public Library, 27 Chūō Kōron (magazine), 125, 127, 199, 208, 231; censorship of, compared with Kaizō, 156, 158, 295n10 Circle Circle News (Marumaru shinbun), 144 circumlocution, 237, 240, 241, 242–43, 245 class inequality, 108 Coetzee, J. M., 287n3 collectors, 55–56 colonialism, 10–11, 138 Committee for the Reform of Censor­ ship, 157 Complete Works of Marx and Engels, 57–58 consultation system (naietsu seido),  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cabell, James Branch: Figures of Earth, 254; Jurgen, 254 Calverton, V. F., 92 Canard Enchaîné, 282n46 canonization and censorship, 112–14, 114–17, 120, 125, 130, 138–40 cartoons, 3, 71, 72fig., 73fig., 79–80 censor-baiting, 219 censors: cartoons of, 3, 71, 72fig., 73fig., 79–80; categories developed by, 3, 92, 97; death of, 76–77; in fiction, 137, 169; similarities with archivists, 2–3; as writers, 91. See also inter­ nalization of the censor; Tachibana Takahiro censors’ examination copies (nōhon): access to today, 24–25; archiving of, 4–5, 25–26, 28–29; censor’s margi­ nalia in, 8fig., 26, 117–18, 171–73, 172fig.; disposition of, in the United States, 26–27, 29; of Kuroshima  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index    /    347 1–2, 147–48, 150; and Kuroshima Denji’s Busō seru shigai, 288n9; and the relationship of censors and edi­ tors, 169, 239; termination of, 68; and the use of redaction marks, 147, 159, 160 Cook, Haruko Taya, 290n36 Council of State proclamations (1868 and 1869), 17, 269n26 crime fiction, 89–91 Criminal Sciences, 89, 91 “crossing words,” 247–48, 305n49  

 

 

 

esotericism, 260–62 Espionage Act, 79 essays on censorship: a­ dvocating re­ form of the system, 66–68, 279n4; archive of, 39; boom in, after 1923, 61–62; critique of the i­ rrationality of the censor, 65, 66–67, 71; dis­ appearance of, by the 1930s, 62, 85; discussion of self-censorship, 69–70; Eastman’s “The Post Office Censorship,” 80; humor in, 61, 62, 63–66, 74–75, 85, 280n13; in Kaizō, 157, 202–3, 233; by Masamune Hakuchō, 280–81n21; metaphor of death in, 61, 76, 85; by Mishima Yukio, 196; Nakano’s “The Selling of Writing and Other Matters,” 231, 235–39, 245, 304n23; narratives of personal encounters with censors, 69; by Nii Itaru, 65–66; by Nobori Shomu, 65; during the O ­ ccupation, 62 Etō Jun: contrasted with Said, 10–11; criticism and list of banned books in Great Encyclopedia, 276n24; flir­ tations with Pauvert, 268n10; on fuseji, 145; mentioned, 60; nostalgia for imperial rule, 10–11; on postwar censorship, 10–11, 31, 39, 119, 126, 127, 264 euphemism, 161, 215 “every man his own censor,” 11. See also self-censorship and Snafu Executive Order 13233 (United States, 2001), 255–58  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dazai Osamu: “Hanabi” (Fireworks), 204; Hibari no koe (The Voice of the Lark), 204–5, 215; mentioned, 121; Pandora no hako (Pandora’s box), 203–5, 220 death: as metaphor for censorship, 61, 75–77, 83; in war, 126 death names (okurina), 229–30 deletion marks. See redaction marks (fuseji) de Man, Paul, 241, 242 democracy, 10, 13, 39, 80, 118–19, 212 De Palma, Brian, Redacted (film), 256, 258–60 Derrida, Jacques, 191, 230, 282n51 Dowd, Maureen, “Weapons of Mass Redaction,” 256 Dower, John, 269–70n27  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eastman, Max, “The Post Office Cen­ sorship,” 80 Edogawa Ranpo, 109, 121; Mushi (Maggots), 177–83 Einstein, Albert, 184 ellipsis, 190, 191, 208–9, 264 Emperor Julian, 260–61 emphasis mark, 173, 180 empty spaces, 143, 191–92, 239, 263 ero-guro-puro, 95 erotic and proletarian literature, 19, 95, 102, 108–9. See also obscenity, and sedition; Umehara Hokumei erotic texts, 91–92, 95. See also obscenity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

fascism, 42 February 26 Incident (1936), 33–34, 93 film: avante-garde, 210–12; censorship of, 213–15; redaction in, 258–60 Film Law of 1938, 213–14 Foley, Barbara, 285n36 Foucault, Michel, 84, 111 Frederich, Ernst, Krieg dem Krieg, 109– 11, 110fig. freedom of speech, 12, 65, 71, 73fig., 235–36  

