SOURCE: Mayo, Marlene J. “Literary Reorientation in Occupied Japan: Incidents of Civil Censorship.” In Legacies and Ambiguities: Postwar Fiction and Culture in West Germany and Japan, edited by Ernestine Schlant and J. Thomas Rimer, pp. 135-61. Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Mayo describes and analyzes the ways in which the U.S. occupying forces censored fiction and poetry by Japanese writers and how Japanese writers resisted and subverted attempts at censorship.]

From September 1945 to April 1952, political, economic, and psychological reorientation of occupied Japan was a conscious policy of the postwar American government. This included an ambitious program of ideological reprogramming in support of the American rise to globalism. Japan was in effect reconstituted as a giant reeducation camp under the supervision of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Japan (SCAP). The concrete aims were to end Japan's “feudal” concepts, characterized specifically as class stratification, glorification of the military, and subservience to authority, together with its racial consciousness and belief in divine mission, and to foster new beliefs, labeled as democracy, individual responsibility, and fair dealing.¹ For the first four years, 1945 through 1949, as millions of overseas troops and civilians were repatriated, Japan was largely cut off from the rest of the world and subject to extensive foreign surveillance of its schools, mass media, postal services, and telecommunications. The preferred methods of control were nonviolent and persuasive, but intimidation and coercion were not ruled out. When policy emphases shifted from reform to recovery in 1948 and controls were lessened but not ended, cultural exchange programs were adopted to strengthen Japan's integration with the United States and the European democracies. Because occupied Japan was not split among a number of victorious allies but remained a political entity under a single military bureaucracy, and was, in addition, an island country, reorientation was easier to implement than in Germany. However, Japan's history and culture were far less known to Americans than Germany's and far fewer Americans spoke or read Japanese than German.²

As required by Washington and carried out by SCAP, control and reform of Japan's media were as central to the process of reorientation as were changes in Japan's schools. In practice, this task required an intricate mixture of indoctrination and censorship. To carry out the tasks of fostering democratic and peaceful ideas through the mass media while instilling war guilt, MacArthur relied primarily on units in the Information Division of the Civil Education and Information Section (CI&E).³ To detect and check militaristic and chauvinistic ideas, he turned to the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) of the Civil Intelligence Section. Each section had a distinct mission: the propagandists were to insert or prescribe acceptable words, and the censors were to delete or suppress objectionable ones. Frequently, their functions overlapped, but together they were to immunize Japan against the spread of ideologies inimical to American interests, whether lingering militarism or advancing communism.⁴ Although SCAP was not particularly interested in literature per se, literary works came under its scrutiny as published works.

On balance, CI&E was far less concerned with the literary world than with the press, theater, films, or radio broadcasting. Its major contribution to reorienting Japan's literary life was in allocating newsprint, expanding the flow of foreign books to Japan, and, above all, in interacting with other SCAP sections to change the intellectual and political atmosphere for the whole population by constantly promoting the concept and practice of peace, democracy, and responsible international life through numerous information programs, campaigns, and exhibits. Inadvertently, it may also have contributed to a growing American appreciation of modern and classical Japanese literature. In order to observe major reorientation activities that directly affected Japanese literary life and production during those years, the chief topic of this essay, one must look rather to the work of the occupation's civil censors.⁵ It is here too that some answers may be found concerning the charges subsequently made of an undue interference with literary creativity in occupied Japan.

Quickly organized and employing a combined Allied and Japanese staff of over 6,000 at its high point in 1947, CCD had several branches to carry out its overall mission of surveillance of the media and other channels of public communications.⁶ Within this large apparatus, the unit responsible for preventing the mass media from carrying materials harmful to the goal of demilitarization and democratization was the Press, Publications, and Broadcasting Division, or PPB, which, in addition to its functional units, was also divided into three operational districts with headquarters in Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukuoka. The taboos designated in SCAP's Press Code, issued in late September 1945, embraced the broad categories of militarist propaganda, inaccurate statements, incitements to unrest or remarks disturbing to public tranquillity, and criticism of the United States, the Allies, the occupation, or General MacArthur. For internal guidance, there were detailed office manuals and elaborate key logs that extended and periodically updated the list of forbidden subjects.⁷

Well-fortified, PPB's senior media censors and supporting staff acted to delete offensive materials from newspapers, wire service copy, films, plays, slides and lantern shows, paintings and cartoons, magazines, and books. The range of strictly literary activity was surprising, since its priorities, like those of CI& E, were political and economic publications. At first PPB's main target was the ultra Right, but it soon added the Communist Left and continued to watch both extremes closely to the end of its official operations in late 1949. This was a delicate matter since PPB was obligated to protect the Soviet Union from criticism. With the heating up of the cold war, and the onset of the Korean War, SCAP was able to combat the Left more openly, culminating in MacArthur's support of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru's government in suppression of the Communist organ Akahata (Red Flag) in 1950 and purge of leftists from the media. During the first two years of PPB operations, the bulk of Japanese books and periodicals were precensored, with a shift in September 1947 to postcensorship of books followed by magazines at the end of the year. Even then, several troublesome magazine and book publishers on both the Right and Left were kept on a precensorship basis, and in this later stage, any “flagrant” violations of the Press Code could bring fines, reprimands, or even suspensions of sales. Strict measures were taken to keep the existence of occupation censorship secret from the Japanese public by banning all written references to the process and proscribing the use of telltale ellipse marks (fuseji) for deleted items or passages. Of course, Japanese authors, editors, and publishers were fully aware of the process as were foreign correspondents. During the period of precensorship, publishers had to submit two copies of all galleys to the censors and wait for decisions, just as in the old days of Japanese government controls.

Within PPB, the key figures in making literary decisions were the chief of PPB, the District heads, and senior officers in the Publications Branch (Tokyo), in particular the book and magazine unit. On occasion the chief censor of CCD became involved, and in highly delicate issues, such as atomic bomb literature, the chief of MacArthur's intelligence operations, General Charles Willoughby, joined the deliberations. For most of the period, 1945-49, the head of PPB was John Costello, a former St. Louis newsman with wartime training in a Japanese language and area program specially created for civil censors at the University of Michigan. The District One Censor in Tokyo was Richard Kunzman, a journalist by trade, who was succeeded in 1948 by Patrick J. Malloy, followed by Robert M. Spaulding, a young graduate at war's end of the Army's intensive Japanese language school. The senior publications officers were American, but the central book and magazine unit in Tokyo also employed European nationals Klaus and Hans Pringsheim (who were residents of Japan from the interwar years and relatives by marriage of the German writer, Thomas Mann), together with hundreds of Japanese nationals at lower levels as scanners, examiners, and translators.⁸ As individuals, the American senior censors tended to be well educated, professional people from civilian backgrounds with a modicum of training in things Japanese. Their overseers, however, were career Army officers who tended to look at issues as military or security questions and were careful to protect MacArthur's image.⁹

Almost immediately, foreign journalists began raising questions about press censorship in their home publications, where they were free to exercise their First Amendment rights, and consistently condemned its continued existence as contrary to guarantees of free discourse under the new Constitution of 1947.¹⁰ Systematic study of literary censorship in occupied Japan, however, has been slow to develop. In the aftermath of occupation, Matsuura Sōzō, former editor of the journal Kaizō, offered a judicious overview in 1971: Occupation censorship was “more democratic” than the homegrown version but had its “biting edge.” Literary historians, such as Honda Shūgo, seconded by Donald Keene and Jay Rubin, posited a postwar literary renaissance, giving much more credit to occupation freedoms and the inner history of the literary circles or bundan in shaping the literary scene than to SCAP controls in dampening creativity.¹¹ A far more negative view, condemning occupation censorship as interventionist and harmful to postwar Japanese literature, owes much to the outrage of author and social critic Etō Jun, whose first articles were written in the late 1970s and based on research in American archives.¹² Since one of his chief concerns was to document a racially motivated SCAP attack on traditional Japanese culture and the Japanese language, his findings, though valuable, were not placed within the larger framework of Japan's long history of literary censorship reaching back into the Tokugawa era. This need has been well addressed by others, among them Jay Rubin, Richard Mitchell, and Ben-Ami Shilloney in their studies of prewar and wartime press and literary controls of the Japanese state, but work on the actual hermeneutics of censorship is not yet very advanced.¹³ For truly comparative analysis, moreover, additional research is needed on Japan's exercise of literary censorship and guidance in colonial Korea, 1910-45, including attempts to suppress the Korean language, and in the occupied areas of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 1937-45. Nevertheless, Etō's arguments have raised necessary questions and stimulated detailed research. Even if SCAP censorship was less pervasive and different in the selection of banned topics from that of the Japanese state, it did exist, it was intrusive, and it posed a threat to freedom of expression. However altered the conditions in the aftermath of war and defeat, Japanese authors and publishers continued to live with the problem of external censorship and self-censorship to ensure publication. For a critical period, Japanese readers were deprived of certain works in whole or in part.

