‘불온문서’의 창출과 식민지 출판경찰

Abstract

The term "seditious documents" should be appreciated as a result of situation at the time which increasingly needed a hostile definition for dissident people against Japan Empire. It is impossible to overlook an intention of the Japan Empire -embodied in the hidden background of this term's formation-to control over all the anti-Japan desires being intensified both inside and outside. For instance, by becoming the only agent naming the term "seditious documents", the Japan Empire monopolized authority to distinguish between wrong and right values, and also legally social-ethically justified itself to be a rational body. And declaring specific person to be "seditious one", was aimed to characterize the imperial government as an agent to prevent social chaos due to him or her, or to restore the empire to its stability and order. In brief, so-called "seditious documents" were recognized as reading materials which tended towards destroying stability and order of the empire. The main role of the term "seditious documents" was focused on provisional voluntary pre-designating illegality of specific reading materials. To call specific publication "seditious documents" connoted urging, according to circumstances, even concluding that it should be taken into an administrative measure or juridical judgment. It was serious situation that the state judgment was influenced by comprehensive arbitrariness, but this phenomenon was kept up its expansive reproductions. The publication police system, concretely shaped since late 1920s, could be supposed to have accomplished ex post facto legalization for empire's suppression against publication by constantly defining(or re-defining) the meaning and concept of "seditiousness" "seditious documents".