 

 

 

 

 

 

348    /    Index freedom of the press, 2, 11–12, 13, 158, 202–3, 204–5 Freud, Sigmund: on censorship in Interpretation of Dreams, 293n1; on humor, 65, 74; Introductory ­Lectures, 239 fugōri (irrational), 66, 280n15 Fuji (periodical), 30 Fujimori Seikichi, 65, 280n13, 190, 296n16; Gisei (Sacrifice), 157, 176, 296n15, 299n52; “Hikari to yami” (Light and dark), 157; Two Disputed Things, 176–77 Fukuoka Seikichi, 277n35 Fukuyama, Francis, “The End of ­History,” 260 fuseji. See redaction marks (fuseji) Futabatei Shimei, 190  

 

 

 

Gakuren student uprising, 163 Gendai Nihon bungaku zenshū (­Collected works of modern Japa­ nese literature), 176, 299n52 genre, 122–23 Gertzman, Jay, 95, 102 Gluck, Carol, 50 Gordon Prange Collection, 30, 40, 272n23 Gray, Kevin, 257 Greater East Asian War Reports and Memoirs, 41 Great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, 25, 38, 92, 163, 271n17 Greimas Square, 244fig., 244–45, 263– 64, 265fig. grotesque fiction, 109 Guillory, John, 115 Gurotesuku magazine, 98, 99 gyōsei (administration), 287n3  

 

Harootunian, Harry, 251–52 Hatanaka Shigeo, 231–32 Hayashi Fusao, 159 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 240–41 Heine, Heinrich, 240; Germany: A Winter’s Tale, 238–39  

 

 

 

 

Heitai seikatsu (comic book), 286n54 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 257 Hentai shiryō (Perverse Matters), 99, 109–11, 110fig. Hersey, John, Into the Valley, 292n45 Hicks, Granville, 292–93n62 Hino Ashihei, 158, 291n40; “Tsune” (“Claws”), 291n40; Mugi to heitai (Barley and Soldiers), 125, 128–29, 130–31, 162, 296n19; Tsuchi to heitai (Earth and Soldiers), 128–29 Hirano Ken, 101 Hirotsu Kazuo, 157 Hirotsu Ryūryō, Zangiku (Last chry­ santhemum), 190 historicism, 251–52, 260, 261–63 Hokumei. See Umehara Hokumei Holquist, Michael, 17, 264 Holzer, Jenny, Redaction Paintings, 2004–10, 256, 257–60, 258fig. Home Ministry Office documents, 24–25, 26, 29 Hori Tatsuo, 190–91, 264 Hosokawa Karoku, 158; A Course in the Development of Capitalism, 279n4 humor: caricatures of censors, 3, 71, 72fig., 73fig.; censorship of, 79–81; in discourse about censorship, 61, 62, 63–66, 74–75, 85, 280n13; and marks of deletion, 144–45, 144fig. Humor and Eccentricity (Kibatsu to kokkei), 144, 144fig. Humor Press (Kokkei shinbun), 79, 80–81  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Iimura Takahiko, Shikan ni tsuite (On Eye Rape) (short film), 210–11 Inagaki Horoshi, Muhōmatsu no isshō (The life of lawless Matsu) (film), 213 inbi (latent or obscure), 10 indexes of banned books, 3, 39, 44–56, 59–60, 276n24. See also Akama Tōhō; Ino Shōzō; Itō Chikusui; Odagiri Hideo; Saitō Shōzō Ino Shōzō, 48, 169 internalization of the censor, 11–13, 34, 62, 69–70. See also self-censorship  

 

 

 

 

 

