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Japanese crime writer Natsuo Kirino has warned that editors in her country are seeking to censor the work of their authors by asking them to avoid controversial subjects, “in order to gain readers”.
The writer – who herself previously faced controversy with her top-selling thriller Out (Vintage), in which a factory worker murders her husband and is helped by a female co-worker to cover up the crime – delivered a keynote address at the IPA Congress in Jakarta on 11th November. Speaking in Japanese with translation, Kirino, who is now president of the Japan PEN Club, delivered a wide-ranging argument that drew parallels between the censorship exercised during the Second World War and more recent instances during the pandemic and on social media.
During the Second World War, writers, artists, editors and journalists were sent to the battlefield to “justify and glorify a war of aggression”, in what amounted to a form of conscription, Kirino said. In Japanese-occupied territories such as Singapore and Indonesia, they were not allowed to write anything unfavourable to the Japanese forces, such as about military failures or the deaths of Japanese soldiers. Editors of publishing houses were imprisoned if they were deemed “anti-national”, while the distribution of paper and pulp supplies were restricted so that no criticism of the war could be published. Meanwhile neighbourhood groups in occupied countries were used to monitor the population and transmit information about local people to the authorities.
Drawing a parallel, Kirino said that in contemporary Japan the pandemic has led to “many ugly events”, including when the government requested the population to stay indoors and there were phone calls made to police, snitching on neighbours. “It was not the police who cracked down, but ordinary people living their lives,” she noted. Meanwhile on social media, “once people have been labelled evil or an enemy, [their critics] are allowed to say anything”, without consideration for their human rights, she said. Internet algorithms favour shareable “provocative, low-quality” posts, which people assume are majority opinion, and which leads to a very simple dualism of thought that creates sharp divisions between people, and “mutual slander”.
Taking the argument into a books context, Kirino said that a female writer she knows wrote a novel about two married people who meet and fall in love, but she was told by her editor: “Don’t write about infidelity”. “This wouldn’t have happened until recently,” she said. “Publishers will co-operate with this censorship in order to gain readers.”
She went on: “Humans make a lot of mistakes. They lie, they are mean to others, they like people even though they are married. Some people commit crimes. I write novels about people who cross the line; novels about human weakness and stupidity, and the suffering of weak and stupid human beings... People who protest to publishers against writing stories about infidelity may only want to read novels that say ‘the right thing’. That is the true nature of mass censorship.” But understanding human weakness creates a new relationship between one’s self and others, she said.
Similarly, Kirino spoke out against making alterations to historical works that use discriminatory language against women, or against Asian people. “It represents the limitations of writers who lived in that era – read it with a critical spirit, but don’t change it,” she said.
“Carried away by internet algorithms, ordinary people should never act like the censorship of state power,” she warned. “All expression should be free – writers and editors must seek harder for freedom of expression than ever before.”