Censorship in Japan

Heung Wah Wong, Hoi Yan Yau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315409047
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores censorship, particularly film and video censorship, in Japan in modern times. It shows how most censorship has been the film and video industry exercising self-censorship and how this system has been problematic in that it has allowed dominant players in the industry to impose their own standards and exclude independent filmmakers. It outlines notable obscenity cases and discusses how industry self-censorship bodies have been undermined both by industry outsiders setting up their own alternative regimes and by the industry self-censorship bodies themselves being prosecuted for obscenity. The book also examines the conflict between the obscenity law, introduced in Meiji times when Japan was importing Western models, and the freedom of speech law, which was put in place by the US occupation administration after World War II. The book concludes by assessing the current state of censorship in Japan and likely future developments.

1 Introduction

On a warm afternoon in early October 2016, Jacky, his wife, and one of the authors of this book, visited Michael at his house in Miaoli, Taiwan. Michael and Jacky have been our key informants since 2003, and the two, as mentioned elsewhere (Wong and Yau 2014), became close friends when they were drafted into military service in 2002.

Although the two have since married and have their own families, they remain very close and frequently meet up. On this day, Jacky and his wife are invited to Michael’s house to have dinner. Soon after arriving at their house, Jacky’s wife joins Michael’s wife in the kitchen, preparing dinner for us. Michael then invites Jacky to his study for ‘guys talk’ and to enjoy ‘men’s stuff’. Soon after they enter the study, Michael turns on the computer and tells Jacky that he would like to show him his recently collected Japanese adult videos (AVs).

Michael navigates to a hard drive on his PC. The drive is named Japanese AVs with mosaics¹ (riben youma A-pian). As Michael plays one of the AVs, Jacky could not help but say, ‘It’s mosaicked AV, how can it be good!’ Michael turns to Jacky and suggests that he will know that it is good once he starts to watch.

The two then start to watch the AV together. The AV is about a young housewife who has a sexual fetish involving someone’s sweat. She fell in love and married her husband in large part because she was attracted to the smell of his sweat. Nevertheless, her husband is a clean freak. When they are about to make love, he immediately checks if she has showered—and if she hasn’t within the hour, he sends her off to wash. He wipes up the sweat and wants his wife to have a shower with him straight after sex, too, rather than cuddle.

A young housewife has created a toilet blockage by throwing too many tissues into the toilet bowl after masturbating in the living room. Unable to fix it, the young housewife calls on the plumber for help. A couple of minutes later, the plumber, a man in his late 40s, arrives at her house. He is led to the bathroom. As he is unclogging the toilet pipe, the young housewife is seen standing outside the toilet. She is eying the plumber as if he were a delicious piece of meat. He is sweating a lot and using the towel to wipe up his sweat. Excited by what he is doing, the young housewife approaches the plumber, who notices her and finds it very awkward. In the meantime, she covertly takes away his towel while he focuses on fixing the pipe. She then runs away. The camera turns to the bathroom, where she is depicted covering her nose and mouth with the plumber’s towel. Soon, she starts to caress her vagina with her undergarment on. Meanwhile, the camera shifts back to the toilet where the plumber is portrayed having a hard time fixing the toilet, then murmuring, ‘Madam, you throw too much toilet paper into the toilet bowl’. When he turns his head around, he cannot see the young housewife. He then calls out to her, ‘Madam, madam!’ As he does not hear any reply, he gets up and starts looking for her in the apartment. He follows the sound of someone breathing to the bathroom. As he opens the door of the bathroom, he sees the young housewife masturbating herself with her skirt rolled up, while covering her mouth with his towel. Speechless at what he has just seen, the plumber’s gaze just stays on her undergarment. Shocked and embarrassed, the housewife rolls down her skirt immediately and tries to sit up. As she attempts to run from the bathroom into the living room, the plumber follows her and drags her into his arms. He then starts to kiss her. Shocked, the woman resists by uttering ‘Please stop …’ (‘Yamete …’). Now, having realised her unique sexual taste, the plumber counters by covering her mouth and nose with his towel. The housewife is immediately paralyzed and depicted indulging in the sexual pleasure triggered by the towel. The two start to kiss vigorously. The plumber continues to sexually engage her by allowing her to taste his sweat. Aroused and excited, she is shown licking the plumber’s face, body and legs. They then make out in the living room. Lying on the coffee table, she spreads her legs wide as the plumber starts to penetrate her. The scene ends when the plumber ejaculates inside her.