Index    /    349 interrogation scenes, 65–66, 280n14 Iraq war, 256, 258–60 Ishikawa Tatsuzō: articles on “fuseji writers,” 199; Ikiteiru heitai (Living Soldiers), 125, 127–28, 131, 199–201, 291n41 Itami Mansaku, 213–14 Itō Chikusui, 49, 52, 54, 58 Ito, Ken, 121 Itō Sei, 121 Iwashita Shunsaku, Tomishima Matsugorō den (The legend of ­Tomishima Matsugoro), 213  

 

 

 

 

Jameson, Frederic, 262, 263, 305n4 “Japanese aesthetic,” 191–92 Japanese Imperial Navy Libraries, 26 Jimmy Kimmel Show, 306n9 Jintan, 235–36 Jō Ichirō, 100, 104, 105, 207 Joyce, James, Ulysses, 191  

 

Kahoku company, 203 Kahoku shinpō, 203 Kaihō (Liberation), 71, 73fig. Kaizō (Reconstruction): as an archive of censorship, 157–58, 161; censor­ ship of Fujimori’s Gisei, 176; circu­ lation of, 295n8; lengthy redaction in, 173–74, 175–77, 177–81; as a microhistory, 156–60; proper-name erasure in, 162–63; publication of Akutagawa’s Kappa, 164–66; publi­ cation of Edogawa Ranpo’s Mushi, 177–83; publication of Fujimori’s Two Disputed Things, 176–77; pub­ lication of Hino’s Barley and Soldiers, 128; publication of Kawabata’s “Shiroi asa no kagami” with dele­ tion marks, 154–55; publication of Kobayashi’s Numajiri mura, 168; publication of Kuroshima’s A Flock of Swirling Crows, 186–87; publi­ cation of Tanizaki’s Manji, 183–85; publication of Tokuda’s “Moto no eda e,” 173–74; redacted works by Nakano Shigeharu, 233–34; ­society  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to protect, 157; special c­ ensorship edition, 65, 66, 69; as target of censorship, 156–57, 158, 176, 202, 295n3, 295n10; use of redaction marks, 19, 152–53, 156, 159–60 Kaizō company, 183; Collected Works of Modern Japanese Literature, 50 Kanbayashi Akatusji, “Fuseji,” 169, 175, 186–87 Kaneko Mitsuharu: “Santen” (Three points), 208, 264; “Todai” (Light­ house), 208 Kaneko Yōbun: “Akai Mizumi” (The red lake), 295n3; on Umehara Hokumei, 100 Kanno Satomi, 286–87n56 kanpu (returns), 269n16 Karatani Kōjin, 15, 31–32, 74–75 Katō Norihiro, 10, 35, 39, 278n52; The American Shadow, 35 Katsumoto Seiichirō, 176 Kawabata Yasunari, 121, 157, 191; “Shi­ roi asa no kagami” (The mirror of a white morning), 154–55; Snow Country (Yukiguni), 154–55 Kawakami Hajime, Binbō Monogatari (Tales of destruction), 159 Keene, Donald, 121, 204 kinku (taboo words), 215 Kishi Sanji, 175 Kobayashi Takiji: collected works of, 48, 298n44; death of, 175, 239, 264; March 15, 1928, 38, 57, 274n39; Numa­jiri mura (The village of Numajiri), 168, 169–73; Tō seikat­ susha (Lifetime party member), 101 Kōdan Club, 106, 107 Koike Mubō, “the symphony of sexual desire and the left-wing,” 92 Kojève, Alexandre, 260–61 Komori Yōichi, 115, 126–27 kondankai (meetings between cen­ sors and publishers), 13, 68, 148, 268nn15–16 Kōno Kensuke, 197n22, 295n4, 295n5, 295n6, 296n15 Kōno Taeko, 183  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

350    /    Index Kripke, Saul (K), 226–28, 303n9 Kurata Hyakuzō: “Akai reikon” (Red spirit), 157; “Death of a Police Chief,” 162–64, 296–97n20 Kurihara Sadako, “What is War?” 119 Kuroshima Denj, 101, 190; Busō seru shigai (Militarized Streets), 117–20, 288n9, 289n18; A Flock of Swirling Crows, 175, 186–87 Kusama Yayoi, 210; Self-Obliteration (film), 210, 211 Kusano Shinpei, “Tōmin” (Hibernation), 209–10 Kuwabara Takeo, 295n10  

