A Japanese Mirror

by Ian Buruma

  At home kachan, literally Mummy, but often used to refer to the wife, is waiting for her husband. After he stumbles in, she takes his shoes and socks off, feeds him if necessary, listens to some drunken abuse and puts him to bed.

  Little seems to have changed since Susanoo screamed for his mother instead of commanding the ocean as he was told. Or indeed since his sister Amaterasu patiently put up with his offensive behaviour. It is often hard to avoid feeling that in male–female relationships in Japan every woman is a mother and every man a son.

  Kurt Singer, one of the wittiest foreign observers of the Japanese scene in the 1930s, said this about it:

  Seeing the Japanese mother in the street, serenely sauntering and humming, with her child attached to her back, one feels that it is through her that the stream of Japanese life runs and refreshes itself. The over-busy and excessively self-conscious males appear, compared to her, a mere protuberance, unattractive and lacking authenticity; useful or noisome instruments, hardly initiated in the mystery of being.1

  Being a Japanese child, especially a boy, and most of all an eldest son, is as close as one can get to being God, I am not just being flippant. According to an eminent American scholar:

  An analogy may be drawn between a child in a tantrum and a god in the Japanese pantheon who vents his anger by causing trouble for humans. Both the child and the god are expected to be placated and quietened down by some sort of pacifier. Indeed, the folk belief has it that a child is god’s gift or a god himself to be looked after.2

  Appeasement appears to be the Japanese mother’s favourite tactic. Bad behaviour, even rank destructiveness of what Singer calls ‘the divine tyrant’ is often met with compliant smiles and instant forgiveness. Girls are indulged less, for they are trained to be mothers, thus to be giving rather than taking. Appeasement seems to be currently fashionable in the West too. What is remarkable in Japan, however, is for how long it goes on. Even when a child grows up to, say, six years old, feeding him sweets, even just before meals, is still a common way of appeasing temper tantrums.

  The treatment of young children is in a way similar to that of drunks and foreigners. They are not held socially responsible for anything they do or say, for they know no shame. They must be pampered not punished. This wonderful state of grace is one good reason for foreigners to live in Japan and Japanese males to spend much of their non-working hours in a state of inebriation or even, if necessary, to fake it.

  Much in the traditional way of child-rearing seems to foster passive dependence. The child is rarely left alone, day or night, for it usually sleeps with the mother. When it goes out the child is not pushed ahead in a pram, to face the world alone, but is tightly bound to the mother’s back in a snug cocoon. When the mother bows, the child does too, so the social graces are acquired automatically while feeling the mother’s heartbeat. Thus emotional security tends to depend almost entirely on the physical presence of the mother.

  In the worst, but not in the least rare cases this leads to a clinging relationship stifling any individual independence. Children learn that a show of passive dependence is the best way to get favours as well as affection. There is a verb for this in Japanese: amaeru, translated in the dictionary as ‘to presume upon another’s love; to play the baby’. According to the psychiatrist Doi Takeo this is the main key to understanding the Japanese personality.3 It goes on in adult life too: juniors do it to seniors in companies, or any other group, women do it to men, men do it to their mothers, and sometimes wives, the Japanese government does it to stronger powers, such as the United States. An education fostering this type of passive dependency obviously does not encourage much personal initiative or sense of responsibility.

  An added complication is that the mother needs the child’s dependence to satisfy her own emotional needs. The child’s attempt to act contrary to the mother’s desire (and thus act independently) tends to provoke anxiety in the mother, since she may feel that she is no longer needed.4

  If anything, this phenomenon has grown worse in recent times. In this age of birth-control and nuclear families, wives, cooped up in small high-rise apartments with nothing but a television-set for company, easily become fixated on their children. They are often their only satisfaction, their only link to the outside world, in short, their only reason to live, particularly when their marriages are not based on romantic illusions.

