Issue:
April 2024
A five-year legal battle over freedom of expression ends in defeat for the right
In August 2019, a major free-speech dispute erupted in Japan after Hideaki Omura, the governor of Aichi Prefecture, shuttered a display of censored art at the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya. The organizers had been bombarded with thousands of angry phone calls and emails, many threatening violence, against the After Freedom of Expression exhibition, which included artwork satirizing the Imperial Family and highlighting Japan’s war crimes. The exhibition briefly reopened in October 2019 under heavy security.
Last month, the Supreme Court ended the most serious legal challenge to the exhibition when it ruled that Nagoya City must pay outstanding contributions to the organizers of the Triennale. Takashi Kawamura Takashi, the mayor of Nagoya and arguably the political ringleader of the disputes, argued for five years that the exhibition should not have been supported by taxpayers. Nagoya subsequently withheld about ¥33.8 million of its ¥171 million contribution toward the event.
In December 2022, after Aichi had sued Nagoya City for the unpaid contribution, the Nagoya High Court upheld a ruling by a lower court that acknowledged the exhibition’s “strong political content” but said the city’s funding did not imply support for this content. The court added that art unavoidably causes “discomfort among those who view it.
“It is easy to declare works of art illegal on the basis that they cause discomfort or disgust to viewers,” said the ruling.
The Supreme Court rejected Nagoya’s final appeal on March 6, concluding that the refusal to pay was illegal. Mayor Kawamura said he was “beyond disappointed”.
“The mayor has the discretion to ensure that taxpayers’ money is used fairly, and I have argued that it cannot be used for the contents of this exhibition,” he told reporters. “I guess [the mayor] can no longer say, ‘Please stop’ spending taxpayer money on claims that are too politically biased.”
The city and the prefecture had agreed to share the roughly ¥1.2 billion cost of the Triennale, which was also supported by the Cultural Affairs Agency. After the protests began, the agency refused to pay the full ¥78 million in promised subsidies because of “inappropriate procedural matters,” saying the prefecture had failed to notify it of “serious facts that threatened the safety of the exhibition hall and the smooth operation of the business”.
Hagiuda Koichi, then in charge of the agency as minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology, said the funding decision was based solely on “whether the event could be properly managed and organized,” and rejected criticism that he had bowed to a rightwing mob. Omura also threatened to sue the ministry but this row was settled out of court.
The artistic director of the Triennale 2019, Tsuda Daisuke, told the FCCJ at the time that his aim was to “provoke discussion” on the health of freedom of expression in Japan. The exhibits included Koizumi Meiro’s Air#1, a portrait of the Imperial Family with all its members erased, nodding to the ghostly space they occupy in the collective Japanese unconscious. Shimada Yoshiko’s twin portrait of the Showa Emperor (Emperor Hirohito) with his face scratched out, then burned, also infuriated nationalists.
Koizumi helped launch a petition of over 100,000 online signatures against what he called “state censorship” after the exhibition’s closure, which was also protested by Japan’s International Association of Art Critics and dozens of artists and academics in Japan, South Korea and around the world. “Censorship thrives on fear and insecurity and silence is its accomplice,” Mexican artist Monica Mayer told a conference in Nagoya in 2019.
The ruling is the latest defeat for the right on the comfort women issue. In March 2023, the Supreme Court also rejected a final appeal by the plaintiffs in a civil suit against the makers of the documentary Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue. The movie’s director, Miki Dezaki and its distributor were sued for defamation by five of Dezaki’s interviewees who argued the denialist case – that neither the Japanese state nor the wartime military had been involved in coercing thousands of Asian women into sexual bondage.
The plaintiffs, including Kent Gilbert, a lawyer and TV celebrity, Nobukatsu Fujioka, the deputy chairman of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, and Yumiko Yamamoto, a former leading member of far-right group Zaitokukai, argued they had been “deceived” into joining what they thought was a student film and upset to have found themselves dubbed “nationalists” and “revisionists” in a movie that Gilbert denounced as a “propaganda hit piece”.
Dismissing the suit in the Tokyo District Court on Jan 27, 2022, Yoshiaki Shibata, the presiding judge, said the plaintiffs had signed consent forms before the movie’s release, allowing the producer “to permanently distribute, show, display, or transmit the film to the public in Japan or abroad, or to sell or rent copies of the film”. He found no evidence that the film had diminished the social reputation of the plaintiffs by calling them revisionists, which after all means they were trying to “reexamine the established theories of history and present new interpretations”.
The pressure against Dezaki and the Triennale organizers is part of a broader campaign to realign history in accordance with Japanese government objectives. In 2018, Japan's incoming ambassador to the U.S. Sugiyama Shinsuke pledged to “travel around the U.S. and explain the Japanese government’s position in person” in an attempt to remove comfort women statues that had appeared in several American cities. Before he had taken office, America’s Supreme Court ended the three-year legal battle to remove a statue in Glendale, Southern California, when it dismissed a lawsuit, funded by the late writer and journalist Hideaki Kase and other denialists. Japan has repeatedly demanded that the Mitte district in Berlin remove a comfort women statue there.
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Professional Activities Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