 

 

 

 

 

Lacan, Jacques, 243, 262, 263 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 202, 255 “language of slaves” (dorei no kotoba), 231–33, 239–40, 240–42, 243–45, 244fig. See also Nakano Shigeharu Latinizations, 301–2n23 Lenin, Vladimir, 235, 238, 240–41 lesbianism, 185–86 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 225–26, 234, 235 libel, 253 Liberation (Kaihō), 71, 73fig. Library of Congress, 9, 26–27, 29, 271n17 “literary casualties,” 19, 83–84, 113–14, 138–39 literature: effects of censorship on out­ put of, 35–36, 273n35; number of books published, 35, 36fig., 37fig., 45; period of greatest censorship, 34; postwar, 39; topic of censorship in, 125, 137, 166, 169, 186–87, 280n14. See also banned books; “literary casualties”; novels, serialized; poetry; proletarian literature; war narratives “loose lips sink ships” propaganda campaign, 11 Loseff, Lev, 241  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Makino Mamoru, 214 Manchurian Incident, 4–7, 33, 93  

 

Manchurian Railway Company library, 26 marginalization, 139, 143 Marquis de Sade, 92 Marumaru chinbun (Circle Circle Paper), 190 Marx, Karl, 57, 67, 234, 277n43 Marxism, 106, 279n4 Masamune Hakuchō, 69, 280–81n21 Masao Miyoshi, 121 mass circulation, 112–13, 115fig., 115–17, 117fig. Masses, The (magazine), 79–80, 282n52 Matsumoto Toshio, Bara no sōretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses) (film), 211–12 Matsu’ura Sōzō, 148–49 McDonald, Keiko, 132 McKenzie, D. H., 296n18 meetings between censors and pub­ lishers (kondankai), 13, 68, 148, 268nn15–16 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 293n4 metaphor, 175, 208–9, 235–37, 239 Michener, James A.: “Lobeck, the Asi­ atic,” 135–38; “Passion,” 137–38; Tales of the South Pacific, 131, 135– 38; The Voice of Asia, 136–37 Michigan State University, 299n51 Mid-Year Overview Report of the Publishing Police, 267n1 Mifune Toshirō, 214 Miki Kiyoshi, 69–70; “Responsibili­ ties of/for Censorship,” 67–68 military censorship, 162, 223–24, 225. See also wartime censorship Miller, Henry, Sexus, 207 Minowa Renichi, 298n36 Mishima Yukio: After the Banquet, 305n6; “Fuseji,” 196, 197; wartime writings, 289n21 Miyatake Gaikotsu, 80–81, 98; Banned Things, 144; postcard from the collection of, 144, 144fig. See also Humor Press modernism, 94, 101, 102  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index    /    351 Modern Japanese Literature Archive, 38 Moretti, Franco, 35, 36 Muhōmatsu no isshō (The life of law­ less Matsu) (film), 213–14 Mumei jidai (Nameless era), 159  

Nagai Kafū, 12 Nakajima Kenzō, 157 Nakamura Mitsuo, “The Specter of the ‘Censorship System,’ ” 201–2 Nakamura Murao, 295n3 Nakano Eizō, 152 Nakano Masato, 100 Nakano Shigeharu: “Ame no furu Shi­ nagawa eki” (Shinagawa Station in the rain), 233–34, 237; and the “language of slaves,” 218–19, 231– 40, 240, 242, 243–45; “Laws,” 239; mentioned, 101, 121, 264; “Shōsetsu no kakenu shōsetsuka” (The Novel­ ist Who Couldn’t Write a Novel), 160, 233, 245–48; poems of, 278n44; “Politics and Art,” 234–35, 303n17; “Bunshō o uru koto sono hoka” (The Selling of Writing and Other Mat­ ters), 231, 235–39, 245, 304n23; “Sokkuri sono mama” (Nothing changes), 202–3 Nakazato Kaizan, “Yumedono,” 157, 295n5 National Archives (Washington, D.C.), 26 National Diet Library (NDL), 23, 26– 27, 29, 270n1, 271n17, 272nn20–21 National Diet Library Law, 270n1 National Mobilization Law, 33–34, 93, 294n9 necrophilia, 177–79, 181, 186 Newspaper Law of 1909, 158 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 254 Nii Itaru, 65–66 9/11, 255–56 Nishio Kanji, 10, 40–42, 278n52 Nishitani Osamu, 112, 113 Nobori Shomu, 65  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nogami Yaeko, “Machiko,” 197n22 Noguchi Takehiko, 121 Noma Hiroshi, 196–97 novels, serialized, 116, 117fig., 157, 168, 171, 183, 203  