The record of American and Allied civil censorship in Japan, including strictly literary censorship, is ironically probably the best documented case in history. The bulk of the evidence is contained in the Prange Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland at College Park, and in the SCAP archives housed at the Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland. Both collections are vast, and both must be utilized to arrive at an overview. Together they contain working papers, galleys, original manuscripts, statistics, and internal correspondence. The Prange Collection, in addition, contains reprints of literary classics and new works of fiction in book and magazine format, all in the form in which they were actually published and made available to Japanese readers, 1945 to 1949.

Finding answers in these and supplementary archives is an enormous task. What follows is impressionistic, though based on a systematic search through selected magazine and book files, and owes much to prior researchers. In common with previous case studies, it surveys censorship of reprints and newly written works. The ultimate assessment of Allied literary censorship is part of the larger question of reorientation, and it awaits, not only quantification, but, more important, mastery and textual studies of the literature itself, in addition to examination of memoirs and reminiscences of literary figures and their literary debates.

At the heart of the matter is the question of what the censors actually deleted or suppressed, and why, in serious and popular literature. Here, the work was in two parts—scanning reprints of classics and modern standards and also reviewing new works by established and beginning writers. This was an awesome task at the beginning. Despite forced wartime consolidations and paper shortages and the loss of equipment in fire bomb raids, a good part of Japan's publications industry was still in business. Moreover, the Japanese were a nation of readers.¹⁴

In the first instance, Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel, citing the interference of censors with reprints of classical and modern masterpieces, contends along with Etō Jun that Japanese readers were alienated “from their own unique cultural heritage, from their inner selves, and from their society.”¹⁵ It is true that PPB book censors, who incidentally were keen to destroy Japanese perceptions of uniqueness, closely examined ancient works for signs of ultranationalism, checking for example the poetry of the Man'yōshū (compiled in 760 A.D.) and the myth cycles in Japan's first extant historical work, the Kojiki (compiled in 712 A.D.). But the evidence indicates mixed reactions and sensitive handling, including consultation with Japanese nationals. By late 1946, the policy, devised by PPB and announced by Richard Kunzman, was to permit reprints of the ancient classics but to suppress “interpretations of these works which misuse them for militaristic or for ultranationalistic purposes” or conveyed anything faintly resembling ideas of a divine emperor. Accordingly, while Yamaguchi Takao's Kojiki Kōwa (Lectures on the Kojiki) was suppressed in 1947, publication of the Kojiki itself was not.¹⁶

For the medieval and early modern ages, publications censors displayed zeal equal to that of their drama counterparts in checking samurai literature for tales of revenge and martial values. In July 1947, PPB excised a passage from a critical study of Japanese plays for lamenting the recent prohibition of sixty-nine Kabuki plays (in addition to the twenty-nine already banned) “as a great loss to the theatrical world.” Also scrapped was the author's question as to why these banned plays were still so popular and retained the “power to charm” present day Japanese. Was it because they were militaristic, he had asked, or because they were “sensitive to beauty which appeals to the human sense of sight or hearing.”¹⁷ The following November, PPB suppressed an entire article in the magazine Dokusho tembō, for asserting, among other violations, that an English translation in 1879 of the tale of the forty-seven rōnin was one of President Theodore Roosevelt's favorite books. Drama censor Faubion Bowers agreed with the publications unit that this item was “nationalistic propaganda.”¹⁸ Attitudes had relaxed somewhat by the fall when SCAP permitted the first postwar performance of Chūshingura, the famous version of the forty-seven rōnin story, with a stunning all star cast. Nevertheless a year later in September 1948, a time of postcensorship, PPB applauded the publication of a new book, which it approvingly described as “a disparaging analysis of this most popular story.” The author was praised for characterizing the rōnin as a dissipated lot, who instead of sacrificing themselves for their lord's honor were really hoping by their dramatic act to win reinstatement as samurai in order to live idle lives and exploit the people. They were merely using the lord, just as the militarists who started the Pacific War had used the emperor, to attain their own “sinister ambition.”¹⁹ Perhaps another reason for relaxation was a growing sense, reinforced by Japanese examiners, that samurai literature was a relatively harmless and perhaps even necessary form of popular entertainment and a deepened understanding of the largely nonmilitary role and values of Tokugawa samurai.

The contention that Japanese readers were cut off from their prewar heritage is much better supported by the record of PPB's actions on reprints of modern literary classics dating from the Meiji period to the 1930s. Samuel's work is especially helpful in identifying instances of such book censorship in the Prange Collection.²⁰ For example, she discovered that book censors had cut several passages as offensive from a conversation about going off to the Russo-Japanese war in Natsume Sōseki's 1906 novel Kusamakura (Pillow of Grass, literally, but translated as Three Cornered World).²¹ By her count, over 100 lines were deleted from Mushakōji Saneatsu's 1918 play, “Aru seinen no yume” (“The Dream of a Young Man”). Prewar installments of Yokomitsu Riichi's novel, Ryoshū (Lonely Journey), which he had begun writing in 1937 and would complete in 1946, were suppressed. The reasons are unclear, but, since Yokomitsu had been prevailed upon to produce his share of patriotic literature, possibly it was because of criticism of China or Shinto nationalism. A reference to British exploitation of Singapore was removed as criticism of the Allies in a 1946 reprint of Serizawa Kōjirō's Paris ni shisu (Death in Paris), originally serialized in a woman's magazine in 1942.²² Also cut were prewar works by proletarian writers, such as a few lines referring to Russia in Kobayashi Takiji's 1929 novel, Kanikōsen (The Cannery Boat),²³ and a portion of Miyamoto Yuriko's 1931 work, Sangatsu no dai-yon nichiyobi (The Last Sunday in March), in which she described a crowd waving flags and shouting “banzai” after a fireworks demonstration. The Prange book files further reveal that a passage in a 1928 short story by Kawabata Yasunari, “Shisha no sho” (“Book of the Dead”), which was included in a postcensored seven-volume anthology published in 1948, was blue-penciled and marked “disapproved,” evidently for derogatory remarks about Koreans in a conversation between two of the characters.

From the SCAP records come additional examples. In November 1946, PPB was displeased with a proposed reprint of Dazai Osamu's Shinshaku shokoku banashi (New Tales from the Provinces), a refashioning of late seventeenth-century stories by Saikaku, which the author had finished in 1944 and published at war's end. Several passages were cut as “divine propaganda, incitement to unrest, and justification of revenge.”²⁴ As late as April 1949, Kikuchi Kan's rendition of the “Tale of Chushingura,” denounced by the censor as a “violent revenge story,” was disapproved as rightist propaganda. Natsume Sōseki's work, too, was still giving the censors problems. In July 1949, a publisher was forced to apologize in writing for his “carelessness” in violating the press code by including “Joining the Colors,” an allegedly nationalistic poem from the late Meiji period, in a complete edition of Natsume.²⁵

Since the works of most of the affected writers were soon published as originally intended, some as early as 1949, it is questionable how adversely this limited period of censorship affected the literary world or reading habits in Japan. An unintended result may have been greater freedom to indulge in socialist interpretations of the classics as people's literature or a lingering impression of American aversion to Japanese culture. Certainly, there was no permanent reorientation of Japanese from pleasure and pride in these works. A PPB report on book trends, July 1947, noted that “general readers,” besides buying “cheap novels and third rate detective stories” were also “craving Japanese classics,” such as works by Natsume and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. Such was the spell of Akutagawa that Hokuseido Press published a new translation of Hell Screen and Other Stories in 1948 and reprinted Kappa (Water Sprite) for English readers in 1949.²⁶

Next in question is the fate of new literature written under the occupation by established writers and newer artists in the immediate postwar era, and whether or not authors deliberately left out questionable passages or chose to remain passive in order to guarantee publication. This issue is at the center of the argument over literary renaissance versus literary suppression and of greatest concern to those who wonder how creative artists dealt with problems of war, defeat, and occupation. Here it is possible to use and add to the many individual instances already uncovered by Etō, Matsuura, Keene, Rubin, Samuel, and others, while also challenging and modifying some of their conclusions.