As the AV ends, Jacky cannot but agree with Michael that it was a good movie, even though it is fully mosaicked. They are excited about how sexually earnest the housewife is and how her sweat fetish is both hilarious and sexually arousing.

Jacky asks Michael if he has other ‘interesting’ videos. Michael moves to another folder on his computer where has different genres of AVs such as mature woman, old woman, lesbian, wife, teacher, sister, cosplay, SM, rape, bondage, imprisonment, train groper (chihan dianche), threesome, group sex, incest, secret filming, big breast, beautiful buttocks, scatology, interviews, amateur, hunting for women (bamei), sex entertainment (fengzu), and so on. Amazed at the wide array of genres, Jacky cannot help but stare at the page while scrolling up and down to have a quick view of the large number of genres. Michael adds that there are simply too many genres of Japanese AVs because genres keep diversifying.

Meanwhile, Michael clicks onto one of the AVs, while telling Jacky that it is ‘great’ because it is about facial ejaculation (yanshe). Yet, Jacky counters by asking why this video is so special, as there are so many bukkake (the Japanese term for facial ejaculation) AVs out there. Michael explains that this yanshe AV is special because the actress will be given a ‘facial shower’ or facial ejaculation by 150 men continuously. Stunned by what he has just heard, Jacky looks at Michael with his eyes wide open.

Michael skips most of the background that explains why the female character will be given facial ejaculations by so many men and ‘jumps’ into the middle of the AV. Kneeling on the floor, the female character is seen surrounded by a large number of men who are masturbating over her face. Meanwhile, she is made to perform fellatio for a man, whereas her hands are seen masturbating the penises of another two men. As this group of men finish ejaculating on to her face, the second wave of men come to the front and start to ejaculate on her already semen-covered face.

Meanwhile, Michael’s wife comes in the room to tell us that dinner is ready. As she sees what is on screen, she cannot help but say, ‘You guys are watching these again?’ Michael just explains that they are all legal videos with ‘dancing squares’ (the term for mosaics). Jacky also echoes that they are legal AVs, not the illegal hardcore ‘unedited’ (wuma) AVs. But Michael’s wife counters by asking, ‘Don’t you guys feel that this treats the woman as if she was an object, not a human being?’ Jacky immediately defends himself saying that it is just a story and, hence, not real. But as they talk, they admit that women depicted in most Japanese AVs are often treated as objects for male sexual pleasure. On the other hand, they also could not deny that they find the scenes sexually gratifying because it allows them to enjoy the sexual fantasy of controlling or subordinating the woman. Michael’s wife sighs and cannot help but ask, ‘Why does the Japanese government censor the display of sexual organs by stipulating that they have to be covered with the “dancing squares”, but does not do anything to censor this “misogynistic” ideology?’ Jacky suggests that the dancing squares, according to his Japanese friend, are not done by the government but by the people of the Japanese AV industry. Michael’s wife counters, ‘But still!’ Michael then turns to Jacky and wonders, ‘If all these are removed, no one will watch AVs anymore!’ Looking at each other, Michael and Jacky appear speechless.

