Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (Volume 11)

At the height of state censorship in Japan, more indexes of banned books circulated, more essays on censorship were published, more works of illicit erotic and proletarian fiction were produced, and more passages were Xed out than at any other moment before or since. As censors construct and maintain their own archives, their acts of suppression yield another archive, filled with documents on, against, and in favor of censorship. The extant archive of the Japanese imperial censor (1923-1945) and the archive of the Occupation censor (1945-1952) stand as tangible reminders of this contradictory function of censors. As censors removed specific genres, topics, and words from circulation, some Japanese writers converted their offensive rants to innocuous fluff after successive encounters with the authorities. But, another coterie of editors, bibliographers, and writers responded to censorship by pushing back, using their encounters with suppression as incitement to rail against the authorities and to appeal to the prurient interests of their readers. This study examines these contradictory relationships between preservation, production, and redaction to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse. (Winner of the 2010-2011 First Book Award of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University" ). What does censorship produce? Does censorship leave a trace? Where would we find it? How would we measure it? What would this trace capture and indicate about the censor? Redacted opens with these basic questions in order to examine one of the most thoroughly documented modes of literary reception—suppression. The extant archive of the Japanese imperial censor (1923-1945) and the archive of the occupation censor (1945-1952) stand as tangible reminders of the contradictory function of censors—while they remove books from immediate circulation in their own moment, they also secrete them away, preserving for posterity the very books deemed dangerous to society. Censors remove specific genres, topics, and words from circulation, but authors and publishers use their encounters with suppression as incitement to rail against the authorities and to appeal to the prurient interests of their readers, consciously risking bans through the intentional appropriation of the censor's categories for offense and modes of deletion. Redacted examines the relationships between collection, suppression, and production to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse. Redacted considers not only the tangible traces and marks produced by censorship in various archives, but also what those marks delineate—the outline of the black box of the unwritable. The book's three major divisions explore these relationships: “Preservation” examines the way information about censorship is known through three sources (archives, indexes, and essays); “Production” delineates connections between censorship and the growth of three literary mega-genres (proletarian, erotic, and war); and “Redaction” focuses on the X marks printed in the place of deleted words The Censor's Archives And Beyond -- Indices Of Censorship -- Essaying The Censors -- Seditious Obscenities -- Literary Casualties Of War -- Epigraphs -- Redactionary Literature -- Beyond X -- Unnaming And The Language Of Slaves -- Redaction Countertime. Jonathan E. Abel. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. At the height of state censorship in Japan, more indexes of banned books circulated, more essays on censorship were published, and more works of illicit erotic and proletarian fiction were produced. This study examines the contradictory relationships between preservation, production, and redaction. Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Translations Introduction: Archiving Censors Part I: Preservation Part II: Production Part III: Redaction Coda Notes Bibliography Index