PPB magazine files clearly demonstrate that no Japanese writer, no matter how distinguished or obscure, and no type of literature, whether serious or sensational, was immune from censorship.²⁷ Among precensorship was Kawabata's very short or palm-of-the-hand story, “Kako” (“The Past”). It appeared in the June 1946 issue of Bungei shunjū but suffered two deletions for unacceptable references to fraternization (a taboo listed in the key logs but not in the Press Code). Kawabata's character Yūzō, for example, was in violation for speculating about two Japanese women who were accompanying senior American officers. From their behavior, which did not seem sufficiently “bashful or sophisticated” for proper Japanese ladies, Yūzō concluded that they had probably lived for a long time in foreign countries.²⁸

In the precensored September 1946 issue of Shinchō, another writer, Nagayo Yoshirō, not as famous as Kawabata but a leading member of the prewar Shirakaba (White Birch Society), lost two passages, one quite long, again for improper references to fraternization. In “Ichijikan no hanashi” (“A Story for an Hour and a Half”), he had not only referred to a GI walking arm in arm with a Japanese girl near Asakusa Station but to the unpleasant feelings the sight generated in the viewer. “Detestable, eh. Of course, many of them are forced to do so. Perhaps just about the time when we get the new rice this fall, lots of blue-eyed babies will come out one after another.”²⁹ Additional examples of PPB deletions for fraternization occur in the Prange files, but it would be precipitate to conclude, as does Rubin, that this is the single greatest reason for deletions. Statistics compiled by PPB for the category of literature, 1946-48, show that the chief offense by far, as in other types of publications, was militarist and nationalist propaganda.³⁰ PPB sensitivity to the fraternization issue, however, such as deleted references to GI's holding hands with Japanese women or to blue-eyed Japanese babies, not only distorted social reality in the fiction but helped reveal the opposite side of the coin, Japanese racism and sexism, or simply envy of occupation soldiers as male power figures.

The most startling example of precensorship of the famous is the total suppression of a short story, “A fujin no tegami” (“Letters from Mrs. A”), by probably the most distinguished writer of the time, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, from publication in the August 1946 issue of Chūō Kōron. In the view of the original examiner, a Japanese national, the piece, “presumably written before the Surrender,” gave an overall impression of militarist propaganda, “although it may not have been the writer's immediate design.” Keene calls this Tanizaki's first postwar story, an inferior one at that, and though conceding the author's probable disappointment, almost dismisses this particular act of censorship as a trivial matter. The complete story was subsequently printed in the January 1950 issue of Chūō Kōron, not because the censors had changed their minds about the supposed militarism of Mrs. A's infatuation with an unknown Japanese pilot, as Keene indicates, but because censorship had just ended and Tanizaki presumably had pride of authorship. Moreover, the story had been singled out in the first instance, as in the cases of Kawabata and others, by Japanese examiners and brought to the attention of American supervisors. In February 1947, Tanizaki was again a victim. A few phrases were deleted from an entry in his wartime diary prior to publication in Shinchō for criticism of the United States. By quoting a speech, he had seemed to accuse President Roosevelt of ordering the bombing of Tokyo merely to gain votes in the 1944 election. In a third instance, Tanizaki's recollections of taking English lessons during his childhood days (submitted to Shinbungaku, June 1947), censors cut a passage for implying that the attractive Western women living on the second floor of the foreign style manor housing the classes were high-grade prostitutes catering to rich and famous Japanese.³¹

Nagai Kafū's return to publication after a long silence during which he had refused to write patriotic literature was marred by a deletion for alleged militarism from an installment of his serialized 1941 diary for the new magazine, Shinsei, November 1946. Offensive remarks about Americans were also removed from his early postwar diaries, which were published in book format, 1947, as Risai nichiroku (Days of Suffering).³² In the June 1946 issue of Shinchō, Takami Jun was accused of rightist propaganda in his serialized story, “Waga mune no soko no koko ni” (“The Bottom of My Heart”). He was not allowed, when referring to older school textbooks on Japanese literature, to cite passages praising the Great Empire of Japan or the purity of the nation. Portions of his diary for the spring of 1945, published in Bungaku kikan (August 1946), were censored as militaristic.³³ Other famous writers who suffered indignities from the American censors were Ishikawa Jun and Sakaguchi Ango. Ishikawa's short story, “Ogon densetsu” (“Golden Legend”), was cut for magazine publication in Chūō kōron, March 1946, and subsequently deleted in full, apparently by his publisher, from a book by the same title at the end of the year. Sakaguchi's story, “Sensō to nitori no fujin” (“The War and One Woman”), submitted to a special issue of Shinsei in September 1946, was slashed on almost every page for alleged propaganda and love of war propaganda.³⁴ In 1947, he published Niryū no hito (The Mediocre Man) after making minor modifications in lines crossed out by the censors and never bothered in later years, according to Samuel, to restore the original version.³⁵

Among these writers, the case of Tanizaki, the best known and most financially successful, is particularly interesting since he had experienced periodic difficulties with Japanese censors going back to his debut as a young writer in 1910. His most recent bouts were in the late 1930s when portions of his translation into modern Japanese of the Tale of Genji were cut under duress (a domestic example of selective severance from tradition) and during the war when Chūō kōron, in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stay alive, decided in 1943 to stop serializing Sasameyuki (translated as The Makioka Sisters) after two installments. Was the earlier Japanese censorship system “little more than an occasional annoyance” to him, as Rubin believes, requiring only “small compromises” in the pre-1937 period, or was it and the subsequent PPB version troubling to his conscience? Tanizaki waited to restore his expurgated translation of Genji until October 1949 (the end of postcensorship) when he offered portions of previously deleted materials to readers of Chūō kōron. How did other writers feel? A long time before, in 1909, Nagai Kafu had declared that “The authorities don't read our stories and novels as literature or art: they treat them strictly as ‘printed matter.’” How did he judge the situation under foreign authorities after 1945? An entry in a restored edition of his diary, alluding to misconduct by occupation troops in September 1945, reads: “There were a number of dead and wounded [Japanese], it is said, but because of American censorship, there was nothing about the indictment in the papers. The Americans talk about freedom, but they conceal what is to their disadvantage. How very laughable.”³⁶ Textual studies and a search through reminiscences and zadankai may yield further clues about the cultural impact of external controls and self-censorship upon Japanese literary creativity.

Among newcomers, one whose aspirations for a literary career may have been thwarted by censorship is Yoshida Mitsuru, in a case made famous by Etō Jun. Yoshida's 1946 epic prose poem, “Senkan Yamato no saigo” (“The Sinking of Battleship Yamato”), in essence a lament of his dead comrades and their fighting spirit, was severely cut prior to publication in the magazine, Sōgen, edited by an important critic, Kobayashi Hideo. Even then, it was a close call, for the literary quality and dramatic power of the work were immediately recognized by the first Japanese examiner. A second opinion by a re-examiner undoubtedly helped doom the work: “The simple attitude and the vivid style, as well as the extremely impressive contents themselves, [will arouse] something like deep regret for the lost great battleship, and who can be sure that the warlike portion of the Japanese do not yearn after another war in which they may give another Yamato a better chance?” Colonel Rufus Bratton of counter-intelligence, asked to comment, “realized that a renaissance of the spirit is desirable” but in the end did not overrule PPB's finding that Yoshida's poem was militaristic propaganda, “inimical to the development of a peaceful Japan.” Visits to headquarters by the author's powerful friends and angry charges that the poem was “fine literature” but the “censors were too dumb to get it” were unavailing.

In June 1949, Yoshida published a reworded and enlarged prose version with the objectionable parts omitted in a popular magazine. To a Japanese examiner in CCD, it was passable as “just another dirge on the end of the Japanese Imperial Navy.” When Yoshida next tried to publish the original poem in a book of his collected pieces on the battleship, confessing to his “extraordinary attachment to the original,” CCD reprimanded him for taking suppressed material to a publisher. It not only flatly refused permission to print the poem but objected to other passages in the book as rightist and militarist propaganda “that would create nostalgia in the minds of the Japanese audience.” A handwritten note by one of the censors said that “whatever the intent of the author,” the work “plays into the hands of those who want to see a rallying point for nationalism.” By the time Yoshida published still another version in 1952, he had apparently lost all motivation for the life of a writer. The requiem did not appear in its original form until 1981, thirty-five years after its creation. Though unusual, the case was important and not an isolated one.³⁷

A more experienced writer who faced similar hurdles but persisted in his career was Ōoka Shōhei. Following repatriation from the Philippines in December 1946, Ōoka began writing, also with Kobayashi's encouragement, a fictionalized account of his experiences as a soldier and as a captive of the Americans. Kobayashi's plan to publish it in the second issue of Sōgen was dropped, however, after the crisis over “Battleship Yamato.” Subsequently, in early 1948, Ōoka published to much praise and attention a thoroughly reworked version of the prelude to capture, called “Furyoki” (“Record of a POW”), in a recently revived anti-Marxist journal, Bungakkai, but apparently had to change “enemy” to “opponent” and omit certain passages describing his treatment by American soldiers. In other ways, Ōoka's case reminds one of Yoshida's plight. He continued to write fiction, in time producing a great war novel, but in his later years became increasingly obsessed with memorializing the Japanese war dead of the Philippines.³⁸

