JAPAN: Through With Love

Traditionalists in lovemaking, as in most other aspects of social intercourse, die-hard Japanese cling stubbornly to a stylized amorous technique. Last week, to protect the customs of the country, the Tokyo Home Office announced a sweeping ban on all foreign love stories, particularly the French. The younger generation, newspapers explained, are apt on reading such literature to become deplorably excited, indulge in unJapanese kissing and carresses.*

Specifically censored were the elegant, terse, cynical works of Guy de Maupassant, which are quite popular in Japan. De Maupassant has been banned before, even in France, for immorality, but some observers thought that the Tokyo censorship was directed not at his descriptions of lovemaking, but at his bitter essay on war in a little-known travel book, Sur l'Eau.

Excerpts:

We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs . . . of our barbarous ancestors. . . .

Military men are the scourges of the world.

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.