The essays collected in this volume highlight the complexities of the censorship process by investigating the responsibilities and choices of all three groups, in a range of case studies from the Japanese arts. By exploring censorship in a number of different Japanese art forms from popular music and kabuki performance through to fiction, poetry and film across a range of historical periods, this book provides a clearer picture of the pervasiveness and strength of Japanese censorship across a range of media; the similar tactics used by artists of different media to negotiate censorship boundaries; and how censors from different systems and time periods face many of the same problems and questions in their work.