obscenity: censorship of, in the 1960s, 211–12; and sedition, 19, 91–95, 98, 100–101; trials, 202 Occupation censorship: concern with anti-imperialism and ultra-nation­ alism, 118–19; Etō Jun on, 10–11, 31, 39, 119, 126, 127, 264; of film, 214; lasting effect of, 10; list of titles confiscated, 41, 276n24; Nishio Kanji on, 40–41; and Odagiri’s anthology of banned works, 58– 59, 201; redaction marks and, 148, 162, 189–90; secrecy of, 2, 10–13, 276n24; stipulation against refer­ ence to SCAP censorship, 62, 202, 208; stipulations for confiscation and reporting, 40, 41; of Tanizaki’s “Letters of Mrs. A,” 123–24; traces of, 41, 198, 202–3, 205 Occupation-period publications. See Gordon Prange Collection Odagiri Hideo: on censorship, 58–59; lists of banned books, 45, 49, 51, 54– 55, 59, 300n9; postwar collection of stories, 201 office of censorship, 1–2, 16, 24, 43, 61, 91, 149, 229, 268n15; US, 11–12 Ogasawara Naganari, 99 Okuizumi Eizaburō, 30 Onchi Terutake, 77–78 Onion, “CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years,” 256 Ōoka Shōhei: “Field Hospital in San Jose,” 135; “A Record of a Prisoner of War” (“Furyoki” ), 131–35, 203, 296n17 “OO Occupied Zone,” 223fig., 223–24 Osaka Humor Press, The, 81–82; “Para­ sitic Rare Words,” 81, 82fig.; “Reread the Same Characters,” 81, 82fig.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

352    /    Index Osatake Takeki, 51, 52–53, 57 Osman, Jena, Essay in Asterisks, 256– 57, 258 Otaki Noritada, 275n6 “outside of discourse,” 31 Ōya Sōichi, 66–67, 69, 101, 126–27, 156–57, 234, 237 Ozaki, Shirō, 158; “MacArthur’s Boots,” 41  

 

 

 

 

paper shortage, 2, 206 pariah capitalism, 95, 96–98 Parker, Dorothy, “Sex: Without the Asterisks,” 255 Patterson, Annabel, 242–43, 261 Paust, Otto, Volk im Feu, 287n57 Pauvert, Jean-Jacques, 268n10 Peace Preservation Law of 1925, 1, 38, 163 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 243 Pen Brigade, 105 periodicals, 271n18. See also Kaizō Perverse Matters (Hentai shiryō), 99, 109–11, 110fig. place names, redaction of, 162, 163, 164–65 poetry, 76–78, 107–8, 209–10, 233– 34, 238–39, 256–57. See also Proletarian Poetry postmaster general, 79 Prange Collection, 30, 40, 272n23 prepublication manuscripts, 131, 136– 37, 194 preservation, 18, 20, 24, 264, 266 Price, Byron, 11, 126 privacy, 253 private examination system. See con­ sultation system private publications, 98 Private Snafu, 11 Proletarian Arts, “Against Unfair Cen­ sorship” special edition, 71, 72fig., 239 Proletarian Arts Handbook, 234 proletarian literature, 7, 91–92, 100– 102, 106, 161, 234 Proletarian Poetry: censor’s examina­  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

tion copy, 4–7, 5fig., 6fig., 8fig.; in Publishing Police Report, 6–9, 7fig. proper names, 161–67, 178, 189, 221– 22, 223–24, 226–28, 229–30. See also unnames Publisher’s Yearbook, 38, 39 Publishing Laws (1890s), 92 Publishing Police (Shuppan keisatsu), 24–25, 147. See also censors’ exami­ nation copies; Publishing Police Report Publishing Police Materials (Shuppan keisatsu shiryō), 279n4 Publishing Police Records, 38 Publishing Police Report: on Fujimori’s Two Disputed Things, 176; on fuseji, 168; on Ishikawa’s Living Soldier, 200; items banned for both morals and politics, 93; listed means of con­ trol before ban, 268n15; monthly lists of banned books, 44; preserved in collections, 28; recorded ban on Taki’s “Prepare! It’s Time,” 6–7, 7fig.; reports on banned essays on censor­ ship, 279n4 Publishing Police Survey, 159, 168 Puritan Vice Societies, 302n23  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

