TOKYO — Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989, the year he turned 42 and the year his powerful nude photographs caused hysteria in Washington, DC. While the world has seen many changes during the past nearly two decades, the nature of Mapplethorpe’s human body and sexuality imagery still rattles cages, with some insisting that it is obscene. According to Japan’s highest court, such is not the case in the Land of the Rising Sun.Although a the Tokyo High Court rules in 2003 that the contents of the book Mapplethorpe qualified as indecent, last week’s decision by the country’s Supreme Court overruled that, allowing the book to end its eight-year wait and finally become available for sale within Japan.

Uplink publisher Takashi Asai’s insistence upon $20,370 worth of compensation for having had the book confiscated in 1999 was rejected, however. Asai, who calls the decision “groundbreaking,” is hopeful that the decision will “change the obscenity standard” and clear the way for films and books to be shown uncensored within the country.
An internet statement by Asai explains that he believes the ruling “will change the criteria for obscenity so that films shown at film festivals will not be banned from coming to Japan just because they show private parts, and so that books will not be imported or published with private parts covered or scratched out.”
A representative for Japanese Customs informed Reuters that the department has not yet received new rulings on how to handle such materials, but called the decision “regrettable.”

Japan’s infamous domestic obscenity laws were changed during the 1990s to permit the depiction of pubic hair, but important materials must still pass through customs, which disallows materials that represent human genitals. Madonna’s book Sex was only allowed into the country in 1992 after two of its images had been scratched out by censors. An unaltered domestic edition was released a few months later.

Among Asai’s arguments during the legal proceedings, was the fact that a copy of the Mapplethorpe book has been housed in the Japanese parliament’s library, as well as available for sale online, both of which he contended made the obscenity ban obsolete.

The national Yomiuiri newspaper reported that Justice Kohei Nasu declared that the black and white images in the book compiles “works from the artistic point of view, and is not obscene as a whole.” The Kyodo News agency added that the five-judge majority opinion on Mapplethorpe concluded that he was “an artist who has won high appreciation as a leading figure in contemporary art.”