Commercial publishing in Japan started in 1609, during Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), but as the number of publishers grew alongside increasing literary rates so did censorship.
The Shogunate authorities (the government) outsourced much of their required publishing, such as directories, maps and calendars; and the encouragement of publishing by the most famous Shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa (1543-1616), is credited with enhancing the longevity of the regime and the Tokugawa Period (1603-1867).
However, the ruthlessness of the samurai-run regime and the need to meet the increasing demand for news about social changes, power-politics and scandals, meant that entrepreneurial publishers and authors were not able to use similar approaches to the tabloids and scandal sheets of today.
They had to be much more creative to avoid censorship and harsh punishment.
According to historians and academics, they got round these rules by masking political commentary. For example, within fantasy storytelling, Kabuki plays and other formats including so-called yellow books, Kibyoshi, were a particularly successful format.
There was significant self-censorship and guilds were formed to deal with the authorities and also new competitors. The charge of obscenity was often bandied about and used in a wider definition than that of today to deal with publishers who works used satire to mask criticism of government policy and officials.
Nonetheless, publishing was a dangerous pursuit. Baba Bunko (1718-1758), a famous storyteller and lecturer, who some academics suspect may have been a Christian who hid his faith and whose work is included in the canon of important Christian authors of Japan, was tried and executed for his satire and publications.
He is probably best known for Contemporary Edo: An Album of One Hundred Monsters (Todai Edo hyaku bakemono, 1758), in which struggles with ‘monsters’, expose the hypocrisy of well-known and lesser-known officials of the government and Confucian teachers, and other religious leaders of the time.
Capital punishment still exists in Japan today and Bunko is not the only Japanese author or man of letters who has got into trouble, and been executed.
A few other notable examples include Ikki Kita (1883-1937) a critic of Japan’s Emperor system, Takiji Kobayashi (1900-1933) a proletariat author tortured to death by the Tokyo police, Hitoshi Igarashi (1947-1991) a Japanese professor who was murdered for translating Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses into Japanese and Norio Nagayama (1949-1997) a bestselling novelist who went on a killing spree and was executed for his crimes.
