By exploring censorship in a number of different Japanese art forms - from popular music and kabuki performance through to fiction, poetry and film - across a range of historical periods, this book provides a striking picture of the pervasiveness and strength of Japanese censorship across a range of media; the similar tactics used by artists of different media to negotiate censorship boundaries; and how censors from different systems and time periods face many of the same problems and questions in their work. Taken together, the essays in this book demonstrate that censorship at every stage involves an act of human judgment, in a context determined by political, economic and ideological factors.

1. Introduction: Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan 2. Censorship and Patronage in Meiji Kabuki 3. Seditious Obscenity / Obscene Seditions: The Radical Eroticism of Umehara Hokumei 4. The Censor as Critic: Ogawa Chikagoro and Popular Music Censorship in Imperial Japan 5. Kawabata's Wartime Message in Beautiful Voyage (Utsukushii tabi) 6. Banned Books in the Hands of Japanese Librarians: from Meiji to Postwar 7. Self-Censorship: The Case of Wartime Japanese Poetry 8. Kurosawa Akira's One Wonderful Sunday: Censorship, Context and Counter-discursive film 9. Censoring Tamura Taijiro's Biography of a Prostitute (Shunpuden) 10. Censoring Imperial Honorifics: A Linguistic Analysis of Occupation Censorship in Newspapers and Literature 11. "Art" Il-legally Defined? - A Legal and Art Historical Analysis of Akasegawa Genpei's Model Thousand-yen Note Incident 12. Parodying the Censor and Censoring Parody in Modern Japan