The exhibit wasn’t censored by any branch of government. The contents of the exhibition were known well in advance. Censorship would be if the city/prefecture or national government prevented certain or all works from being publicly exhibited.
The Nagoya mayor made some rather reprehensible comments for which he was roundly criticized by citizens and the Governor of Aichi prefecture. As the article points out, the cancelation was due to a threat of an arson attack right on the heels of the horrific Kyoto Animation attack.
Japanese twitter users have now found that Daisuke Tsuda, the artistic director of the Triennial, made comments in favor of restricting freedom of expression a while back. Of course he is free to try and start a court case over this particular incident if he really feels that his freedoms were violated by the state.
As a bit of followup news, today the police arrested the man who made the arson threat. Thats incredibly swift action by the Japanese police who are normally rather glacial in their handling of crime.
Personal comment: I sure as heck can understand the public safety concern concerning the threat of arson. I was personally responsible for overseeing evacuation of only two floors worth of people during the 2011 quake in a situation where there was a minor fire on one floor. Fortunately the building was new and up to all current fire code. I dont know the building where the Triennial was held but I do know that lots of buildings dont have fire break doors, automatic sprinklers or other fire suppression, etc and the exit staircases are easily jammed up. That and the fact that the exhibition space cant really be guarded with enough patrols and searches 24/7 to prevent a copycat attack.
Come on. Not wanting freedom of speech to be absolute is not, in any way, the same as someone threatening to burn down a whole museum over one statue.
The point remains that the mayor was calling for the cancellation of the exhibit, and incited a lot of the threats from other citizens that shut it down.
Whatever mitigating factors you think there are here, it’s clearly not a situation that, on balance, shows Japan as a place where freedom of expression is defended vigorously, especially where that expression is about remembering Comfort Women.
Good Lord no! I’m glad the person who made the threat was found so quickly and arrested.
As for the Nagoya mayor, again he was roundly criticized by the citizens of Nagoya (generally an outspoken bunch, I enjoy Aichi quite a lot, I’ll be there next week) and warned by the Achi governor that his comments on this matter were likely unconstitutional.
Freedom of expression is always a tightrope. You may recall the stupidity of the reactions to the Piss Christ exhibit in NYC. Or that art exhibits have been the subject of riots at various times in various places. In this case, you can be sure that once the news of the threats got out that if no action was taken on the exhibit, the public opinion and the news here would be quite critical. Concerns over public safety and copycat crimes are pretty common across the spectrum here.
As is I expect a fair amount of discussion here and also that the Western press will continue to sell their narrative as the NYT & Guardian have already done on this topic.
It wasn’t a single threat, and it wasn’t a single person who made those threats. Good that they found one of them, but please don’t try to sell it as a one-person problem, now wrapped up with the arrest of one guy.
The only thing one can safely take from this debacle is that modern Japanese society is still not an open and safe environment to talk about what happened with comfort women.
You can assign blame for that however you want, but nothing you have said so far convinces otherwise.
I was unclear in my reply there, my bad. Of course I’m aware that the prefectural government received multiple threats. Hopefully the police will have equal success on other threats as well with similar speed. In no way did I mean to assign everything to one person.
OK then we’ve both spoken our peace and that’s that. I wasn’t intending to change your mind on the comfort women issue, its not one of those kinds of topics at all. Not something I have any intent to defend anyway. Genuinely a pleasure to talk to you overall.
