In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

23 Engraved in charcoal gray concrete above the book pickup desk at the National Diet Library (NDL) in Tokyo, an epigraph beckons to all whose eyes might wander while waiting for the vacuum tubes and conveyor belts of the archive to bring forth desired books: 真理が我らを自由にする; a translation, though nowhere attributed, of John 8:32: “Truth shall make us free.” The implication is clear: the archive preserves not just books but also access to truth. The NDL advertises in this slogan the imported postwar liberal principles upon which it was founded.1 This adopted Miltonic tradition reasons that, in the “free marketplace” of ideas or, in this version, with open access to books, “the truth” will rise to the surface. Assumptions abound in this seemingly simple motto of the Japanese national library: the information and knowledge contained in books lead to the truth, and truth is a universal good. The phrase memorializes an almost direct equating of the terms books, information, knowledge, and truth. Perhaps it would be desirable to have easily accessible truths housed in an institution and served up by conveyor belts, thus releasing us from our enslavement to misinformation, false ideals, half-truths, and lies. This desire is the often-proclaimed reason behind the mass digitization and internet publication of historical documents; it is imbedded in the very nature of research and discovery as defined since at least the Enlightenment; in it, there is a positivism of the most essential sort. But the dream of a library of all books, which seems closer with each new digitized book, also seems paradoxically like an illogical and, more importantly , impractical pipedream, because the bigger the archive and the more items it preserves, the more selection and exclusion are necessary to make sense of it. The dream of easy access to truth through its most distilled 1. The Censor’s Archives and Beyond 24 / Preservation source—books—is a laudable aspiration, but it masks a deep anxiety about the value and use of the modern archive in practice. In practice, the necessary archival and, lately, corporate control over not only the content but also the means of disseminating information has produced effects of regulation on expression similar to those archives aspire to eradicate. Indexing, cataloging, scanning, and posting constantly make more materials accessible today to readers around the world; and yet much is not included. The pages unscanned or misplaced, the books with mistaken catalog entries, or the materials that will never be scanned because they are the wrong size or shape: these seemingly benign, oftenunavoidable mishaps of technological transfer in archival preservation and circulation shape the reception of information, the production of knowledge , and the discovery of truths. In the inevitable archive fever and quest for treasures in the library, the Truth that is supposed to be setting us free may be relinquished for numerous examples providing only the singularity of mini-truths and petit réçits, material never attaining the heights of the paragon.2 And while the sort of haphazard, unintended control exercised by archival technologies shares little with the randomly enforced intentional bureaucratic forms of state censorship, its effect can be similar: cutting off access. Precisely because archives are thought to be authoritative, complete, and objective and yet are in practice incomplete, uneven, and devoid too often of information about the acquisition of their materials, archival materials and access to them is always circumscribed, often in ways that are unknown to users. Rather than setting us free, this archival control may, in fact, make us more subservient to the limited data garnered from our information providers. This means that the realization of the longings represented in that admirable NDL epigraph may reproduce the very means of repression once evinced by the state censors, albeit in comparatively less violent and more subtle ways. And in this, the recent modes of digital archival preservation and dissemination and older modes of government control and censorship are not far apart. The stakes of the NDL’s aspirations are readily apparent in the history of a collection of books it partially holds, books censored during another age and readily accessible today. The books collected by the imperial Home Ministry’s office of censorship (Naimushō keihokyoku) are available now to all readers who request them. These examination copies (nōhon) of the Publishing Police (Shuppan keisatsu, 1923–1945) represent the ideals embodied in the modern library and, indeed, the postwar Japanese constitution itself. The examination copies of the censors are now so readily...

Share