In reviewing important new literary journals on the Left, censors marked two items for deletion in the first issue of Shin Nippon bungaku, March 1946. They dropped an entire story, “Asahan” (“Breakfast”), by Fujimori Seiichi, once again for violating the taboo against fraternization. The work's leading characters had gone to Tokyo to participate in renewed Communist activities under a certain Mr. S, one of the political prisoners released from jail in October 1945 following SCAP's Civil Liberties Directive. The Japanese examiner did not think the piece was objectionable in itself and simply recommended suppression of references to the eating of K-rations for breakfast since their possession was illegal and implied improper transactions between Japanese. Higher ups disagreed and took more drastic measures. In the same issue, one line was removed from Nuyama Hiroshi's verse collection, “The Braided Hat,” for disturbing public tranquillity: “the body of a starving man, who lies prostrate from weakness, falls prey to the cold north wind and becomes its fodder.” It is difficult to determine whether the journal's openly leftist slant made it more vulnerable to literary and political censorship, since the Prange files are incomplete for 1946-47, a time of lively debate and quarrel within the group and with supporters of its even more important rival Kindai bungaku, for which unfortunately evidence is also limited.³⁹

In the postcensorship year of 1949, several literary essays in Shin Nippon bungaku were disapproved as leftist propaganda as was a book of collected essays on proletariat literature edited by Nakano Shigeharu and sponsored by the society. The magazine's fiction apparently occasioned no comment. Miyamoto Yuriko, a leading member of the group and like Nakano a Communist, was closely watched through the occupation in all of her activities including postal correspondence. A civil censorship mail intercept of her letter to fellow writer Sata Ineko in July 1949 revealed disappointment at the people's lack of understanding of Communist literature. Creative ability alone was not sufficient, she said. There must be a supportive national movement of the party. Miyamoto exhorted Sata not to worry, however, and to keep on with her writing.⁴⁰ Their colleague Nakano, who had experienced confiscation of his poetry by the Japanese police in 1928 and endured a temporary ban on his writing in the late 1930s, was also under constant surveillance. In the January 1947 issue of Tembō, his satirical novella of the postwar scene, Goshaku no sake (Five Cups of Sake), was cut for implying, as the examiner put it, “sarcasm and almighty US influence”:

On the morning the draft constitution was to be presented to the Diet, or the previous day, the presses carried GHQ's statement stressing that the draft was worked out by the Japanese. It is a wonder that the Japanese should permit their government to commit a shameless act in asking a third party country for confirmation of its originality when they make the constitution of the state for none but themselves.

PPB was supposed to censor writers for what they said and not for their political affiliation, as Robert Spaulding reminded his staff in 1948, but censors undercut remarks by leftist figures whenever possible.⁴¹

Poetry was carefully followed by PPB, since, like wartime tanka, it seemed to be a perfect vehicle for rightist and nativist sentiments. Two poetry magazines, in particular, were closely watched as ultranationalistic, Fuji and Musashino (a network of small magazines of the same name). A principal figure of Fuji was suspect for believing that “as long as the Emperor exists in Japan, we must revere him heart and soul.” Kageyama Masaharu, one of the magazine's leading contributors and later named in the media purge, was viewed as a fanatic who wished to restore the spirit of the gods to Japan. He kept PPB busy under his own and other names. One of his sample poems, “Song of the Braves,” scheduled for publication in August 1947, was totally suppressed as nationalist propaganda. It began

Though this be a dark age,
Remindful of the Sun-Goddess' withdrawal,
Behold the divine image of Mt. Fuji,
Standing pure and clean in the clouds!

And on it ran for another eight unacceptable stanzas. Fuji was retained on the precensorship list in 1948-49. Its poems were regularly cut for rightist propaganda even as SCAP, in line with Washington's shift of emphasis, turned from preoccupation with democratization to economic recovery and heightened concern with leftist propaganda. Still another ode to Mt. Fuji was banned as late as August 1949.⁴² Meanwhile, in Saitama prefecture, the editor of Musashino, representing only a tiny part of the poetry world with a circulation of fifty, was reprimanded for publishing a poem entitled “Will Die for My Country.” The reach of PPB was so great that in June 1948 it had even disapproved of a poem in the initial issue of a magazine called Classroom of Flowers, the project of a girls' school in Nagano prefecture. Characterized as derogatory of Christ, this poem was cited as a flagrant violation. The records do not indicate who got into trouble for this piece, the teenage author or the editor; the poem was ignorant and tasteless, but there was no taboo in the key logs against anti-Christianity.⁴³

Established poets, like famous novelists, received the same, sometimes harsh, treatment. In the November 1947 issue of Ningen, a magazine with a much larger circulation than Fuji, two poems of Shaku no Chōkū (pen name of Origuchi Nobuo), were found to be in violation for rightist propaganda and for criticism of occupation forces. One of these was “Airplane,” from his “Collection of Modern Elegies”:

Even during the days of war,
With what a breathless ecstacy of yearning
I viewed their passing.
Now I see again the white wings
Pass roaring, row on row,
And feel the same yearning anew—
Even today when our remorse is so deep. …(44)

Censors were equally alert to the danger of leftist poetry. To heighten awareness, a special report by PPB in 1949 on “Poetry, Popular Songs, Communist Propaganda Media,” carried the warning that leftist poets were promoting proletarian verse to protest tyranny and inculcate a revolutionary spirit.⁴⁵ This was hardly a startling charge since SCAP itself used songs and poems as vehicles for democratic propaganda.

The American crusade against literary expressions on the Right did not diminish even as leftist literature became a growing concern. New war stories in 1947-49 by Japanese veterans about their battlefield or POW experiences in the Asian and the Pacific theaters were scrutinized as carefully for nationalistic sentiments as were tales of repatriation by soldiers and civilians from Siberian labor camps for leftist indoctrination. Thus, a prose version of “Senkan Yamato” (“The Battleship Yamato”) by Hosokawa Sōkichi, not to be confused with Yoshida's more famous poem, was subjected to heavy cuts in the October 1947 issue of Kaizō for rightist propaganda. A sample offensive passage said: “The heavy shameful feeling that we survived while many of our brothers sacrificed their lives as the special attack corps made us feel miserable. This was just the appropriate feeling for the defeated returning home.” In the summer of 1948, when the popular wartime writer Hino Ashihei published a new collection of short stories (Four Hundred Shaku above Sea Level) through a Fukuoka publisher, the watchful censors in District Three pounced on it as unacceptable rightist propaganda. “Defeat,” lamented one of his characters in a marked passage, “would be ruin and the last of Japan. Everything would come to naught. Defeat was too sad even to imagine.” It is unclear what action CCD took, if any—fines, reprimands, or confiscation.⁴⁶ For other reasons, war-related materials sometimes suffered delay in publication. Dr. Gordon Prange, civil historian in General Willoughby's Historical Section, G-2, attempted to protect the official history he was writing of MacArthur's campaigns by controlling all possible Japanese source materials, even to the extent of keeping them out of the hands of censors and CI&E. It was “most essential,” he said in July 1949, “that no publication either in Japanese or English reach the reading public either in Japan or America which may scoop some of the excellent points we shall make in our own studies.” Prange had in mind primarily documents and factual materials but may have held up some of the fictionalized accounts of fighting, especially in the Philippines.⁴⁷

As this small sampling indicates, Japanese writers were overwhelmed by their own misery and sorrow or were adrift in postwar chaos, though many were struggling with domestic social issues. Since PPB was not apt to ban expressions of war guilt or remorse, a survey of early postwar fiction in the form it was published should reveal to what extent Japanese authors felt compelled to address larger questions of militarism, aggression, and exploitation of conquered peoples. Clearly, throughout this period, SCAP censors contributed to an inaccurate picture in Japanese literature, as in nonfiction, of Western imperialism and created a distorted image of well-behaved occupiers and of a wholesome United States devoid of social and racial or ethnic problems. The evidence also shows that, generally, in dealing with literature, occupation censors were satisfied with deletion of offensive passages and only infrequently ordered total suppression of a work. Atomic-bomb literature presented a more difficult problem.

As a counterpart to SCAP's quick destruction of Japan's only cyclotron and confiscation of scientific notes and newsreels of atomic damage, PPB suppressed, or as it preferred to say, temporarily suspended, publication of nonfiction accounts by survivors (hibakusha) and heavily monitored scientific articles. The main concern of censors was to prevent criticism of the United States or the spread of technical information. In the realm of fiction, it permitted the publication in full of Agawa Hiroyuki's short story about a fictional family, “August 6th,” in the December 1947 issue of Shinchō, but a year and a half earlier had deleted as untrue and disturbing to public tranquillity a reference to radiation in a piece he submitted to Sekai (September 1946), “Nennen saisei” (“Year after Year”): “They say that they [survivors] took refuge in Higiyama Hill. Arriving there, many vomited something green and passed away. By the way, if you marry with a Hiroshima girl, they say she may give birth to a three-legged or one-eyed baby. That can't be. It's true I can tell you! We find for example many deformed plants.”⁴⁸ Hara Tamiki's prizewinning story, “Summer Flowers,” which the editors of Kindai bungaku had declined to carry in 1946, apparently after checking with CCD, appeared in Keiō University's Mita bungaku, a postcensored magazine, June 1947, precut either by the editor or with the advice of censors.⁴⁹ In Fukuoka, 1946, censors in District Three deleted four poems before allowing Kurihara Sadao to publish her anthology of free verse and tanka called Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs). Her 1942 antiwar poem (“War Nears”) was totally suppressed, along with a new one addressed to Americans (“Let's Shake Hands”); yet her explicit atomic-bomb poems (“Let Us Be Midwives,” “The City Ravaged by Flames,” and “The Day They Dropped the Atomic Bomb”) inexplicably passed, though portions of explanatory material were omitted. Another survivor, Shōda Shinoe, warned by friends of the occupation's hostility, surreptitiously published and distributed a collection of poems in 1947, Sange (Penitence or Scattered Petals), which she limited to 150 copies.⁵⁰ Otherwise, little atomic-bomb literature appeared until late 1948 and 1949; even then, the bulk of such writing, both in titles and numbers of copies, came after the occupation had ended.

