His face was as large as a house and he rippled gently

His face was as large as a house and he rippled gently in the summer heat. This Godzilla of Koizumis was a poster, the biggest I have seen in Japan, hanging from the upper floors of his party’s HQ. There was something naggingly familiar about it, and eventually I remembered where I had last seen such a vision: North Korea, where the world’s last Stalinist dictator, Kim Jong Il, is revered as a god. All hail, Koizumi, Great Leader of the Japanese Revolution! * * * Tonight, hallucinations allowing, I will go to the cinema to see Romance, a French film which caused a stir when it came out in Britain two years ago.It is a disturbing and erotic film and includes scenes of explicit unsimulated sex.

That kind of thing is a problem in Japan, which until fairly recently censored anything below the belt with the so-called “mosaic”: a shimmering shadow which obliterates anything hairy or erect without interfering with the rest of the screen Then in the mid-Nineties, the policy was liberalised. In certain circumstances, female nakedness could be tolerated.A new expression came into the Japanese language: heya nudo, or “hair nude”. Suddenly there were heya nudo magazines, heya nudo videos, and every other ambitious starlet was promoting a heya nudo photo book At the cinema, the irritating mosaic was seen less and less. But with Romance the Japanese censors have regressed.It is not surprising that they cut a scene featuring the glories of a male porno actor, nor that they obliterated a close-up shot of childbirth.

The alarming thing is that after five years the heya nudo seems to be coming to an end Much of the nudity in Romance has been obscured. When challenged, the censors explained that the hair in question was “wet” or “too bushy”. As the director, Catherine Breillat, said of the censors: “Are their wives ‘obscene’ if they give birth? If they don’t like where they came from, maybe they should go back.”. The worldwide web has been a boon for young people in China, where the enormous popularity of internet caf?testifies to a growing thirst for unfiltered information and contact with foreign peers. The worldwide web has been a boon for young people in China, where the enormous popularity of internet caf?testifies to a growing thirst for unfiltered information and contact with foreign peers.
Until now. After a three- month inspection of the country’s internet caf? Beijing has ordered 2,000 to close down and suspended another 6,000.The thousands which have been allowed to continue operating have been ordered to use “information purifiers” – devices which will allow the police to monitor which websites are being accessed from the caf? computers.Ostensibly, the anti-net drive is a response to a wave of parental complaints that their children are accessing too much pornography. But there are suspicions that the government has found an excuse to limit people’s access to material it considers politically subversive.Communist officials have been complaining of an onslaught of “online poison”, which they say is sapping the younger generation’s moral fibre.Young Chinese may be hitting porn sites as they surf the net.