  No wonder then that the separation from the mother at a later stage of development should be so traumatic. The mother tries to hang on as long as she possibly can. The child retains a lifelong nostalgia (mixed, no doubt, with more or less suppressed aggression) for that early childhood paradise. The yearning for that particular Arcadia is a very important aspect of Japanese culture, for it can be as collective as it is personal.

  The novelist Tanizaki Junichiro (1886–1965) is a good, though perhaps slightly eccentric example. He could never forget his mother, the beautiful Seki, ‘whose breasts I sucked until I was six’.5 This, incidentally, is not unusual in Japan, where weaning tends to take place rather late. In Days of my Youth (Yosho Jidai, 1957) he wrote about his mother that ‘not only did she have a beautiful face, but the skin of her thighs was so lovely, so white and so delicate that I experienced a thrill every time I looked at her, when we took a bath together’.

  Tanizaki’s mother-worship was like a cult. Apparently he was close to his grandfather who, rather unusually for a Japanese, belonged to the Greek Orthodox church. Tanizaki remembered how his grandfather would pray to the Virgin Mary and how he himself, as a little boy, would ‘gaze at Mary holding the infant Christ … and with a feeling of almost indescribable awe I would watch those merciful, soulful eyes, and I never wanted to leave her side’.6

  One of Tanizaki’s most elegiac mother stories is The Bridge of Dreams (Yume no Ukibashi), written in 1959. The hero Tadasu is haunted by his memories of two mothers: his real mother who died when he was five, and his stepmother. Often the two merge in his mind, and he cannot remember which was which. He does remember, though, that he slept with his first mother, ‘a small, delicately built woman, with plump little dumpling-like feet …’ (Tanizaki was a connoisseur of women’s feet.) He would suck his mother’s breasts and ‘the milk flowed out nicely. The mingled scents of her hair and milk hovered there in her bosom, around my face. As dark as it was, I could still dimly see her white breasts.’7

  Several years later, after his mother’s death, he sleeps with his nurse, still remembering ‘that sweet, dimly white dream world there in her warm bosom among the mingled scents of her hair and milk … Why had it disappeared? … was that what death meant?’ One is reminded again of Susanoo’s craving for his mother in the underworld. Is there a connection perhaps between mother-worship and the wish to die? Singer has remarked that ‘the readiness of the Japanese to die, casting away their lives or dying by their own hands, may echo this desire of their divine ancestor.’8

  He did write this at a time (the end of the Second World War) when many Japanese showed a greater readiness to leave this world than is usual today. But even allowing for that, I doubt whether the supposed Japanese death wish ought to be taken so literally. The longing described by Tanizaki is not for death so much as for that dimly white dreamworld, that supremely sensual state of unconsciousness. Many Zen-ish meditation techniques are geared to achieve exactly that: to dull, even deny the conscious mind, to sink into a state of ego-less sensuality like a warm, collective, Japanese bath.

  When the hero is about fourteen, his stepmother has a child, who is swiftly removed for adoption in some remote country area. Thus the illusion that the second mother is identical to the first is preserved. He soon goes back to his old habits too: ‘ … I leaned down and buried my face in her bosom, greedily sucking the milk that came gushing out. “Mama,” I murmured instinctively, in a spoiled, childish voice.’

  The Garden of Eden-like state of early childhood does, however, come to an end. Around the age of six children are handed over to the care
of schoolteachers and other outside agents of education. The chains of social conformity are progressively tightened from then on. The psychological importance of this cannot be overestimated. The spoilt little gods, living at the centre of their pampered universe, are required to become rigorous conformists. The shock is considerable, for, unlike most children in the West who, as an ideal at least, are taught that they are not the only ones in the world, the Japanese child is quite unprepared for this. Moreover, he will never really get used to the idea. Obsequious conformity and callous egotism can alternate in many a Japanese personality with disturbing and unpredictable ease.

  Life is especially hard on boys, for they are to be achievers. It is through their future success that families prosper. Only through the son’s achievements can the mother assert her power. This means that an obedient son must pass all the right exams to get into all the right schools to enter all the right companies, and yes, even to marry the right woman.

