NEW YORK — With Barack Obama's military policy in the Middle East getting murkier by the day, his predecessor George W. Bush's stated goal of democratizing the region through violence has to be judged to have failed. The thought prompts the reflection that forced democratization could entail considerable duplicity even after the violence.
Tokuzo Kimura (1911-2005), the literary editor who dealt with many of the distinguished writers two generations ago — Yasunari Kawabata and Mishima Yukio among them — experienced two forms of censorship firsthand in a span of 10 years, as he recounts in his memoir, "Bungei Henshusha: Sono Kyo'on" (1982). The first was Japanese, for outright suppression; and the other was American, for democracy, so called.
Censorship in Japan, which became law in the early 20th century, reached its brutal peak with warmongers' takeover of governance. By the time Kimura was employed by Kaizosha, in 1937, the days when editors could use fuseji were over. Fuseji is the replacement of the characters of an offending word or phrase with an equal number of blank squares. With this practice, the reader so inclined could sometimes guess the original word or phrase.