Not Even Death is a Barrier to Censorship

It’s a classic moral question that you pose to your friends on a lazy Sunday afternoon; “A stranger hands you a black box with a red button. She says that every time you press the button someone you don’t know without any connection to you, or your friends or family will die and you will receive $1000. How many times do you press the button?” A popular Japanese comic “Death Note”, by Tsugumi Ohba, put an updated spin on this conundrum. It tells the tale of a bored high school student, Light Yagami, who finds the note book of a Death God which allows him to kill anyone Light wants simply by writing his or her name in the book and picturing the victim’s face. Light quickly gains an addiction to “pushing the button” and the story of corruption through power lasts for 12 volumes, not to mention an anime and two live action movies.

Today, numerous sources, including the Daily Yomiuri report that China has developed a sever aversion to this manga and has placed a ban on its publication. The controversy followed from a school in Shenyang, China which began confiscating school “Death Notes” that the students used to write down names of teachers they didn’t like. The note books the students had were commercially available versions of the manga Death Note, although it is unclear to me if the ban is on pirated Death Note materials, which I suspect is all that is available in China, or anything to do with the manga. According to Comi Press Hualing Publishing reports that it has legal permission to print “Death Note” in China, but the Japanese publisher, Shueisha, says they never gave permission and they have nothing to do with this incident.

Whatever the legal ramifications, as a teacher I would be more than a little alarmed if my name appeared on a student’s death list, even one modeled after a manga. At the same time I have read Death Note and found it very intelligently written and felt no personal inclination to go anonymously murder a bunch of people who had ticked me off that day. I feel that this is no more than juvenile experimentation that has given China yet another excuse to censor foreign content within its borders. The newspaper Shenyang Night Report called Death Note "poison, creating wicked hearts”, but have we not all, at least in our minds, made a list now and again of people we feel the world would be better off without? Have you ever been tempted to push the red button? I know the Chinese government has.