Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan

6. Epigraphs

143 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 6. Epigraphs Histories of X Epigraph: 144 / Redaction 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 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 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...