Much good work has already been done on the painful experiences of Ōta Yōko, a survivor of Hiroshima, in publishing her novel Shikabane no Machi (The City of Corpses), originally written in 1945 and first published in 1948 after a struggle and with significant deletions. After its full publication in 1950, following the end of censorship, Ōta herself provided an account in May 1953 of a visit from an occupation investigator in 1946-47, whose chief concern seemed to be disclosures of scientific secrets.⁵¹ The dilemma of PPB censors is better revealed in their disagreement, 1947-48, over a famous work of nonfiction, Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of Nagasaki), a graphic eyewitness account of the atomic aftermath in Nagasaki by a Catholic medical doctor, Nagai Takashi. Richard Kunzman, to whom the book was submitted in 1947, passed it, only to receive a tongue-lashing from John Costello for failing to see the damage such a litany of horrors would do to the American image in Japan. Lt. Colonel Nugent was brought into the case and agreed with Costello. Quarrels and repeated reviews within PPB, followed by submission of the case in early 1948 to General Willoughby, resulted in a six-month suspension of publication for inviting resentment and disturbing public tranquillity. Willoughby, at a time when PPB was moving into postcensorship of the media, sensed that it might be better to go ahead with publication while the United States was in a position to “neutralize an adverse effect.” His idea of neutralization was to insist on inclusion in the book's appendix of an American account of Japanese atrocities in the Philippines, one which his own officers had prepared. Dr. Nagai, who was harassed by counterintelligence officers sent to make sure he was really ill and dying, agreed to compromise, but in thanking GHQ in print for providing the account, he left no doubt in the minds of Japanese readers as to the origins of the appendix. By then, the public had been saturated with media coverage of the war crimes trials, 1946-48, and attendant publicity to Japanese atrocities in the Pacific War and in the China theater. In this instance, as in the case of the poem, “The Sinking of the Battleship Yamato,” Yoshida Kenichi, the Cambridge-educated son of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, became involved, helping Dr. Nagai to translate the book into English while arranging publication in Japanese. The Minister of Communications in the Yoshida Cabinet also visited PPB on behalf of Dr. Nagai.⁵²

Astonished to find the book in print in early 1949, Robert Spaulding, deputy chief of PPB, made the trenchant comment that linking the two, the bombs and the atrocities, would have an opposite effect to that intended—a “direct demonstration of what the Japanese mean when they claim that Nagasaki-Hiroshima was just as bad as, if not worse than, the Japanese atrocities in Manila and Nanking, and our action cancels out their guilt.”⁵³The Bells of Nagasaki was instantly a best seller in 1949, and soon inspired a film, while a number of suppressed descriptive and literary pieces were at last published. Although the short period of civil censorship had delayed but not stopped publication of the earliest atomic-bomb writings, the difficulties experienced in publicity expressing the anguish had taken a severe psychological toll on the authors.⁵⁴

Censors, incidentally, also read for information as well as for violations of censorship guidelines and forwarded requested items to intelligence officers for analysis of trends or for further investigation. Occasionally, items on the literary Left and Right were reported. An examiner thought he had spotted a valuable piece in the August 1949 issue of Ningen, a serialization of Katō Shūichi's novel, Aru hareta hi ni (On a Fine Day): One of the characters, a painter, had expressed resentment “against the Tenno system with very severe language.” Senior censors did not pass it on, but the recommendation shows SCAP's continuing interest in expressions of opinion about the emperor and throne.⁵⁵

In this brief listing of individual instances, the deletions did make a difference in what the author was saying and how the author chose to say it.⁵⁶ The evidence, moreover, shows the censors to be overworked but thorough, fairly consistent, and operating closely within prescribed guidelines. The categories may have been arbitrary, but the censors usually were not.⁵⁷

Before reaching final conclusions about the balance of liberation versus interference in literary creativity during the first four years of the Allied occupation of Japan, there is the related question for future evaluation of what got through the censors—what was not suppressed or deleted.⁵⁸ For the present, however, firsthand research in CCD censorship files yields extensive and sobering evidence of slashed and altered manuscripts. For Japan's literary world, censorship remained very much a fact of life as did thought surveillance. It affected words and themes, the internal flow of ideas and emotions, and overall conceptualization. Although the range of acceptable subject matter was broad, reflection on the war and debate over war responsibility was heavily compromised by the victors' version of the truth. Expression of patriotic sentiment, not merely ultranationalism, was artificially checked, perhaps to the point of ensuring a reactionary return of nativism. Realistic depictions of the experience of living under foreign occupation were handicapped by numerous taboos. As conditions of reading and writing, the Japanese, moreover, had to contend with idealized views of the values and historical experiences of the conquerors.

Even if foreign controls were in fact lighter than earlier home-grown ones or if indeed the inner dynamics of Japan's literary world ultimately were more important in shaping postwar literary life than external guidance, censorship in occupied Japan was dangerous. Freedom of expression was severely compromised. However necessary ideological reorientation may have seemed in the aftermath of total war and in the conduct of a military occupation, there was potential harm in the process to the victorious as well as to the defeated. The large and efficient civil censorship apparatus established by the victors in Japan, the long-term planning they represented, and the alacrity with which the senior American censors took to their jobs of prying into Japanese life and the Japanese psyche reflected the rise of the American national security state. American authorities in occupied Japan rationalized interference with Japanese civil liberties in their own national interests. This was an attitude that could be and was reproduced at home in subsequent years. America's continuing war of words in Japan was thus, in part, a war against its own ideals. SCAP's fear of criticism by foreign correspondents in Japan and the persistent questioning of censorship by Japanese editors, publishers, and writers were an important brake on even more stringent action. The occupiers did not yield their controls happily in 1949 and found ways to perpetuate them in supporting the red purge. There is evidence that in 1950-51, with the outbreak of the Korean War, that SCAP was leaning toward the reestablishment of censorship both of the Japanese media and the foreign press in Japan.⁵⁹ In the decades since 1952, many Japanese writers have actively opposed interference with civil liberties and have been vocal on domestic and foreign issues. Their vigilance, including their help in unmasking American censorship, has been a return gift to the universal cause of freedom of expression.

Notes

1. See SWNCC 162/D, 19 July 1945, “Positive Policy for Reorientation of the Japanese,” National Archives, Record Group (RG) 165, ABC 014 Japan (13 April 1944), section 4-2; followed by SFE series 116, early August to December 1945 (National Archives, Microfilm Publication, T 1205); and revised version forwarded to General MacArthur by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as SWNCC 162/2, January 1946, published in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. 8 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 105-9.

2. Sources for comparative study of reorientation policies in occupied Germany and Japan include James F. Tent, Watch on the Rhine, Reeducation and Denazification in American Occupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson, eds., The Political Re-Education of Germany and Her Allies After World War II (London: Croom Helm, 1985); and Harold Hurwitz, “Comparing Reform Efforts in Germany: Mass Media and the School System,” Americans as Proconsuls, ed. Robert Wolfe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 322-41, 516-23. The terms, “reeducation” and “reorientation,” tended to be used interchangeably by postwar policy planners within the American government. In Japan's case, it would be inaccurate to speak of a shift in philosophy from reeducation (1945) to reorientation (1947) or to view reorientation as “a gentler term,” as does Tent in discussing occupied Germany (254).

3. Since the Japanese government remained intact and the occupation of Japan was technically indirect, MacArthur set up several special staff sections in his General Headquarters, in early October 1945, to maintain liaison with Japanese officials. Unlike Clay in Germany, he combined educational and informational control in one staff operation (CI&E); also, censorship policies for the two defeated enemies were drastically different—licensing of publishers in Germany, direct censorship by Allied authorities in Japan.

4. I have traced the evolution in wartime Washington, D.C., of the policies of reeducation and of civil censorship and information control for occupied Japan in two essays, “Planning for the Education and Re-Education of Defeated Japan, 1943-45,” in The Occupation of Japan: Education and Social Reform, edited by Thomas W. Burkman (Norfolk: MacArthur Memorial, 1982), 21-127; and “Civil Censorship and Media Control in Early Occupied Japan: From Minimum to Stringent Surveillance,” in Americans as Proconsuls, edited by Robert Wolfe, 263-320; 498-515.

5. This essay is part of a larger study that includes CI&E activities in literary guidance, book banning and confiscation by SCAP authorities, and the dilemmas of Japanese nationals in enforcing literary censorship.

