Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan

2. Indices of Censorship

44 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 2. Indices of Censorship 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...