rape, 119 reading between the lines, 223, 242– 43, 245, 262–63 reality effect, 161, 163, 165, 167 redaction: aesthetics of, 155, 156, 177– 88, 205, 210; in film, 258–60; polit­ ical and ethical implications of, 217–19; in US public documents, 255–58, 260. See also “language of slaves”; redaction marks (fuseji); unnames; X-ing redaction marks (fuseji): in Akutaga­ wa’s Kappa, 164–67; alternative devices to, 147, 215; ambivalence about, 233; ambivalence of, 219–22; auditory, 214; censor’s marginalia surrounding, 171–73, 172fig.; con­ sidered problematic by censors, 168; and the consultation system, 147–  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index    /    353 48; crackdown on, 152, 160, 173, 199, 205–6, 246–47; creation of new meaning by, 149–50; cultural cachet of, 159–60, 196; decoded by cen­ sors, 6–7; decoding table for, 168; enhancement of literature by, 167; excision of, 175; fetishization of, 14, 150, 194, 197; heyday of, 148, 150, 160, 219, 296n15; h ­ umorous play with, 19, 223–25; in Kaizō, 19, 152–53, 156, 159–60; in K ­ awabata’s “Shiroi asa no kagami,” 154–55; in Kawabata’s Snow Country, 154–55; as the “language of slaves,” 218–19, 231; at the linguistic level, 183; and the myth of prewar and postwar censorship, 148–49, 194–95, 215– 16, 303n17; in Nakano’s The Novelist Who Couldn’t Write a Novel, 245–48; necessity of p ­ reserving, 182–83; nostalgia for, 195–97, 225; as outside archive, 39; as part of the design of text, 150, 184 in proper names, 161–67, 178, 221–22, 223– 24; readers and, 219–20; read in context, 150–53; replaced with restored text, 178, 188, 230; respon­ sibility for, 231–32; in Tanizaki’s Manji, 183–85; timeline of, 148– 49, 149fig., 199; as trigger for fur­ ther censorship, 235; in the United States, 254–55; used for long pas­ sages, 173–77, 177–181, 184–85, 186–88, 206, 238; used in poetry, 4–7, 210, 234; used to circumvent privacy law, 253; variety of marks and their functions, 19, 145, 152– 53, 160–61, 173, 181; as violence to texts, 69, 83; in visual culture, 209– 12; wider view of, 253–54. See also asterisks; X-ing repetition marks, 179–80 restored text, 178–79, 181, 188, 230 rhetoric of blame, 13–14 Rosenfeld, David M., 291n40 Roth, Samuel, 77–78 Russell, Bertrand, 184  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Said, Edward, 10–11, 13–14, 16, 137, 293n69 Saitō Shōzō, 44, 54, 56–57; The Great Bibliographic Chronology of Contemporary Literary Indictment, 50, 51, 52–53, 57; lists of banned books, 44, 45–46, 49, 54; Modern Japanese Literature Timeline, 50 Sakai Tokuzō, “Fuseji,” 221–22 Sanders, Mark, 241 Sanger, Margaret, 184 Sari Kawana, 109 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 243 SCAP. See Occupation censorship Scarry, Elaine, 125–26 Secret Tales of Criminal Arrests for Blind Passion, The (1939), 3–4 sedition, 4, 19, 92–95, 98, 100–101 self-censorship: concern expressed about, in essays, 69–70, 75; con­ nected with overt censorship, 16, 32–33, 42–43, 149, 155–56; ellipses in, 190; in film, 214; before the Occupation, 129; in Ōoka and Michener, 131–38; and redaction marks, 148; shifted r­ esponsibility to editors, 148; and suicide of texts, 81–82; in the United States, 11–12. See also internalization of the censor semiotic squares, 244fig., 244–45, 263–64, 265fig. Senki (magazine), 157, 238 Senryaku senjutsu ketsugi roku (Record of agreed-upon strategies and tactics), 270n6 Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (The spiriting away of Sen and Chihiro) (film), 228 sex: censorship of, 154–55; and poli­ tics, 102, 185–86. See also erotic texts; obscenity Shimizu Kemokurō, “Improve the Censorship System!” (cartoon), 73fig. Shinchō (magazine), 157, 159, 235 Shinkō eiga, special censorship edi­ tion, 70  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