The above ethnographic episode raises a series of interesting questions. First and foremost, why must Japanese AVs in which real sexual intercourse between the female and male characters is employed to sexually arouse the audience have the actors’ sexual organs and ‘working parts’ mosaicked, rendering them nothing more than a kind of softcore pornography? Second, why, on the one hand, is the visual display of sexual organs heavily censored but, on the other hand, the sexist, if not misogynist, content is allowed to permeate all kinds of genre of Japanese AV? Moreover, considering the fact that the self-regulatory bodies of the Japanese AV industry did and do pay extra attention to moral issues, why does sexist, misogynist content continue to rage on in Japanese AVs? Finally, as we have seen in the above episode, why do Japanese AVs have so many different genres? Of course, we are aware that, while American counterparts have different genres, Japanese AVs have far more genres. The answer to all these questions, as we will argue in this book, is closely related to the ‘self-regulatory body’ (jishu dantai) established to inspect the AVs produced in the industry.

This book, therefore, is about the self-regulatory body and its impact on the production, circulation, and consumption of AVs in Japan. The self-regulatory body is established voluntarily by the people of the AV industry to ensure that the AVs produced by their members are all in line with the nation’s obscenity laws, as well as with the sexual morality of Japanese society, before they are released on to the market. In other words, what is being practised in the AV industry is not state censorship but industrial regulation or a self-regulation system (jishu sei).

As we shall see, AVs have been inspected by the people of the industry through the self-regulatory body for a wide array of reasons, which do not always have to do with the obscenity laws in Japan. More importantly, as all AVs are supposed to be inspected and endorsed by the self-regulatory body before they are released on to the market, it is rare that they will be taken to court for violating the obscenity laws after they are released. This indeed not only renders those studies of censorship of AVs that focus only on court cases insufficient and partial, but also speaks to another important implication: the inspection criteria adopted by the self-regulatory body for AV inspection are not necessarily a direct translation of the obscenity laws; they rather follow the different organisational logics of the self-regulatory body. If the self-regulatory body is not taken seriously, important questions concerning censorship of AVs in general and AV inspection in particular are often ignored—such as who is charged with the duty of undertaking the mosaicking work? Why and how do they do this? Are they made or forced by someone to undertake the mosaicking work?

Conceived narrowly, this study is about how Japanese AVs are regulated, if not censored. Our major purpose is to investigate the nature and character of the AV inspection by the self-regulatory body. We argue that the AV inspection conducted by the self-regulatory body should be understood as a social process, the result of which is shaped by the way the major players involved interact with each other. This enquiry in turn raises new questions: what are the consequences of the self-regulation of Japanese AVs for the industry, for instance, in terms of circulation method, power relations among major players, the emergence of new genres, and the changing status of a genre? Similarly, what are the impacts of the self-regulation of Japanese AVs on the society in general, such as morality and sexual representation, as well as the (mal)treatment of women in particular? Finally, and most importantly, what does ‘obscene’ mean in the cultural context of Japan, and how has it been interpreted in the actual AV inspection process? More than this, however, this ethnography also speaks to some important issues concerning the concept of censorship in general.

It is also important to clarify at the outset what we do not aim to do in the book. This account is not intended as a general ethnography of AV inspection or a comprehensive study of the self-regulatory system adopted by the people of the Japanese AV industry to inspect Japanese AVs, though this constitutes part of the whole book. Neither does it pretend to be a study of ‘legal anthropology’, because our main concern is not the relationship between the legal processes involved in censoring AVs and other aspects of the social, cultural, and political lives of the AV field; neither does it aim to offer a philosophical reflection on morality, especially the relationship between sexual moralities and sexual representations. These topics have been handled by many other scholars who are more competent than we are. Our goals are more modest and narrower: we would like to investigate the nature and character of AV inspection and how this affects the AV industry in Japan.

