The obscenity trials ofLady Chatterley’s Loverin Japan from 1951 until 1957 established an enduring legal precedent that would continue to be invoked with great success for over half a century in a series of judicial proceedings against literature, film, photography, art, and, eventually, manga (comics). Unlike the case in Britain and in the United States, where the equally highprofile trials of the novel marked the beginning of “the end of obscenity,” to borrow a phrase from the head defense lawyer in the U.S. trial,² in Japan they marked only the beginning.

Translator Itō Sei and publisher Oyama Hisajirō...

In 1949, Oyama Hisajiro, owner of Oyama Publishing, approached respected critic, author, and translator Itō Sei about translatingChatterleyas part of a planned series of Lawrence’s collected works. His decision to ask Itō was a natural one, since Itō had already published two expurgated translations in 1935 and 1936 with other publishers.Chatterleywas to be the first in the series, followed by Lawrence’s 1926The Plumed Serpent(Tsubasa aru hebi), translated by Nishimura Kōji, who had also previously published an expurgated version. Oyama would later make the improbable claim in court that this lineup was based solely on...

TheChatterleytrial deeply influenced subsequent proceedings despite the many differences that divided them—from the objects on trial and the historical contexts of their production and reception to the individual personalities of the defendants. Before turning to these individual case studies, let us first consider how these later trials conformed to and departed from the template established in theChatterleytrial. On the one hand, there was a striking continuity in the kinds of structuring arguments over the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of the medium; the contemporary state of morality among youths and females; the relationship of art to reality,...

Unlike their literary precedents, the objects of prosecution in Japan’s film trials are less assuredly classics.Black Snow(Kuroi yuki,1965; directed by Takechi Tetsuji) belonged to the burgeoning genre of Pink Film (pinku eiga), low-budget erotic B productions churned out in seven days. In the subsequent Nikkatsu Roman Porno trial, four films from 1972 to 1973 were simultaneously targeted, suggesting that they were chosen to represent a genre rather than for the singularity of their content. These films’ notoriety as the objects of a censorship trial remains, however, with most commentators invariably devoting more lines to the trials than...

As the first postwar censorship proceedings against a film, theBlack Snowtrial established a revised template that took into account both the existence of a self-regulatory body like Eirin for film and the inherent differences between the media of literature and film. Although Eirin itself was not ultimately charged, the case againstBlack Snowmarked an unprecedented attack on the authority of the self-regulatory organization.

When director Takechi (or Kawaguchi, his legal name) Tetsuji and the distributor chief at Nikkatsu, Murakami Satoru, were officially charged on December 25, 1965, the film in question no longer existed. The charges were...

In 1971, amid a climate of increasingly liberalized sexual expression both domestically and internationally and a severe economic crisis for the Japanese film industry, Nikkatsu Roman Porn was born. It would prove to be the financial salvation of Nikkatsu studio and the most long-lived genre in Japan, lasting eighteen years, from 1971 until 1988, with some 850 titles total released under the brand name.¹ At the same time, it proved the ideal target for the state censors to make good on the threat issued in theBlack Snowtrial that Eirin’s seal of approval offered no guarantee of immunity from...

A striking shift occurred in the kind of literature targeted in the 1970s landmark obscenity trials. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s the translated works of Lawrence and Sade were the objects on trial, in the 1970s works with conspicuous ties to canonized Japanese classics and authors became targeted in two literary trials that reached the Supreme Court: the 1968 republication of the Edo-periodThe Record of the Night Battles at Dannoura (Dannoura yagassenki,ca. 1800), a pornographic adaptation of the canonical medieval textThe Tale of the Heike,and the 1972 republication of Nagai Kafu’s 1924 “Yojohan,” written in...

In late 1948, publisher Matsukawa Ken’ichi was indicted for the publishing, sales, and possession of 1,400 copies ofThe Safflowerand for selling 170 copies of a privately published secret edition of Kafū’s “Yojōhan.” In the Tokyo District Court verdict of August 1950, although the publisher was acquitted of all charges relating toThe Safflower,he was convicted on the “Yojōhan” charges and given a three-month prison term as well as an additional two-year suspended sentence. Two booksellers also indicted were similarly acquitted of all charges related toThe Safflowerbut convicted for “Yojōhan,” with the first receiving the maximum...

It is altogether fitting that the author Nagai Kafū marks both the beginning and the end of Japan’s landmark literary obscenity trials. He is an author known equally well for his immaculate high style as for the rather “maculate contents” of his fiction, for dabbling with the debauched dancing girls of Asakusa, for antagonizing the authorities in the prewar and postwar periods alike, for introducing Western literary translations to Japan and for reintroducing early modern Japanese literary traditions in the fashion of an Edo-period “scribbler” (gesakusha), and for his avowedly apolitical sexual politics. Kafu remains one of the more confounding...

The cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” suggests that images are inherently more powerful than texts. The perceived power of images, in turn, has encouraged their association with obscenity. As Frederic Jameson has provocatively put it, “the visual isessentiallypornographic.”¹ Stanley Cavell has claimed that the “ontological conditions of the motion picture reveal it as inherently pornographic.”² But if these claims are true, the verdicts in Japan’s landmark postwar censorship trials of literature and film make little sense. In these trials, spanning thirty years from theChatterleytrial to the Nikkatsu Roman Porn trials, literature was consistently...

The bookRealmis divided into three discrete sections: first, twenty-four 7-by-10-inch color still photographs; second, the original screenplay that was distributed to the actors and staff prior to making the film; and third, several essays of criticism by Oshima. In the tersely worded indictment, twelve of these photos and nine passages of the screenplay were identified as obscene. The prosecutor’s laconic style makes it especially difficult to determine what precisely was objectionable about the book. He merely identified the twelve “obscene color photographs taken of the poses of men and women engaged in sexual intercourse and sex play” and...

In 2002, after a twenty-year lull without a single notable obscenity trial,¹ a manga (comic book) was tried for violating the obscenity law, going all the way to the Supreme Court in June 2007. Despite the consistent guilty verdicts at all three phases, the outcome was not entirely a defeat for the defense, which managed to get the initial one-year suspended prison term reduced to a fine of 1.5 million yen (approximately $13,750). Notwithstanding this slight victory, the unprecedented case against a manga marked the introduction of a new artistic medium as a candidate for successful prosecution by the state....