Features

Archived at the University of Maryland’s Gordon W. Prange Collection in the United States are materials related to the system of censorship carried out by the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers (GHQ) during the occupation of Japan. When Japan’s National Diet Library in Tokyo created microfilm copies of the materials for preservation, more than 15,000 items were excluded as being “unsorted.” The materials were also largely untouched by researchers after the Prange Collection’s work to digitize the information between 2014 and 2015. Found among the materials was one article involving the atomic bombing published by a news organization other than the Chugoku Shimbun that had been censored. Herein, the Chugoku Shimbun will report on that case.

“I don’t think there are any cases of researchers, including myself, making a full-scale investigation of the unsorted materials,” said Taketoshi Yamamoto, professor emeritus of media history at Waseda University and someone who is steeped in the issue of media censorship during the occupation.

This staff writer also set about checking the list of “unsorted” documents to verify the reality of censorship of articles published in the Chugoku Shimbun and the Yukan Hiroshima, a local evening newspaper founded by an affiliated company in 1946. Most of the unsorted materials had been published in other newspapers. I also checked the scattering of articles involving the atomic bombing. Here, I will first take a look at local newspapers in Nagasaki which, like Hiroshima, was devastated in the atomic bombing of that city.

The present iteration of the Nagasaki Shimbun was divided into four newspapers in December 1946, a time when censorship was being conducted — the Nagasaki Nichinichi Shimbun, the Nagasaki Minyu Shimbun, the Sasebo Jiji Shimbun, and the Shin-shimabara Shimbun. My investigation of the “unsorted” materials revealed that, among the four newspapers, only one article, published in the Nagasaki Nichinichi Shimbun, had received notification of being in violation of the press code (reporting guidelines).

“As soon as it passes censorship”

The headline of that article, dated July 31, 1948, reads, “Dr. Nagai devoted to writing.” The article introduced how Takashi Nagai, an assistant professor at Nagasaki Medical College (present-day Faculty of Medicine, Nagasaki University), who experienced the atomic bombing at a location 700 meters from the hypocenter, had written Ganbakubyo Gairon (in English, ‘Outline of A-bomb disease’) from his sickbed. The article indicated that, “His writing will be published as a book containing 257 pages by Showa Shobo as soon as it passes censorship.”

The censorship documentation clearly states that the reference to “censorship” was the reason for its banned publication because the GHQ had prohibited the press from referring to censorship itself.

Similarly, only one Chugoku Shimbun article involving the atomic bombing was found to be in violation of the press code. The short article, dated July 22, 1946, reported that the Hiroshima City mayor had requested permission from U.S. General Douglas MacArthur to appeal for assistance from overseas for reconstruction of the city. The reason for the article being in violation was that it contained a description using a prohibited name for General MacArthur that read “Ma, general headquarters” (GHQ).

In both cases, it was not the content that was regarded as being problematic. The reason for the censorship was the use of language that breached the violation guidelines, in other words a mere formality.

To what extent overall were articles published in Nagasaki newspapers, including news of a general nature, censored?

I started investigating that issue using the 20th Century Media Information Database, developed by the Institute of Intelligence Studies, a Tokyo-based NPO for which Mr. Yamamoto serves as director. The database contains the publication dates, headlines, and presence or absence of censorship for all newspapers and magazine articles that were published between 1945 and 1949 and microfilmed by Japan’s National Diet Library. Information on the “unsorted” materials is not included in the database.

Lax monitoring notable

For the Nagasaki newspapers, information published in three of the newspapers, all except the Shin-shimabara Newspaper, was included. Of a total of 89,144 articles, 32 articles (0.04%) had been targeted for censorship. None of those articles involved the atomic bombings.

On the other hand, for the Chugoku Shimbun, of a total of 97,225 articles confirmed to have been published, at least 74,126 (76.2%) were found to have been targeted for censorship. Among the 1,505 articles involving the atomic bombings, 45.1% had been targeted for censorship.

Newspapers published in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like other local newspapers, were subject to post-print publication, undergoing censorship after publication by the third branch (based in Fukuoka City) of the GHQ’s Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD). The low number of cases of censorship involving Nagasaki newspapers is notable. Why was there such a disparity? Materials that might offer a glimpse into the reason have yet to be identified.

(This series is written by Kazuo Yabui, Appointed Senior Staff Writer, the Chugoku Shimbun.)

Keywords

Prange Collection
A huge volume of documents and publications submitted from throughout Japan to the GHQ were sent to the University of Maryland in the United States and archived by Dr. Gordon Prange, a person charged with compiling a history of the war. The collection contains a wide range of materials, including newspapers, magazines, as well as books and pamphlets, many of which do not exist in Japan. In 1992, Japan’s National Diet Library began the work of microfilming the materials. In the case of newspapers, 3,826 microfilm reels containing an estimated 1.7 million pages and 26 million articles are archived at the Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room of the National Diet Library. Around 15,000 items, including “unsorted” censorship materials, were digitized by the Prange Collection between 2014 and 2015 and are now available for viewing at the Diet Library.

(Originally published on September 5, 2024)