6. CCD statistics, are misleading and often indicate authorized strength rather than actual employment, such as the frequently used figure of 8,763 in mid-1947 (435 of whom were in fact charged to censorship in District IV, Korea). A CCD Monthly Report for November 1947 indicates that the actual strength was about 5,500 (4,974 of whom were Japanese nationals), that is 742 understrength. In Tokyo, the center of Japan's publications industry, PPB grew from a staff of 131 in November 1945 to over 600 in late 1947. For relevant reports, budget requests, and office correspondence, see National Archives, Record Group 59, 740.0019 Control (Japan)/1-748; and Washington National Records Center (Suitland, Maryland), RG 331, Boxes 8537, 8568, and 8585.

7. For overviews of media censorship in practice, see Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Japan, 1945-1949 (Lund Studies in International History; printed in Tokyo, 1986), pp. 61-96; Mayo, “Civil Censorship and Media Control in Early Occupied Japan”; Matsuura Sōzō, Senryō-ka no genron dan'atsu [Suppression of Speech under the Occupation] (Tokyo: Gendai janarizumu shuppankai, 1977), together with his earlier book, Senryōka no gengo dan'atsu [Suppression of Written and Verbal Communication under the Occupation] (Tokyo: Gendai janarizumu shuppankai, 1969). The official history is contained in General Headquarters, Far East Command, Military Intelligence Section, The Intelligence Series, X, Operation of Military and Civil Censorship USAFFE/SWPA/AFPAC/FEC (Tokyo, 1950); and Documentary Appendices (copies at the Washington National Records Center and at the MacArthur Memorial Archives, Norfolk, Virginia).

8. In the low hundreds, not many thousands, as sometimes implied. Although approximately 5,000-5,500 Japanese nationals worked for CCD, the majority were engaged in postal and telecommunications operations rather than publications work. Moreover, within PPB itself, a larger number of Japanese and foreign nationals worked in press and news agency censorship than in book and magazine processing. For example, in a total staff of about 600 in PPB, Tokyo (November 1947), 458 were Japanese nationals; fewer than 200 worked in press and publications as examiner-translators, associate and junior translators, or clerk typists; 26 employees were foreign nationals, mainly European, Korean, or Chinese in origin (RG 331; Box 8537). Large numbers of Japanese nationals, of course, were also employed in publications work in Districts Two and Three.

9. Background of senior CCD personnel in Mayo, “From Minimum to Stringent Surveillance,” 291-92; 299-300; entry for Hans Pringsheim in Japan Biographical Encyclopedia (Tokyo: Rengo Press, 1958); see also Robert M. Spaulding's keynote remarks, “CCD's Censorship of Japan's Daily Press,” in Thomas W. Burkman, ed., The Occupation of Japan: Arts and Culture, 1-16 (Spaulding ultimately succeeded Costello as head of PPB).

10. An early critique of newspaper censorship is William Coughlin, Conquered Press: The MacArthur Era in Japanese Journalism (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1952).

11. Matsuura, Senryō-ka no genron dan'atsu, 100. In placing emphasis on the postwar liberation of Japanese writers and their outburst of creative energy, Keene argues that occupation controls were “in no way comparable to the wartime or even prewar censorship”; despite “adverse circumstances, publication flourished as rarely before in Japan”; see his Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, Fiction (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 963, 967-68. Jay Rubin arrives at similar conclusions in “From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under Allied Occupation,” in Journal of Japanese Studies, 11: 1 (Winter, 1985): 71-103.

12. Etō Jun provoked overdue examination of occupation literary censorship in 1979 with scholarly presentations at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he was a resident scholar, and a series of lectures at various American universities. This was followed by publication of Part One of “Tozasareta gengo kukan: Senryōgun no ken'etsu to sengo Nihon,” (“Sealed Linguistic Space: The Occupation Army's Censorship and Postwar Japan”), in Shokun, 14, no. 2 (Feb 1982), 34-109, with succeeding parts appearing in 1982 and 1984; translated by Jay Rubin in Hikaku bunka zasshi, vol. 2/1984; vol. 3/1988 (Etō's “sealed linguistic space” is an inspired metaphor, compared with “hot house,” “cage,” “huge prison,” employed by other writers, or my prosaic “reorientation camp”). For amplification of Etō's views and supporting evidence, see his book, Ochiba no hakiyose: haisen, senryō, ken'etsu to bungaku [Gathering Fallen Leaves: Defeat, Occupation, Censorship, and Literature] (Tokyo: Bungei shunjūsha, 1981). Brett DeBary provides a succinct review of the debate and of distinctions between literature written under the occupation and early postwar literature in “Comments,” Burkman, ed., Arts and Culture, 181-82.

13. Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984); complemented by sections on literary censorship in Mitchell, Censorship in Imperial Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Shilloney, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). No study of imperial Japan is complete, argues Mitchell, “that does not take into account the ubiquitous censor” (337).

14. CI&E and CCD media researchers were quick to note in 1946 the popularity of literature in Japan both in total number of books or magazines sold and in percent of total circulation. In April 1949, literature was still at the top (see, for example, SCAP, Summation of Non-Military Activities in Japan and Korea, No. 20, 20 May 1947, MacArthur Memorial Archives, and CI&E Publications Analysis, No. 286, 9 August 1949, RG 331, Box 5116).

15. Samuel, “Momotarō Condemned: Literary Censorship in Occupied Japan,” unpublished paper presented to the New England Conference/Association for Asian Studies (Fall, 1982), 15. See also her published remarks in rejoinder to Jay Rubin, “Discussion,” Burkman, ed., Arts and Culture, 176-80. Samuel expedited book and reprint research for this essay by graciously sharing her photocopies of materials from the censored book galley files of the Prange Collection.

16. Kunzman, Memo for the Record, 10 December 1946 (RG 331, Box 8630); Samuel also notes PPB's suppression of Takeuchi Katsuya's Kodaishi no mondai: Shinwa to rekishi (Issues in Ancient History: Mythology and History; no date), in “Momotarō Condemned,” pp. 7, 18. The full extent of PPB censorship of reprints of classical literature remains unclear and would be an excellent topic for additional research.

17. PPB, Action Sheet, 18 July 1947, recording deletion in Nippon no engeki (Japanese Plays), published in Osaka (RG 331, Box 8655).

18. PPB, Action Sheet, 20 January 1948 (RG 331, Box 8632).

19. PPB, District I, Memo for the Record, 22 September 1948, hailing Tamura Eitarō's “The Other Side of the Forty Seven Rōnin” as a “landmark in Japanese publishing history” (RG 331, Box 8631).

20. For book galleys and published books in the Prange Collection, blue pencil marks only rarely indicate the reasons for deletions or disapproval, necessitating research for additional clues in RG 331, SCAP archives, Suitland. Assistant Curator Murakami Hisayo also warns that, in most cases, catalogued books from the period, 1945-1949, represent second, unmarked CCD file copies; it is not known what happened to all of the first copies, presumably bearing postcensorship markings (conversation, August 1989). In short, CCD censorship of new books as well as reprints was probably greater than the Prange evidence at first seems to indicate.

21. Rubin clarifies that there were twelve occupation editions of Sōseki's “Three Cornered World” in the period 1947-49, only three of which were expurgated (“From Wholesomeness to Decadence,” 91).

22. For Yokomitsu, this is speculation based on censored passages translated by Samuel, who compared the 1937 and 1946 editions and noted that Yokomitsu replaced the deleted parts in 1946 with revisions. Samuel also uncovered Serizawa's none too smooth rewrites in 1946 of offensive passages in Death in Paris (“Momotarō Condemned,” 9-10, 14).

23. George Shea discloses earlier forced deletions from Kobayashi's 1929 story, “March 15, 1928,” which remained incomplete in a 1946 reprint (the story was first published in English in 1933, with police torture scenes omitted, together with a partial translation of the author's Cannery Boat, and selected stories by other proletarian writers); see Left Wing Literature in Japan (Tokyo: Hosei University Press, 1964), 314-15.

24. PPB/I, Report on Book Deletions for the Period from 16 November to 25 November 1946 (RG 331, Box 8655). Phyllis Lyons discusses this work in The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations (Stanford University Press, 1985), 45-47, 149; as does James O'Brien, Dazai Osamu (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), 110-18.

25. Kikuchi example in Daily Operational Report, Publications Section, 29 April 1949 (Box 8648); Natsume example in Memo for the Record, 25 July 1949 (Box 8619). Reminiscent of the Serizawa case, a reprint of Kon Hidemi, Oinaru bara (A Great Rose), a prewar novel set in Paris, was disapproved during a postcensorship review in August 1949 for a critical reference to French colonial Indo-China; PPB, Action Sheet, 2 August 1948 (Box 8585).

