伊藤整

Itō Sei (1905-1969) was one of postwar Japan's most influential writers and literary critics, although he was also quite active in the prewar period.

Born in the Matsumae district of southern Hokkaido, Ito's given name at birth "Hiroshi," which is the much more common reading of the chinese character (整) he later came to pronounce as "Sei." This is still a source of some confusion, even among native Japanese speakers, but by all accounts Ito used "Sei" as the exclusive pronunciation of his given name from as early as the 1920s.

Although he was author of over 30 novels and an even larger body of literary criticism, and towered over Japanese literature in the '50s and '60s as a widely-read arbiter of taste, Ito is perhaps best remembered today for his starring role in a famous obscenity trial precipitated by his 1950 translation into Japanese of D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was deemed excessively lewd and fell afoul of the draconian if inconsistently applied obscenity laws prevailing in Japan at that time.