Legal Deposit Law and the U.S. Library Mission: A Legislative History of the National Diet Library Act of 1948

Abstract

This paper illustrates the reluctance of the Japanese government to accept the suggestions made by the U.S. Library Mission in 1948. It also shows that this reluctance was reflected in the revisions made to the National Diet Library Act of 1948 the following year.

My findings are as follows:

(1) The Japanese government introduced penalties for non-depositors in the Amendment Act of 1949. However, the press opposed this provision on the grounds that it might cause the kind of censorship that existed before 1945.

(2) While the Mission advised that the National Diet Library should acquire non-printed materials such as film (motion pictures), the Japanese government explicitly excluded it in the Amendment Act of 1949.

(3) In order to amend the oversights of (2), I proposed that films be addressed in future legislation. A part of this proposal was adopted in the Amendment Act of 2000, which included only videotapes sold in stores, not film shown in movie theaters.