Abstract
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, Transmit No Evil, Receive No Evil
Not long after the first anti-AIDS public advertising campaign in Australia (the Grim Reaper series), I approached the Japanese embassy in Australia to ask if they could send me examples of how AIDS was being talked about publicly in Japan.
They sent me a copy of an English newspaper published in Japan which contained an article that announced AIDS was a problem of Western homosexuals. This seems to have been the general view of the issue, at the time.
Subsequently I found an article, in an Australian newspaper that told of the five monkeys. This, I thought, was the kind of account that I had been looking for. Here was the Japanese visual solution to a major social crisis. I used this image of five monkeys in my teaching with visual communication and communication students.
Then, over the years, I lost the photocopy and I could merely talk about this wonderful communication solution. There was no Internet, no Google, no way for me to readily find what I had lost.
From time-to-time I have searched the Internet, looking for this image and some account of its origins. Thanks to Google’s scanning of books, I have re-found the five monkeys. So I don’t lose this image again, I am posting it here.
“The shrine [the Kanamara Shrine in Kawasaki] began to note the spread of AIDS in Japan from 1987 onward, and commissioned a well-known artist to design a votive tablet that would draw attention to the importance of safe-sex practices. The votive tablet utilizes the popular “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” (mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru) three monkey motif found in Japanese folklore – but adds two more monkeys, the monkey that transmits no evil (sezaru) and the one that receives no evil (sasezaru).”
Ian Reader and George Joji Tanabe, Practically religious: worldly benefits and the common religion of Japan, University of Hawaii Press, 1998, p. 57.
Kairosis 