ABSTRACT

This essay serves as an historical introduction to the problem of film censorship in Japan, a country which, despite an often liberal sexual history, continues to impose baffling and even irrational censorship standards on both its domestic and imported cinema. However, whereas sexual censorship in the West is often the result of religious dogmatism, Japanese film censorship may in fact revolve around political struggles whose import is not the censoring of offensiveness per se, but is rather authoritarianism's basic yet desperate desire to assert itself in an increasingly liberal political climate. Furthermore, Japanese censorship has had the unique side effect of creating safe spaces of sexual fantasy (for children, for example) that most countries, in what is in fact a greater form of censorship, refuse to create at all.