▼ Historically, the banning of literature gives insight to how controlling a government is over their people. The data set obtained contains a count of literature works banned by the Japanese government between 1926 and 1944. The literature was published by stand alone authors, in newspapers and magazines, and by foreign publishers that were translated. The material was banned for reasons due to two major legal categories: fūzoku (morals, obscenity, or sex) and annei (order, sedition, or politics). The count of the literature banned for each category was analyzed to assess the trends in the banning. The Tukey 3RSSH, twice smoothing process was applied, but was not effective. The data was then transformed to satisfy the constant variance assumption, and then loess estimates were used to smooth the transformed data to analyze the overall banning trends. Since there were months where no bannings occurred, they were dropped from the data. The loess estimates were applied again to assess the banning trends when banning was occurring. Lastly, the smoothed data was matched with eight historical dates in Japanese history to determine if any banning trend could be explained by the dates. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident was usually followed by a peak in literature bannings, and Pearl Harbor was usually followed by the final decrease in the literature bannings. Advisors/Committee Members: Albert, Jim.