354    /    Index Shiratori Seigo, 68 Shōei company, 203 Shōjo kurabu (Girls club), 223, 223fig. Shōwa Research Society, 26 Shukan bunshun libel case, 253 silence, 85, 113, 239, 258, 264; in Kobayashi’s Numajiri mura, 170; markers of, 166, 190, 199; as motif in Hyakuzō’s “Death of a Police Chief,” 162, 164; Nakano on, 237. See also internalization of the censor Silverberg, Miriam, 58, 304n23 Social Movement Dispatch, The, 48 Society for the Promotion of Science and Technology, 99 state violence, 109. See also war narratives Stoler, Ann Laura, 273n25 Strauss, Leo, 233, 242–43, 245, 260– 63, 306n17, 307n19; Persecution and the Art of Writing, 260 Sugiura Yukio, “Omens of Censor­ ship?” 195, 196fig., 197 suicide, 78–79, 82; of humor periodi­ cals, 79–81, 282n46 Sumner, John, 78 surrealism, 209 Suzuki Kenji, “The Censor’s Saliva” (political cartoon), 71, 72fig. symbolism, 208–9. See also metaphor  

 

 

 

 

taboo words, 167–73 Tachibana Takahiro (Tachibana Kōshiro): anecdote about censor­ ship, 219–20; “Eroticism, the Pro­ letariat, and Censorship,” 93–94; Everything Else Is Banned, 90–91; foreword to Saitō’s index, 52–53; on fuseji as riddles, 266; “The Ring in the Drawer,” 89–91 Takasaki Ryūji, 291n41 Takebashi incident, 100 Taki Yōsaku, “Prepare! It’s Time,” 4–9, 8fig. Tanaka Kakuei, 253 Tanaka Makiko, 253  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tanikawa Shuntarō, Batsu (X) (short film), 210–11 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 121, 123–25, 264; “The Censor,” 280n14; Diary of a Mad Old Man, 121; The Key, 121, 122; “The Letters of Mrs. A,” 120– 25; Light Snow (The Makioka Sisters), 121; Manji (Maelstrom), 183–85; Tales of Genji, 121; “The Tatoo,” 121; translation of Binding’s “Unsterblichkeit,” 124 Tanizawa Eiichi, 96 Tashima Tarō, 213 Terayama Shūji, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (film), 212 textbook controversies, 42 texts: personification of, 76; respon­ sibility for, 17; violence to, 84, 113– 14, 139 textual restoration, 178–79, 181, 188, 230 textual smoothing, 182–83 Tezuka Hidetaka, 301n10 three ROs, 94–95, 284n9 three Ss, 94–95, 284n9 Tokuda Shūsei: collected works, 174– 75; “Moto no eda e” (To the stem of a branch), 173–74 Tokuyama Tamaki, “The Maru Maru Warrior,” 224–25 Toland, John, 261 torture, 75, 84, 175, 239, 256 traces of censorship, 1, 30, 60, 143, 144–45, 148–49, 197, 206, 215–16 transwar approach to censorship, 17– 18, 194 truth, 23–24, 42, 130–31, 236, 259 Tsuboi Shigeji, 70, 281n31 Tsubouchi Shōyō, 190 Tsukuda Takafumi, 183–84 typography, 189–91, 218  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uchida Roan, 158; “The Problem of Banning Works of Art,” 64–65 Ueno Chizuko, 99, 109 Ueno imperial library, 25, 29  

