Comparative sociology of cinema censorship between Japan and United States before World War

Censorship has been considered as the problem of the repression by the governmental power. However we must deal with this problem from the sociological point of view. Except in periods of national emergency, such as war time, authoritarian forms of censorship, exercised through the monopoly power of the State, have not been prominent features of twentieth-century liberal democracies. Rather self-regulation by the cinema industries was a usual form of film censorship. So censorship was exercised through complex social discourses. For example, Hase analyses the way a film "The Birth of a Nation" was criticized and labeled as racism movie and banned by some state governments in his paper, 'What is the social effect of fictional film? ". Before the regulation of screening by the public agency, this film was 'censored' by social discourses. And Kato analyses the form and content of black movies which have been produced outside Hollywood. Here it was decided by the way of reception by black people. This is, as it were, a censorship. So the problem of censorship must be analyzed as cultural politics.