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Public Welfare, Artistic Values, And The State Ideology: The Analysis Of The 2008 Japanese Supreme Court Obscenity Decision On Robert Mapplethorpe, Yuri Obata

Washington International Law Journal

On February 19, 2008, the Japanese Supreme Court delivered a decision declaring that a collection of photographs by the late American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe did not violate obscenity laws in Japan. The fact that the Japanese Supreme Court publicly found close-up and detailed images of male genitalia in Mapplethorpe’s work no longer obscene perhaps makes the decision a landmark one since the present-day restriction of sexually explicit expression in Japan respected the obscenity standard from the 1957 precedent, the Lady Chatterley’s Lover decision, which ruled that the translation of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was obscene. However, close reading …