Page 68 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 55

Decontextualised Lips: Censorship and the National Body

To fully appreciate the ways in which Sato’s Naked Blood functions as a
critique of Japanese censorship policies, though, it is first necessary to
explore how these regulations came to be established. In Permitted and
Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan, Anne
Allison locates the origin of contemporary standards regarding what can
and cannot be shown on screens in Japan as originating from a nexus of
concerns about national identity and the ‘appearance’ and ‘purity’ of the
Japanese physical and social body. Much of this national focus on
appropriate bodily representations, she argues, stems from a reaction to
Western Orientalist imaginings of the Japanese biological and social
body, particularly as they developed within the nineteenth century:

It was as a corrective to this Western perception of Japanese ‘primitiveness’
that the modern laws against obscenity were first imposed: they were a means
of covering the national body from charges that it was obscene...in part,
acquiring such an identity meant adopting Western standards of corporeal
deportment. In part as well, it meant developing a notion of the public as a
terrain that is monitored and administered by the state. Thus, the behavior of
the Japanese, as state subjects, in this terrain is regulated and surveiled.
(Allison 2000: 163)

Of course, policing (and prohibiting) certain modes of behavior and
visual representations of the human body and human sexuality, especially
in reaction to a perceived ‘dirtiness’, also functions to ‘protect what is
“real”’ – ‘unique to Japanese culture’ – from ‘outside contamination,
3
from being infiltrated and deformed by Western influence’ (164). Some
of the most heated debates about censorship in Japan have arisen in

3
It would be a mistake to assume that this reactionary internal and external ‘othering’ is
limited to visual culture. Identities are, after all, constructs with borders that are often reified/
reinforced, sometimes violently so, when exposed as illusory. As such, when cultures come
into contact, there are bound to be varying degrees of appropriation, reactionary attitudes and,
as Takayumi Tatsumi posits, ‘fabulous negotiations between Orientalism and Occidentalism’.
See Tatsumi, T. (2000) ‘Generations and Controversies: An Overview of Japanese Science
Fiction’, in Science Fiction Studies, 80, 27:1 (March), 113. It is also important to note that
certain behavioral prohibitions related to sexuality were long a part of Shinto mythology. See
Allison, 163.