Word: nakata
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Dates: during 1972-1972
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...long ago, a small-time Tokyo businessman named Tadao Nakata hit upon an idea that he hoped would bring him, as he later put it, "tons of money for the future." He contracted with a California publisher to import 10,000 copies of a grossly prurient quarterly called Trio, which billed itself rather improbably as "a cultural, scientific and sociological publication." Yet even though Nakata had the printers take an air brush to some of the more explicit photographs, Japanese officialdom was outraged. First, customs authorities forced Nakata to have 37 "undesirable" spots in each copy daubed with ink before...
...magazine was blue enough to make a Times Square news dealer wince, but Japanese intellectuals have since made Nakata into a kind of Ginza Ginzburg. Critic Isamu Kurita, writing in the influential Tokyo daily Yomiuri Shimbun, warned that excessive official zeal in enforcing Japan's tough obscenity laws could lead to "the barbarization of our culture and civilization in its crudest form." Tokyo Psychology Professor Kazuo Shimada sputtered that Nakata's arrest was unfair because sex "is a personal and private matter." Mitsuo Takeya, a leading Japanese nuclear physicist, worried that government repression "could end up by distorting...
...students of the once exquisite Japanese art of pornography, Nakata's stuff was a poor substitute for the celebrated Ukiyo-e erotica of the era before the first Westerners arrived more than a century ago. In the 1700s and early 1800s, when the great samurai families ruled the peaceful, isolated island nation, Japanese artists celebrated sex in extraordinarily direct and sensual prints and woodcuts. Every well-bred virgin was given at least one graphically instructive makura-e (pillow picture) as part of her trousseau. "There was no hypocrisy," says Ukiyo-e Scholar Teruji Yoshida. "These artists dealt with...