Japan’s top court ruled on Tuesday that pictures by late United States photographer Robert Mapplethorpe are not obscene, putting an end to years of legal fighting.
Reversing a lower court ruling, the Supreme Court ordered customs to lift a ban on bringing a photography book, entitled simply Robert Mapplethorpe, into Japan from the United States.
In the 2003 ruling, the Tokyo High Court ruled that the book, which included images of male genitals, went ”against good sexual morality”.
But Kohei Nasu, the presiding judge, said at the Supreme Court: ”The books and pictures do not fall into the category that would disturb the public,” as quoted by Jiji Press.
Pornography is widely available in Japan but laws ban the import of images that graphically portray genitalia. Japanese versions of foreign films generally pixelate the genitals.
In 1999, customs at Tokyo’s Narita Airport refused to allow a Japanese publisher and film distributor to bring the Mapplethorpe book into the country for personal pleasure, saying 20 of the 260 pictures included were obscene.
But the publisher said the pictures should be regarded as art.
The Supreme Court had ruled in 1999 in a separate case that a book of Mapplethorpe’s pictures were obscene. – AFP