Major analytical themes

The literature on censorship in Japan is quite large. There are generally three lines of research on the issue. The first line usually traces the history of censorship in Japan, which began in the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), accelerated during the Meiji period (1868–1912) when the Meiji regime incorporated obscenity laws from the West, and culminated in comprehensive censorship during the wartime period (mid-1930s–1945) (Coyne 1967; Kasza 1988; Mitchell 1983; Shogimen 2014; Thompson and Harootunian 1992). Mitchell (1983), for instance, argues that the Meiji leaders created an ‘elaborate network of repressive controls’, which one way or another facilitated if not paved the way for the rush towards World War II. His narrative starts with a legacy of ‘suppression’ in the Edo period, followed by a demonstration of how the early Meiji government made a concerted effort to establish a ‘modern’ yet autocratic state based on Tokugawa practices in the first two decades of the Meiji era, which culminated in the formation of a ‘family-state’ ideology and the development of a ‘surveillance state’ in the later years of the regime. Subsequently, despite being stereotyped as one of the liberal periods in Japan, the Taishō regime (1912–1926) was no more liberal than previous regimes, as Mitchell demonstrates how the Taishō leaders, alarmed by the opposition, tightened controls over various media to curb seditious thoughts, and how the pre-war Shōwa years (beginning in 1926) turned into a time of absolute control.

Mitchell’s account seems to show that there is a general lack of resistance from the suppressed, alongside the politicians’ over-enthusiasm for co-operating with the state apparatus to control freedom of speech. Although Mitchell did describe how writers and journalists opposed censorship and the control mechanisms, especially in the Taishō and Shōwa eras, he concludes that industry people as a whole tended to come to accept state censorship, and that many businesses in the press, broadcasting, book, and movie industries generally submitted for a variety of reasons, ranging from fear, patriotism, and commercial motives to a Confucian-read identification with authority. This was especially the case in the 1930s, when editorial self-censorship, encouraged by direct and indirect pressure from the censorship apparatus, had become routine. Politicians, too, were as enthusiastic as officials about limiting freedom of speech. Mitchell points out that not only did the officials in the Ministry of Justice make concerted efforts to strengthen anti-seditious legislation, but also political party leaders such Hara Takeshi were active in pushing through the legislation. According to Mitchell, the lower house, which used to support libertarians, even authorised the cabinet to prepare ‘a plan to unify national thought’. This willingness of the opposition to cooperate with the Japanese state and the unifying attitude of the Japanese government and the political party leaders thus forced Duus to comment (1984: 828), ‘[t]he picture is rather bleak, perhaps too bleak. Mitchell does not deal much with the opponents of censorship’. Self-censorship, Mitchell concludes, was in fact the most effective tool that the Japanese state adopted to limit the freedom of expression in the society.

Indeed, some of Mitchell’s observations were echoed in a later work by Kasza (1988). Not unlike Mitchell, Kasza shows that Japan’s party cabinets in the Taishō era imposed harsher censorship than the oligarchs had during the Meiji era and that press controls were therefore more stringent during the Taishō era than they had been during the preceding era. Thus, as Kasza (1988: 121–6) concludes, the evolution of censorship in Japan had indeed increased since the Edo period and culminated in the absolute wartime censorship from 1939 to 1945.

While these works offer important insights, we can identify several major problems with the above studies. First, they lump different media, including the press, books, broadcasting, and movies, together as if they were textually the same and as if the logic and the way they were censored were identical. Obviously enough, print materials and visual images are entirely different in terms of textual and narrative arrangement, and so is the way they are censored. As we will show in this book, the form of the medium does matter. For instance, when Japanese AVs in the form of videotapes became popular, a separate censoring body and an entirely new set of inspection criteria were devised for this specific medium, which is supposed to be for private consumption (at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Chinese glossary
• Japanese glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A brief history of censorship in Japan
• 3 What are Japanese adult videos?
• 4 The society of the Japanese adult video industry: AV studios, regulators, and distributors
• 5 How the Biderin regime was founded: Biderin as the self-regulatory body in the AV industry in the 1980s and 1990s
• 6 Medirin: The emergence of a new regime in the AV industry
• 7 From Biderin via Medirin to Eizōrin: The collapse of Biderin and the return to order
• 8 Adult video inspection at Eizōrin
• 9 Changing landscapes: The emergence of a new categorical classification of Japanese AVs
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index