26. PPB Monthly Report, Book Trends, July 1947 (RG 331, Box 8585).

27. Magazine galley files in the Prange Collection that were examined for this essay and a larger study under way include: Ashai hyōron, Bungakkai, Bungaku jihyō, Bungaku kikan, Bungei shunju, Chōryū, Chūō kōron, Fuji, Fujin kōron, Fujin sekai, Fusetsu, Geijutsu, Gunzo, Hataraku fujin, Hikari, Hyōron, Jōsei Kaizō, Kaizō, Kibachi, Kindai bungaku, Kokoro, Mita bungaku, Nihon shōsetsu, Ningen, Saron, Sekai, Sekai bunka, Shakai, Shichō, Shin bunka, Shinbungaku, Shin Nihon bungaku, Shincho, Shinsei, Shin shōsetsu, Shisō, Sōgen, and Tembō. For a full listing of magazine titles in the collection, see Okuizumi Eizaburō, ed., Senrōygun ken'etsu zasshi mokuroku (Catalogue of Censored Magazines from the Occupation Period) (Tokyo: Yushodo Shoten, 1982). Some of these files are disappointingly slim, amounting to coverage of only a few issues; others provide extensive data. Although the Prange Collection also has an excellent run of magazines as actually published in the period, there are significant gaps here too. It was therefore not possible to trace the process of censorship for a number of key stories. As a nonspecialist in Japanese literature, I have omitted questions of content, style, and structure. There is, in short, much more work for future scholars in matters of textual comparisons, archival research, literary criticism, and types of literature.

28. It is not clear when “Kako” was fully restored; unless otherwise noted, all citations in this and the next section are from the censored magazine files in the Prange Collection. Here and there, I have made minor changes for readability in the English renditions of the Japanese examiners.

29. Other pieces by Nagayo ran into trouble, either for militarism or general criticism of the Allies. For example, “Gaen” (“The Feast”), the story of a couple whose only son had died in the war, lost a line describing the mother's grief “for the loss of her only and precious son, who died an honorable death in the Battle of the Solomon Seas” (Kaizō, August 1948).

30. Rubin, “From Wholesomeness to Decadence,” 92. For book and magazine statistics from the period 1945-49, including categories of deletions, see various PPB/I reports in RG 331, Box 8585. Rubin is, however, right to suggest that self-censorship came to be exercised in making references to American troops or the presence of GI occupiers. An especially interesting example that might have served as a warning to writers is censored remarks about foreigners and Japanese women in an exchange between Hayashi Fumiko and Sakaguchi Ango during the course of a roundtable discussion, “Degeneration and Others,” carried by the magazine Fujin kōron (Women's Review), October 1946.

31. Keene on “Mrs. A,” Dawn to the West, 967. The restored passages in Tanizaki's recollection appear in Paul McCarthy's translation of Junichirō Tanizaki: Childhood Years, A Memoir (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1988), 168.

32. On diary deletions, self-imposed and externally coerced, see Edward Seidensticker, Kafū the Scribbler, The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafū, 1879-1959 (Stanford, 1965), 174. Samuel also cites a twelve-line deletion from Nagai's postwar diary, Days of Suffering, for September 1945 (“Momotarō Condemned,” 12). His expurgated diary for the wartime years, 1941-44, was published in 1947 as Kafū nichireki (A Diary Written by Kafū).

33. Ironically, Takami had celebrated the arrival of free speech and publication in diary entries for August and September 1945; see Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, 967-69.

34. According to Keene, Ishikawa's “Golden Legend” made it into print, unscathed, but was omitted from the November anthology when the censors subsequently decided it was derogatory to the occupation (Dawn to the West, 967). Rubin says that lines at the end, which depicted a Japanese woman running down the street toward a tall, black soldier, were chopped off; he also attributes the later omission of the entire story from the anthology to a decision made by the publishers, possibly in protest against the previous censorship (“From Wholesomeness to Decadence,” 92). The Prange censored magazines files lack the relevant issue for verification or reasons.

35. For Mediocre Man, see Samuel (“Momotarō Condemned,” 13). Sakaguchi's “War and One Woman,” told of a wife who was sexually aroused by American bombing raids and otherwise bored with her husband, the narrator of the tale. Rubin adds that Sakaguchi had to change enemy (teki) planes and enemy guns into American (Bei) planes and guns in his famous story, “The Idiot”; the file copy in the Prange Collection, however, has no markings. Perhaps his editors, wise to the ways of the occupation censors, had already made the revision for him. Others besides Sakaguchi were affected in Shinsei's heavily censored special issue of fiction, September 1946, among them Murō Saisei for “Mother”; Kitahara Takeo for a piece called “Nausea”; Inoue Tomoichirō for “Marco Polo Bridge”; and Shibukawa Gyō for “Evening Glory.”

36. Views of Tanizaki and Nagai on Japanese censors in Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, 120, 137-42, 258-60, 263-65; details of his modern language translation of Genji, also in ibid., 258-59; and Keene, Dawn to the West, pp. 772-73. Translation of Nagai's original diary entry for September 1945 by Seidensticker in Kafū the Scribbler, 174. Nagai nevertheless managed to convey a broad hint about the existence of occupation censorship in the published preface to the expurgated 1947 version, Days of Suffering, by stating, “The reason for the deletion [verb, sakujo suri] of some passages and the names of some people is that, under circumstances today, I am unable to do otherwise” (cited by Samuel, “Momotarō Condemned,” 12-13).

37. Based on PPB files, “The Last of the Battleship Yamato” (RG 331, Boxes 8572, 8604); also, Sōgen and Saron censored magazine files (Prange Collection). Etō Jun tells the story in considerable detail, utilizing interviews and additional materials, in “Shishu to no kizuna” (“Battleship Yamato”), Shinchō, February 1980. See also Richard Minear's introduction and translation, Requiem for Battleship Yamato (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985).

38. The Prange CCD files do not contain this particular issue of Bungakkai; for details of writing and censorship, 1946-48, see Sakuko Matsui, introduction to translation of “Prisoner of War, The Prelude to Capture,” Solidarity, February 1967, 56. Ōoka's various POW stories were published in book format in 1952. An earlier POW story set in Wisconsin, Ohinata Aoi's “Makkoi byōin” (“McCoy Hospital”), published in Shinchō, August 1946, was also censored. However, Umezaki Haruo's highly regarded “Sakurajima,” a war story with a homefront setting, dating from the same period, seems to have evaded the censors (appeared in Sunao, September 1946; no copy in the Prange files).

39. Shea reviews the critical essays and fiction published by Shin Nihon bungaku during the occupation (including serialized novels by Miyamoto Yuriko and Tokunaga Sunao) but barely touches on its arguments with the critics of Kindai bungaku (see Chapter 12, “The Democratic Literary Movement,” Left Wing Literature in Japan). Other examples of censorship for this magazine include Uemura Tai's poem, “Angel in Rags” (August 1948) for general criticism of the Allies and Eguchi Kiyoshi's novel A Bride and One Horse (January 1949 installment) for criticism of land reforms and leftist propaganda. The few extant examples for Kindai bungaku include literary essays by Ara Masahito (June 1946) and Katō Shūichi (September 1946) and a short story by Shinjō Munetoshi (January 1947) for reasons of criticism of the Allies or of American forces. In Shinjō's case, a battlefield story set in the Philippines (“Kuchiba,” or “Fallen Leaves”), Rubin argues with reference to the removal of descriptive material that “the fact is retained, only the more graphic details having been eliminated” (“From Decadence to Wholesomeness,” 87). Such detail, however, is vital to the writer's art and craft in conveying meaning and nuance.

40. Mail intercepts (this one dated 20 July 1949) in RG 331, Box 8703. Miyamoto's experience with SCAP is one of the most puzzling from the occupation period. Although she had a wide following and was able to publish a considerable amount of autobiographical fiction, such as Banshū heiya (The Plains of Banshu) and Fuchisō (The Weathervane Plant), without much difficulty both in her own literary organ and in leading magazines, there are at least six or seven instances in the Prange and Suitland archives of censored essays or roundtable remarks by Miyamoto, for example her denunciation of the exploitation of working women in Java and Japan in “For Whose Sake—Women's Life,” Hataraku fujin (October 1948). Even assessments of her fiction by literary critics and historians were censored. In another form of censorship closer to home, the revived Japan PEN Club in 1947-48 was contemplating an eight-volume edition in English of major modern Japanese works that excluded Miyamoto and fellow Communists Nakano Shigeharu and Tokunaga Sunao (RG 331, Box 8576).

41. Brett de Bary's translation of “Five Cups of Sake,” which utilizes a later complete edition of Nakano's works, shows that the passage was restored; Three Works by Nakano Shigeharu (Cornell University East Asia Papers, 1979), 97. Spaulding's reminder (as District One Censor), is in Operational Memorandum 106, 15 August 1948 (Box 8568).

42. Suppressed poem cited in PPB/I, Memo, 3 August 1947 (RG 331, Box 8632); information about “ultrarightist” Kageyama Masaharu (Box 8593); special CCD report on the magazine and its editor, 2 October 1946 (Box 8537). The Fuji file in the Prange Collection is voluminous.