  While these obedient sons spend most of their time hunched over their books memorizing facts, their mothers engage in the most appalling one-upmanship with other mothers, using the sons as pawns in a continuous game of social snakes and ladders. These so-called kyoiku mamas (education mamas), driving their sons in the pursuit of exams, surpass many a Hollywood stage mother in sheer pushiness. Although this can be exploited – ‘If you don’t bring me more chocolate, I won’t work for my exam’ – kyoiku mamas are not universally popular figures.

  Already in 1894, when the phenomenon was not nearly as widespread, the novelist Higuchi Ichiyo wrote a vitriolic short story about just such a mother, ‘whose aspirations rose higher than Mount Fuji, though her station in life kept her back amongst the foothills’. She engineers a ‘good marriage’ for her son, ruthlessly pushing the girl he actually loves out of the way, creating misery for everybody but herself.9

  Like the Jewish mother, the Japanese mama is always suffering and sacrificing. This can be, and frequently is, turned against the child. Every failure could be felt as a betrayal of maternal sacrifice. No achievement could ever repay her devotion. Guilt is one of the most durable pillars of maternal power.10 Suicide notes left by children who failed their exams are the most eloquent proof of this. Most are pathetic apologies to the mothers they could not live up to.

  There is a special genre in the Japanese cinema dedicated to maternal suffering, the so-called hahamono, literally ‘mother things’, in these ostensible celebrations of the sacrificing, always sacrificing mother, feelings of guilt and hidden aggression are exploited with a ruthlessness that could only spring from complete innocence, or utter cynicism; but, as the latter is notably absent in Japan, one can only assume the former to be the case.

  A typical example of the genre and also one of the best made, is entitled ‘A Japanese Tragedy’ (‘Nippon no Higeki’, 1953), an apt title for more reasons than one. The star playing the mother is Mochizuki Yuko, a specialist in ‘mother things’ and thus, before her death a few years ago, affectionately known as Nippon no haha, mother of Japan. She exploited this image quite effectively in a political career, after retiring from the film world. The story is set just after the war, when Japan was destroyed and everybody had to scrounge for the next meal. Mochizuki Yuko is a poor war widow, making every possible sacrifice for her son and daughter. And how she suffers! She is thrown out of her husband’s house by her brother-in-law and she slides lower and lower down the scales of poverty until finally she has to suffer nightly humiliations as a barmaid in a vulgar seaside resort. For the children she will do anything.

  But are they grateful? Of course not. They despise her, The daughter runs off with a married schoolteacher and the son manages to get himself adopted by a wealthy doctor in Tokyo. In an excrutiatingly sad scene near the end of the film, he tells his mother not to come round any more, as he is no longer officially her son. The poor, sacrificing mother of Japan has no choice but to do what poor, sacrificing mothers always do in these cases: she jumps in front of the nearest oncoming train. There, that will show them. This is followed by a loud rustle of handkerchiefs in the auditorium: these entertainments used to be classified by the distributors on the posters as two or three handkerchief films, depending on the number of expected tears to be mopped away.

  In another ‘mother thing’, simply entitled ‘Mother’ (‘Haha’), from the same period, a poor sacrificing mother is discarded by her callous children after a lifetime of devoted duty. With no place to go and no one to turn to, she is compelled to eke out a living by doing menial work in factories and hospitals. In the end she is rescued by her one faithful son, a fisherman, who had not realized what had happened in his absence. He curses his brothers and sisters for what they did. But the ever-forgiving mother just smiles beatifically and says, ‘Please don’t say that, my dear. To me you’re all equally sweet.’

  This is what that ‘sweet, dimly white dream world’ of the mother’s bosom is ultimately all about. Everyone is the same. All are equally sweet. Individual differences are wiped out, just as they are, ideally, in the kind of womb-like group life the majority of Japanese feel most comfortable leading. And if they don’t actually lead it, they dream about it.

