著者

大尾 侑子

出版者

日本メディア学会

雑誌

マス・コミュニケーション研究 (ISSN:13411306)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.100, pp.143-162, 2022-01-31 (Released:2022-03-29)

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After World War II, an action called the “Campaign against Bad Books (Akusho Tsuihou Undou),” rejected men’s entertainment/pornographic magazines, led by many mothers’ groups, police, and the government in Japan. As a part of this movement, in 1963, the “White Post Box” was placed in Amagasaki City, Kobe Prefecture, to collect “bad books.” This post box subsequently emerged in Tokyo in 1966 and spread to many other prefectures in the late 1960s. However, it is rare to see such a post box nowadays, and their number has been decreasing nationwide since the 1980s. This article discusses how this post box was omnipresent and used in the 1960s and the 1970s by exploring mass media discourses and representations. Mothers expected this box to serve as a gatekeeper in protecting underage children from so-called, “harmful books,” which were brought into their homes by the fathers. The police and the national government also wanted this equipment to become a symbol of the “Campaign against Bad Books” movement, to activate and accelerate this atmosphere. The reality differed from their expectations; people often used it as a garbage can. As the number of harmful books did not gradually decrease, the actors of this movement and mass media became indifferent to this box. Unfortunately, some people began to steal its contents, and finally, people started to consider it useless in the early 1970s. In conclusion, the White Post Box was a physical media that worked to visualize the discourse of “harmful media/non-harmful media” through its own body, by being placed in the public space. In other words, this equipment further contributed to this latent function than to a manifest function: gatekeeping to protect children from “bad books.”