Battle Royale
Koushun Takami's Battle Royale is a story set in an alternate timeline in which the countries of Southeast Asia were amalgamated together into the Republic of Greater East Asia during the 1940's. The country is ruled by "The Dictator" who permits small freedoms to his people to keep order, but tightly restricts information and brutally crushes all dissent to maintain the peace. Furthermore, a "youth program" was setup with the supposed reason of helping recruit the very best fighters for the nations military, but whose actual purpose is to spread the message that you cannot trust anyone to help further suppress unified dissent. In spite of the strong lesson of the importance of communication in maintaining our basic freedoms, this novel was heavily challenged in Japan (and was delayed from being translated into English) because of it's intense scenes of violence committed by and against teenage youths.
Battle Royale is set in an alternate 1997 in which Japan has joined with a number of other countries to form the Republic of Greater East Asia, which is a totalitarian dictatorship which grants its citizenry small degrees of freedom in order to keep them pacified but keeps a very tight reign on the flow of information and cracks down brutally on any small sign of resistance. This includes the partitioning of the internet as well as secret police executing members of the general public and framing the incidents as accidents.
In order to really keep the public from forming any large scale insurgent groups against the government, The Program was implemented, ostensibly as part of some form of of poorly explained military research project. A High-school class in its entirety (which in Japan are kept together as consistent cohorts for most of their Primary Education) is abducted and removed to some remote location cleared for the purpose and forced to fight each other to the death, with the one victor as well as detailed accounts of cause of death reported at the conclusion of the Battle Royale on National (Nationalized, in fact) television. These details are provided such that the populace knows that all it takes is the right circumstances for them to turn against one another, and thus it is a bad idea to try working together on something risky and dangerous (say, a conspiracy against the government). The psychology behind this complicated reasoning was actually explored in great detail in the supplemental book, Battle Royale: Analysis of Extreme Psychology, which unfortunately has not yet been translated into English.
Despite being a great example of the importance of freedom of speech in overturning tyrannical environments and the great lengths a dictatorship will go to preserve itself, Battle Royale acquired a controversial reputation and was challenged multiple times in Japan due to its gory spectacles of violence. In fact, its publication was delayed for more than 3 years after the novel was originally rejected from the 1997 Japan Grand Prix Horror Novel competition due to this violent content. Despite these initial setbacks the novel became a National Best-Seller on its publication and shortly thereafter spawned a blockbuster movie which attracted a fresh round of criticism as well as official condemnation from the Diet (Japan's National Legislature). Its franchise continued to grow in Japan despite these early challenges and the Novel (and related works) started to come into the US in 2003, where it received critical acclaim and stayed relatively unchallenged until The Hunger Games came out, which drew criticism for similar reasons (and for its similarities to Battle Royale).
In closing, Battle Royle provides an excellent example of a regime which brutally oppresses its people, but use a complex combo of fear and pacification to keep them in check. It even has as one of its core themes that communication and cooperation are the keys to undoing such a situation. Despite this excellent argument for the necessity of the protection of freedom of speech (as is guaranteed in the Us by the 1st Amendment of our Constitution), most who would challenge the work can't see past its violent imagery to this message.
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