earticle

영어

This study compares the List of Prohibited Publications issued by the Government-General of Korea and issued by the Japanese Ministry of Internal. These lists are censorship records containing books banned because of “the corruption of public morals.” Although many previous studies have analyzed Japanese colonial era censorship, few attempts have been made to compare and contrast the details of the censorship records of Joseon and Japan. This paper tries to compare the censorship records of Joseon and Japan and to identify cases in which books published in Japan and exported to Joseon were not prohibited from publishing in their own country but were disposed of in Joseon. Through this, we can recognize differences in the degree of censorship for the same publications, even though the standards and systems of censorship of the Empire and the colonies were similar. This study focuses on books that were prohibited because of “the corruption of public morals,” and then it can be seen that such censorship led to a decisive difference in the dissemination and reproduction of sexology in Joseon and Japan. As a result of comparing the two lists, it is identified that up to 110 of the 361 Japanese books of “the corruption of public morals” in the List of Prohibited Publications issued by the Government-General of Korea were banned from being released only in Joseon. This proves that the colonial censorship authorities tried to control even books licensed for publication and distribution in Japan with stricter standards than in Japan to prevent their influx into Joseon. Many of the Japanese books of “the corruption of public morals” were published amid an explosive increase in sexological books as a result of the boom in interest in sexology during the entire Taisho period and the early Showa period. The translation of sexological books and the subsequent publication of Japanese manuals made it possible for Japanese researchers to conduct original research by themselves, going beyond the introduction of new Western knowledge. In contrast, there is only one Korean book that is presumed to be a book about sexuality in the List of Prohibited Publications issued by Government-General of Korea. And newspaper articles that give us a glimpse of the reality of sexological studies in Joseon, thus it shows that even though Joseon’s intellectuals, like in the case of Japan, were stimulated by sexology, but they were unable to conduct original research due to the lack of a driving force that allowed them to develop it.