43. Special Report, Musashino, 25 August 1947 (RG 331, Box 8634); Memo for the Record, “Musahino” magazines, 10 December 1948; reprimand of editor of Musashi, Memo, 10 May 1949 (Box 8634); Spaulding, Memo for the Record, recording disapproval of strongly anti-Christian poem, 17 June 1948, and preparation of flagrant violation report for forwarding to CI& E (Box 8632).

44. In another example of established poets, censors apparently nervous about the expression of Shintō sentiments, first shortened the title of one of Kawaji Ryūkō's poems from “Kaeru tamashiii” (Soul Returning) to “Kaeru” (Returning Home), and then proceeded to eliminate several moving verses about the emotions of coming back from war, defeated and uncelebrated; Gendai Nihon shishū (Modern Japanese Poems), book galley (date not indicated), Prange Collection.

45. Action Sheet, 13 September 1948 (RG 331, Box 8585); special PPB report on Communist propaganda in the media, 1949 (Box 8648). There are numerous examples of censorship of leftist or proletarian poetry in the Prange Collection and at the Suitland Archives, ranging from works by amateur poets in obscure pamphlets to those by the distinguished writer and poet Tsuboi Sakae.

46. District III, Memo, 15 April 1948, RG 331, Boxes 8585 and 8576. Hino, who managed to publish a great deal though he was labeled a literary war criminal, complained in a speech at the Saga Girls' High School in February 1948 that true war literature could not be created either during the war or under the occupation (reported to Tokyo by the Fukuoka censors in Check Sheet, confidential, 4 October 1948, PPB, District III, RG 331, Box 8576).

47. See various CIS, G-2 check sheets and memoranda, Prange to Willoughby and others, July-August 1949 (quotation from 19 July 1949, RG 331, Box 8519).

48. Agawa, who was repatriated from internment in China to Hiroshima in March 1946, was an important contributor to atomic-bomb fiction but not technically a hibakusha author. The Prange Collection does not contain the December 1947 issue of Shinchō. For an overview of censorship of mainly nonfiction atomic bomb writings, see Braw, Atomic Bomb Suppressed.

49. Rubin describes three cuts in “Summer Flower” (also translated as “Summer Flowers”), in fact the central story in a triptych (“From Decadence to Wholesomeness,” 89); the Prange files do not contain the issue. The story of Kindai bungaku's negative decision in 1946 is repeated by Brett de Bary (who confirmed it in an interview with Haniya Yutaka, then a member of the editorial board), in “After the Apocalypse: Hara Tamiki's Writing on the Bombing of Hiroshima,” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, 15/2 (November 1980), 150-69.

50. Both a marked galley of Kurihara's Black Eggs and a published copy (Fukuoka, August 1946) are in the Prange Collection. Her poem, “War Close Up,” translated by Richard Minear in a recent issue of Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, did not in fact appear in 1946, as the accompanying remarks assume; “Four Poems (1941-45) by the Hiroshima Poet Kurihara Sadako” (vol. 21, no. 1, January-March 1989, 46-49). Samuel has translated “Let Us Shake Hands” in Burkman, ed., Arts and Culture, 177. For publication details of Shōda's Penitence, see citation in Wayne Lammers and Osamu Masaoka (comps.), Japanese A-Bomb Literature, An Annotated Bibliography (Wilmington, Ohio: Wilmington College Peace Resource Center, 1977), 70.

51. Rubin indicates that “Town of Corpses” was “significantly cut” in 1948, either by Ōta or her Chūō kōron editors, although the altered book nevertheless contained “gruesome descriptions” and “criticism of America,” along with criticisms of Japanese military leaders (“From Wholesomeness to Decadence,” 88-91). Princeton University Press has published Richard Minear's translation of Ōta's complete novel, together with Hara's entire triptych and Tōge Sankichi's famous 1951 poem collection, Genbaku shishū (Atomic Bomb Poems), in 1990 under the title, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses.

52. Based on memos and check sheets in RG 331, Boxes 8519, 8655, and 8630; see also Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed, 99-103; and preface and translation, Bells of Nagasaki, by William Johnston (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1984). Internal evidence in RG 331, CCD files, indicates there are missing endorsements for 17 and 18 January 1948; these may show MacArthur's position and clarify the origin of the “Sack of Manila” compromise (perhaps in an exchange with the Department of Defense).

53. Spaulding, note to TJH, 10 February 1949 (RG 331, Box 8630). The CCD file copy of the Nagai published volume in the Prange Collection does indeed contain the account, “Japanese Atrocities in Manila.” It carries twice as many photographs of the Manila atrocities as of the Nagasaki bombing.

54. For the frustration and pain caused by delayed publication, see Robert J. Lifton, “Creative Response: A-Bomb Literature,” 397-450, in his Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967).

55. Both the Prange files and the CCD records at Suitland contain numerous information sheets (not to be confused with violation sheets).

56. Further examples of CCD literary censorship in my larger study are listed here, since they bolster the argument of extensive tampering with early postwar Japanese literature. In chronological order, these include minor to major deletions from fiction or essays by Mushakōji Saneatsu, “To General MacArthur” (Shinsei, January 1946); Abe Tomoji, “Flowers of Death” (Sekai, July 1946); Hino Ashihei, “Raging Billows” (Kaizo, October 1946); Ōi Hirosuke, “Yoshinaka” (Kindai bungaku, October 1946); Ozaki Shirō, “Thoughts of a Gambler,” Fukada Hisaya, “Hot Water in the Mountain,” and Ishizaka Yōjirō, “Autumn Wind” (all three in Shinchō, December 1946, a special anniversary issue that also carried pieces uncut by several famous authors, including Kawabata and Tanizaki); Serizawa Kōjirō, “Destiny” (Gunzō, December 1946); Tanaka Hidemitsu, “In Town” (Shinshosetsu, December 1946); Dazai Osamu, “Hammering” (also in Gunzō, January 1947); Satomi Ton, “A Splendid Scandal” (Kaizō, January 1947); Eguchi Kiyoshi, Black Flag of Death (Asahi Hyōron, February 1947 installment); Niwa Fumio, “Tributary of a River” (Bunmei, September 1947); Nagayo Yoshirō, “Restoration of a Lost Object” (Gunzō, November 1947); Satomi Ton, “Spiritual Undernourishment” (Hikari, January 1948); Tanaka Hidemitsu again, “Brothers” (Sekai, July 1948). Also, total suppression of pieces by Komiya Toyotaka, “Unprinted Manuscripts” (Ningen, January 1946); Niwa Fumio, “Anti-Human” (Shinchō, March 1946); Ishikawa Tatsuzo, “Incarnation of War” (Shakai, September 1946); and Tamura Taijirō, “Story of a Prostitute” (Nihon no shōsetsu, May 1947).

57. As an example of the standard view, Colonel Walter B. Putnam, Chief Censor, justified civil censorship as “one of the limitations of civil liberties which are unavoidable in the occupation of an enemy country, defeated in war, when the occupying forces are infinitely inferior numerically to the population and charged with a mission which runs counter to the ways of life and patterns of thought wrought in the people by their leaders during hundreds of years of regimentation” (Memo to General Willoughby, 26 November 1947, RG 331, Box 8537).

58. For example, Kawabata's third revised version of Snow Country (1948) comes quickly to mind, as do Tanizaki's completion of The Makioka Sisters (1947) and many early postwar stories by Nagai Kafū (1946-48). Other well-known writers who published prolifically but not freely were Dazai (a large number of short stories and the novels, Setting Sun and No Longer Human) and Sakaguchi (his series of famous essays “On Decadence,” passed unscathed). Noma Hiroshi was able to serialize his complicated novel Kurai e (Dark Pictures), and Haniya Yutaka published twenty installments of Shiryō (Ghosts) by the end of censorship in 1949. Newcomer to the literary scene Mishima Yukio seems not to have caught the attention of censors, and Shina Rinzō's debut stories were untouched. Veteran writers Hayashi Fumiko, Sata Ineko, and Hirabayashi Taiko were extremely active from the beginning of the postwar era and were widely read. Hayashi serialized popular novels in newspapers as well as magazines, and published numerous stories. Ironically, critic Odagiri Hideo, who was listed in CCD watch files as a “radical communist,” was able to publish in September 1948 Hakin sakuhin shū (Collection of Banned Publications), a miscellany of reviews, articles, poems, dramas, and synopses of books banned by Japanese authorities in the Meiji era; the expanded version would later serve as a major source for Jay Rubin's study of the Meiji state and censorship.

59. Chief of Information, GHQ, FEC, to Chief Censor, 26 July 1951, requesting contingency plans for complete censorship in event of a great emergency, including “details and the necessary organization for the censorship of our own media, newspaper, magazine, radio, telephone, mail and comparable Japanese media, which would in effect clamp full scale censorship on all activities in this theater” (RG 331, Top Secret Boxes, Chief of Information).