ABSTRACT
In the urban landscape of postwar Japan, travel between work and home has come to consume an ever larger proportion of the everyday lives of working Japanese. The states regulation of sexual expression in public media seems, on the surface, to be contradictory. On the one hand, there is incredible indulgence. On the other, the state has rigorously and consistently outlawed realistic depictions of genitalia, including pubic hair. Kimoto Itaru, a legal scholar, has argued that it is the law and its regulation of obscenity that has made the visual and textual representation of sex in Japan “smutty” and “lewd.” Implicitly, home and its management are left to women, who as wives and mothers have been directed to work hard reproducing future generations of Japanese workers and subjects largely in the absence of men. Specific relations of history and power are at work in the case of Japanese obscenity laws as well.
