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1 Censorship destroys texts, removes them from sight, places them beyond reach. Even worse, it can render entire avenues of thought off limits. The realms of discourse entirely obliterated by censorship can never be known; our only access to the deep havoc inflicted by censors is what remains after they have done their work. But what exactly does censorship leave behind? Where do we find its remnants? How can we measure these traces? What might they reveal about the censor? Is searching for the material behind the Xs and asterisks of censorship a treasure hunt or a futile quest? Censorship is perhaps the most thoroughly documented mode of modern literary reception in Japan. In the 1870s, modern press laws regulating expression were promulgated to control both sedition and obscenity. Over the ensuing years, the office of censorship grew gradually. Under the consultation system (内閲制度) of this period, publishers could meet with censors to discuss specific texts. But a sea change occurred a half century later following the devastation of the Tokyo earthquake and fires in 1923; in the wake of the fires that destroyed many libraries, technological innovations in binding and printing seemed to enable cheaper book production and the rapid replacement of lost cultural artifacts. Those in power quivered at the thought of this new mass culture carrying so much information to so many so quickly. Global events such as the Russian Revolution in 1917 had contributed to a rise of leftist activity in Japan, which in turn produced a conservative backlash against seditious behavior, as in the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which sought to defend the national polity (国体) from anarchists and communists. In this context, the censorship office doubled in size and budget in an attempt to keep pace with both the burgeoning publishing world and the narrowing political landscape. By 1927, the censors could no longer keep pace with the increased volume of Introduction Archiving Censors 2 / Introduction published material and canceled the consultation system, leaving publishers on their own to anticipate potential bans.1 In this new environment between 1927 and 1936, more books were banned by censors and more passages were redacted by editors than in any other period before or after. During the height of the Asia-Pacific War, censorship and redaction happened less frequently due to both a chilling effect on writers left over from this earlier period and a publishing downturn in the mid-1940s stemming from paper shortages. The public face of the Allied Occupation brought the ideal of freedom of the press to Japan even as secret offices of censorship and propaganda supporting the new regime and suppressing vestiges of the old one were established. Censorship under the newly imposed free press system stipulated that its existence be kept secret. But this often-mentioned contradiction of the occupied state is only paradoxical if we maintain a belief in the possibility of realizing complete freedom of the press. If freedom of the press is conceived not as an attainable reality but as a laudable goal that will always remain beyond reach, the presence of a vast censorship bureaucracy alongside the rhetoric of press freedom seems a more natural state of affairs. This tendency of censorship to censor its own archival trace is not unique to the Occupation period but part of the role of the modern censor. The prevailing history told and retold about the nature of censorship under the Occupation in Japan is that, in contrast to censorship under the imperial regime, which was generally known and understood (and was archived for the general public in the form of indexes, articles, and redaction marks), the Occupation-period censors acted under a shroud of secrecy. Typically, the two censorships are contrasted as follows: the bureaucratic imperial censorship of the prewar and wartime regime was known, explicit, and direct, while that of the postwar occupation was silent, implicit, and indirect.2 However, both regimes maintained internal and external mechanisms of control, and though the saliency of these effects certainly shifted, the shift corresponds more with the decade between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s than with 1945. Despite the desire to erase their own role, censors have continually failed to erase themselves from discourse and consequently from history. The extant archives of the Japanese imperial censor (1923–1945) and the archive of the Occupation censor (1945–1952) provide unique opportunities to explore how censorship has historically functioned and how we come to know what we know about it. Archives and censors share...

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