The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan

Chapter 1 Lady Chatterley’s Censor (1951–1957)

ChAPtEr 1 Lady Chatterley’s Censor (1951–1957) In 1949, Oyama Hisajirō, owner of Oyama Publishing, approached respected critic, author, and translator Itō Sei about translating Chatterley as 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. Chatterley was to be the first in the series, followed by Lawrence’s 1926 The 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 practical considerations of expediency rather than on a financially motivated desire to profit from the sensational reputation of Chatterley in Japan and abroad (CS, 1:59–60). This reputation long preceded the appearance of Itō’s complete translation; many witnesses, for both sides, admitted to having read pirated English-language editions of Chatterley that were being passed around small circles as early as the 1930s.1 Based on the flurry of interest in Chatterley from publishers in the late 1940s, the work seemingly offered an especially attractive prospect in the postwar climate. The postwar constitutional guarantee of free expression encouraged publications previously unthinkable. In fact, other publishing houses had approached Itō as early as January 1946 to commission an unexpurgated translation. Another project planned to include Chatterley as part of a series called the Library of World Literature That Emancipates Mankind (Ningen kaihō sekai bungaku sōsho),2 a name that itself suggests how Chatterley was perceived to accord with postwar democracy and liberation. As Itō Sei’s son, Itō Rei, puts it, Chatterley was intended to be 20 East Meets West, Again “a publication in an era in which freedom of speech had become the new Imperial standard.”3 The effect of this liberalized atmosphere on the publishing world was apparent almost immediately: whereas at war’s end only 300 publishing companies existed, within eight months over 2,000 were in operation, and by 1948 that number had peaked at 4,600.4 The publishing boom encompassed a number of genres, but the most relevant to the Chatterley trial are the pulp magazines (kasutori zasshi) at one end of the spectrum and translated foreign works that had been banned during wartime at the other. Despite this climate of liberation, Itō worried that perhaps Japan was not ready for the sexually explicit nature of Chatterley and urged Oyama to make necessary revisions to avoid trouble with the authorities. Itō was well aware that the novel had encountered legal trouble in England and the United States (although postwar publishers there too would test these limits soon enough) and assumed this would be the case in Japan as well (CS, 1:55–58). Despite Itō’s reservations, Oyama published the translation uncut in two volumes that were released on April 20 and May 1 of 1950. Oyama’s business instincts proved correct: within two months, over one hundred fifty thousand copies had sold. His legal instincts were less savvy, however, as became obvious when the police initiated obscenity charges just two months later. The prosecution—Why Chatterley? What about the novel motivated the state prosecutor to try Itō and Oyama over seven long years all the way to the Supreme Court, and what swayed the judges ultimately to rule in the state’s favor? The Chatterley trial offers a particularly rich example through which to examine the prosecutor’s motivations because, unlike his successors in subsequent obscenity trials, he expounded his arguments at length, calling a total of sixteen witnesses. His case tapped into familiar arguments made by censors through the ages in both Japan and abroad, revealing the censor’s potential to display both a critical acumen that rivals the literary critic as well as occasional stupidity. To begin with the most obvious first question: why Chatterley? The simplest answer would be that the state found the novel’s content obscene, although, as we will see, other less obvious and more complex reasons hold the key to the answer to this question. In the indictment, the prosecution identified twelve particularly objectionable passages, which, in prosecutors’ minds, rendered the entire Lady Chatterley's Censor 21 work obscene. These included examples of the “repeated plain and detailed descriptions of adulterous sexual intercourse” between Lady Chatterley (Connie) and two men, the...