Short Abstract

This paper interrogates debates about the boundary between “the artistic nude” and “obscenity” in 1920s–30s Japan through an examination of obscenity laws, censorship practices over nude pictures, and the production, publication and commentary of self-proclaimed “artistic” nude photographs.

Long Abstract

This paper interrogates the debates surrounding the boundary between “the artistic nude” and “obscenity” in 1920s–30s Japan through an examination of obscenity laws, censorship practices over nude pictures, and the production, publication and commentary of self-proclaimed “artistic” nude photographs in the period. I argue that the discourse created by the publication police and the responses to censorship from photographers, publishers and art commentators together constructed a system of legitimization and delegitimization by establishing “art” and “obscenity” as separate categories.

My research fills in current research gaps in the study of censorship over visual materials in Imperial Japan. I trace the shifts and development in censorship standards for publications with visual depictions of nudity from late Meiji period to early 1930s, and analyze it side by side with an examination of publication activities that constantly responded to, affected by and shaped censorship activities. My research avoids taking censorship as an ahistorical practice that is always dominated by top-down practices of a set of laws and regulations, and I take censorship as not only suppressing but also productive of discourses.

I conduct archival research into obscenity law articles, handbooks for the publication police, and extensive records of censorship practices of the publication police to examine how obscenity laws from mid-Meiji to early-Showa periods struggled to define “obscenity”. I then study the publication, commercialization and commentary of nude photographs on illustrated books, photo albums and magazine publications. The censor’s vagueness in defining obscenity allowed some photographers and publishers of nude pictures to circumvent censorship through camerawork, strategies in advertisement, and art commentaries that argued for nude photograph’s categorization as art. My research shows how the proliferation of self-proclaimed “artistic” nude photography in 1920s–30s pushed the publication police to rethink their criteria for recognizing and regulating “obscenity.” In this way, I investigate how discourses produced by the publisher and discourses produced by the censor mutually informed each other and simultaneously shifted and developed as part of the history of discourses in modern Japan that constructed art and pornography as separate categories. My paper thus denaturalizes such a distinction between art and pornography.