The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan

Chapter 7 A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words: In the Realm of the Senses (1976–1982)

ChAPtEr 7 A picture’s Worth a Thousand Words In the Realm of the Senses (1976–1982) Kichizō’s hand seems to have touched [Sada’s] genitals. . . . The geisha are surprised. Kichi turns toward the geisha and laughs. . . . Geisha 4 suddenly forces open [the young geisha] Osome’s kimono and shoves her hand up it. . . . Sada then approaches . . . and gets on top of Osome and rubs against her genitals. Osome starts writhing, but Sada has no pleasure. Geisha 4 gently pushes Sada aside, sticks a papier-mâché bird inside of Osome’s genitals and rides on top of her. Suddenly, Kichizō is beside Sada. Sada: “Kichi-san”; grabbing him, she violently takes hold of his penis. Kichizō’s hand is stuck up Geisha 1’s kimono. Kichizō’s foot rubs the ass of Geisha 4, who is on top of Osome. Geisha 3 is sucking on Kichizō’s lips. And Sada, who has just become aware of that scene, desperately defends the penis. —Ōshima Nagisa, Ai no korīda (1976)1 The book Realm is 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 Ōshima. 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 nine passages of 198 trying text and Image “obscene prose from the screenplay that plainly describe scenes of malefemale sexual intercourse, sex play, etc.”2 Again, a purely content-based analysis leads to a dead end. An evaluation of the prosecutor’s choices can yield only the conclusion that the criteria used to determine which passages qualified as obscene were either extremely complex or extremely arbitrary. Instead, as Japanese-film scholar Aaron Gerow has aptly noted in an article on the Realm trial, “obscenity comes not from the text itself, but rather from the reception of that text.”3 The book’s hybrid form that overtly presents prose and still photographs and covertly evokes the moving images of the film lay at the heart of the prosecutor’s objections. In his somewhat cryptic closing argument, the prosecutor implied that both the screenplay and the still photos were objectionable because they resembled moving images. He provocatively suggested that the book Realm was obscene because it was a visual and, even more important, filmic text. The coexistence of textual and visual components within the book, coupled with the fact that the book was a by-product of the film, undoubtedly facilitated the accusation that it was filmlike. And in fact the prosecutor likely was indicting the book as a substitute, or, as the defense charged, a scapegoat or payback for the film, which was not prosecutable because of Ōshima’s innovative production strategy (AS, fig. 7.1 the old man in the orgy (photo 21) (Ōshima 1976) A Picture’s Worth a thousand Words 199 1:219; 2:294). He had imported the film stock from France, shot the film in Kyoto, and then exported the undeveloped film back to France, where he developed and edited it and finally distributed it internationally, including importing it back to Japan. This new strategy enabled Ōshima to avoid prosecution for the film under domestic obscenity laws, since the verdicts in the earlier Black Snow and Nikkatsu Roman Porn film trials had definitively ruled that Eirin was the trusted arbiter of morality for films and Ōshima had followed Eirin’s (as well as the Japanese Customs Bureau’s) regulations to the letter. This strategy also helped circumvent the strict domestic censorship regulations that would have allowed the film to exist only in the heavily cut form eventually screened in Japan and that many Japanese film directors felt were inhibiting their critical recognition internationally. The perception that the international reputation of Japanese films was at stake propelled both the film’s creation and the book’s indictment. In his outspoken role as a defense witness at the Nikkatsu trial three years earlier (a factor that also likely encouraged his indictment), Ōshima had touted Realm as the first...