Rethinking the "Post-Defeat" Discursive Space: Censorship during the Occupation Period

Richi Sakakibara - Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature - Waseda University
Thursday March 10 - 4pm - Hoagy Carmichael Room, Morrison Hall 006

The occupation period was a time of ambivalence for writers of Japanese literature. It was undoubtedly a time of freedom, as they were liberated from the wartime regulations on writing. Yet, at the same time, it was a time of oppression, as they were forced to negotiate with the very power that granted that freedom, the General Headquarters/Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (GHQ/SCAP). This ambivalence manifests itself most clearly in their silence on censorship issues. Re-examining this silence is particularly important as recent research examining materials in the University of Maryland's Gordon W. Prange collection, an archive of Japanese censored publications, has begun to reveal the actual operations of censorship. My talk seeks to address this space of ambivalence while introducing recent scholarly developments on occupation censorship in literature.