Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan

8. Beyond X

194 The myth that imperial censorship in Japan was always marked and that deletions became unmarked or “silent” during the Occupation serves a range of contemporary ideological functions, all of which paint imperial and Occupation censorships with a broad brush. The resulting picture of two distinct discursive arenas bifurcated by the war’s end is too impressionistic , sacrificing clarity of detail to render overall moods. In this context , connecting the similarities between wartime and postwar censorship by elaborating a transwar phenomenology of redaction—describing the dynamic process of marking deletion as encountered by readers and audiences —goes a long way toward dismantling the myth and explaining more of the historical record of writing and reading under censorship in midtwentieth -century Japan. Fuseji have been requisite signs for fueling the myth, symbols of an explicit trace of censorship before 1945 in contradistinction to their supposed absence after 1945. The myth in turn has transformed fuseji into historical objects of fetishization both for those haunted by memories of wartime oppression and for those disgruntled with the postwar situation. The truth jettisoned in favor of either haunting memories or nostalgia is that the trace of censorship takes many explicit and implicit forms and, thus, cannot be entirely eradicated. In spite of the tendency to render absent particular markers of deletion, the stubborn presence of redaction stands as a testament to writerly and editorial tenacity in the face of censorship as well as to the censors’ occasional inability to recognize and willingness to allow the signs. The overemphasis on fuseji as the ultimate form of redaction , as opposed to metaphor, metonymy, euphemism, allegory, and other forms that substitute a palatable surface for an underlying taboo expres8 . Beyond X From Myth to Ethics Beyond X / 195 sion, trivializes other forms of encoded, surreptitious writing that take place under censorship and overvalues the typographic mark. This chapter launches two parallel investigations to examine what is covered over by the myth and the value of the myth for contemporary society. To underscore the realities of redaction in contrast to the myth’s assumptions about silent deletion, the first section moves beyond the archaeologies and crass historicizations evident in the provisional timeline of chapter 6 to find the traces of silent deletion, which the myth tends to associate with the postwar, in prewar and wartime letters and, conversely, to locate other explicit markers of deletion akin to fuseji in postwar Japan. The second section moves outside of the typology of fuseji in chapter 7 to illuminate the difficulties of defining what counts as redaction, widening the purview of redaction studies to include visual and aural arts. This chapter then identifies a genealogy of the species of redaction in transwar Japan. These interventions ultimately enable the transcending of the local and historical examples of transwar Japan and work toward providing useful understandings about redaction more broadly. Beyond X History X Nostalgia: Crossing Myth with Desire Postwar attitudes toward fuseji range from thankfulness for the new democratic situation in which the marks are no longer requisite to open nostalgia for the old imperial era’s necessitating redaction. Both views posit that a radical break between wartime and postwar regimes had a radical effect on signification: where one view praises the new regime’s openness, the other blames it for removing the conditions for fuseji. The cartoon in figure 8.1 presents a comment on fuseji that straddles the divide between the wartime and postwar discursive regimes. The aged leftist holds a postwar fill-in-the-blank quiz, a sign of the imported ideals of democratic education, which (it was hoped) would open the doors to success to all on the basis of facts and merit, not rhetoric or rank. As he stares at this kind of crossword puzzle, he is reminded of his old mode of reading into or behind fuseji. The joke of the comic centers on the belief that the comparison between imperial censorship and postwar education is ludicrous, that the two are connectable only in the mind of the dotty old man who once believed in a then-banned and now-abandoned ideology. In other words, the humor hinges on a clean division between wartime and postwar and the assumption that things are better now than they were then. This kind of pro-postwar view is balanced in postwar discourse by a 196 / Redaction nostalgia for fuseji. Recollecting his experiences as a young writer during...