Index    /    355 ultra-nationalism, 118 Umehara Hokumei (Azuma Tairiku): ads connecting obscenity and sedi­ tion, 98; antiwar views of, 109–10, 287n57; “The Beckoning Spirit and the Scout,” 106–8; and censorship categories, 19, 92; collection of news articles banned in the Meiji period, 25; early works of, 102–4; example of pariah capitalism, 96–98; Kindai sesō zenshi, 98; mixed reception of, 100; Murder Incorporated, 103–4; “The Pickled-Overnight Revolution­ ary,” 106, 107; proletarian creden­ tials of, 100–101, 102; published political reportage, 97; published under pseudonyms, 99, 285n23; schemes to avoid fines and incarcer­ ation, 98–99; theoretical writings about writing, 105–6; translation of the Decameron, 97–98; wartime work, 105–8; works from the thir­ ties and early forties, 104–5. See also Hentai shiryō (Perverse Matters) Umehara Masaki, 100 United States: censorship in, 11–12, 39, 67, 254–60, 306n9; censorship of references to, 119 university libraries: rules for viewing banned books in, 25–26; Book Sort­ ing Project, 26, 271n11, 299n51 University of Michigan, 299n51 unnames, 146, 224, 225–31, 244, 244fig., 247. See also X-ing  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

violence, 84; depictions of, 19, 109; to texts, 84, 113–14, 139. See also war narratives  

11; depictions of casualties of war, 19, 109, 125–26; postwar language in, 134, 135; self-censorship of, 131–38; truthfulness of, 130–31; Yano Kan’ichi on, 287n59. See also Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Ikiteiru heitai wartime censorship: canonization and, 116, 120; for generous use of fuseji, 199; taboo words in, 167. See also military censorship Washington Document Center (WDC), 26 Wells, H. G., 184 Wheeler, F. L., 94, 283n7 Williams, Albert Rhys, Through the Russian Revolution, 97 Williams, Raymond, 84  

 

 

X-ing, 145–46, 151, 206–8, 214–15, 220– 22, 293n4; of names, 228–30, 230–31; postwar adaptations of, in visual cul­ ture, 209–13; u ­ nnecessary, 257. See also “crossing words”; unnames X-play, 225, 226, 229  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yamada Bimyō, 190 Yamaguchi Masao, 96, 102, 104, 105 Yamanoi Ryō, “The Hated X,” 220–21, 223 Yano Kan’ichi, 287n59 Yasukuni Shrine, 99, 126 Yokohama Incident, 158 Yokomitsu Riichi, 157 Yokote Kazuhiko, 30, 288n10 Yomiuri Newspaper, 199 Yoshida Mitsuru, 264 Yoshikawa Eiji, 285n23 Young, Art, “O Sorry Plight!” (­cartoon), 79–80 Yu Miri, Fish Swimming in Stones, 305–6n6  

 

war narratives: canonization and cen­ sorship of, 113–14, 130, 138–39, 140; and the connection between the erotic and the proletarian, 108–

 

 

 

Žižek, Slavoj, 16, 42

 

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University Selected Titles (Complete list at: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/weatherhead-studies.html) Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, by David Lurie. Harvard University Asia Series, 2011. Planning for Empire:  Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State, by Janis Mimura. Cornell University Press, 2011 Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China, by Shao-hua Liu. Stanford University Press, 2010 Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2,600th Anniversary, by Kenneth J. Ruoff. Cornell University Press, 2010 Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing, by Fabio Lanza. Columbia University Press, 2010 Postwar History Education in Japan and the Germanys: Guilty Lessons, by Julian Dierkes. Routledge, 2010 The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, by Alan Tansman. University of California Press, 2009 The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan, by Scott O’Bryan. University of Hawai’i Press, 2009 National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States, by Christopher Hill. Duke University Press, 2008 Leprosy in China: A History, by Angela Ki Che Leung. Columbia University Press, 2008 Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan, by Kim Brandt. Duke University Press, 2007. Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production, by Alexander Des Forges. University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan, by Andrew Bernstein. University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. The Making of the “Rape of Nanjing”: The History and Memory of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan, China, and the United States, by Takashi Yoshida. Oxford University Press, 2006. Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan, 1895–1945, by David Ambaras. University of California Press, 2005.

Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573–1912, by Sarah Thal. University of Chicago Press, 2005. The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China, by Madeleine Zelin. Columbia University Press, 2005. Science and the Building of a Modern Japan, by Morris Low. Palgrave Macmillan, Ltd., 2005. Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China, by Myron L. Cohen. Stanford University Press, 2005.