  Seeing heroes and heroines suffer, one is often told, makes Japanese audiences feel anshin, literally ‘peaceful in their hearts’. Not just Japanese, but people everywhere find it wonderfully reassuring to see that other people’s problems, even in fantasy, are worse than their own. But Japanese audiences, especially enthusiasts of ‘mother things’, will not even tolerate a happy ending. Mother is a kind of scapegoat, for nobody’s fate could possibly be worse than hers.

  This too has something to do with traditional child-rearing techniques. It has been pointed out that small boys are allowed to express anger and frustration by using their mothers as punching bags, pummelling their breasts and tearing at their hair.11 Desperate for some response, they find no resistance, like hitting a trampoline, which only increases the aggravation. Japanese mothers rarely punish directly or rationally: how could they, lacking a rational system themselves?

  Education in the West is still influenced by a religious system of abstract moral values as well as reason, transcending – or being supposed to – the arbitrary vagueness of human relationships. This is still largely true even of people who have consciously rejected organized religion. The need for a moral and rational ideology is part of our culture, for better or for worse. In Japan people attach far more importance to human feelings and the hierarchy of relationships than to reason or any universal moral system. There is no God, outside or above society, watching us all. Instead there is a complex system of etiquette, rules of behaviour to fit specific social situations. Which is why many Japanese put in a foreign and thus unpredictable environment either panic, or dispense with rules altogether. Society itself is God: we are constantly watched by other people. Hell, as Sartre said, really is the others, although to many Japanese it seems more like Heaven.

  Because feelings are more important than logic or reason, the laws of the Japanese home are as vague and as open to emotional manipulation as the laws of the country itself. This is exactly what the Japanese mother does: manipulate with her emotions. Bad behaviour does not result in a quick slap or a powerful telling-off, but in a sulking mother withholding her affection, retreating into her cave like the Sun Goddess, after appeasement, bribery and begging have failed. ‘Okachan wa kirai yo’, ‘mother doesn’t love you any more’, is the often used threat. The other one is isolation: ‘We’ll send you away’ or ‘I don’t want to see you again’. Because most children become addicted to maternal affection during those blissful early years, this method usually works perfectly.

  So what happens in effect is that the mother sets herself up as a sacrificing scapegoat in order to make the child feel guilty, and when this does not work, threatens to withhold her affection. It is around these two themes that most ‘mother things’ revolve. We have already seen an example of the first: the audience feels guilty f
or the children’s callous behaviour and produces the handkerchiefs when mama throws herself in front of a train.

  An example of the second theme is a popular play called ‘Mother Behind My Eyes’ (‘Mabuta no Haha’); this is a common expression for a long-lost mother: mother in the mind’s eye, so to speak. ‘Mother Behind My Eyes’ used to be a stock favourite of travelling theatre troupes performing at country fairs and local variety halls. The first film version was made in 1931.

  The story is about a young gambler called Chutaro and his lonely quest for his long-lost mother. They were separated during one of the epidemics that plagued Edo in the nineteenth century. Leading the hard life of a criminal outcast, he spends twenty years saving enough money to help his mother through her old age, should he ever find her again.

  And as one would expect, after many adventures involving the murder of at least a dozen men – Chutaro is by then a practised swordsman – he does indeed hear where she is. It appears that after hard times working as a geisha, she now runs a prosperous shop in Edo. She has turned over a new leaf, as they say, and she want nothing and nobody to disturb her new prosperity. At this rather ill-timed point Chutaro, the gambler son, walks into her shop, shaking with emotion. He blurts out who he is, expecting a tearful welcome. Mother goes pale at first, then pulls herself together and refuses to recognize him. Now would he stop being a nuisance and get out of her shop. The hero breaks down, choking with grief.

  Mother gets more and more agitated, treating her son like a blackmailer out for her money. Chutaro explodes in a peculiar staccato laugh, common with Japanese heroes in the grip of hysteria. He throws his savings down in front of her, apologizes for causing any inconvenience and walks out. As he leaves the room, very cool now, his mother, barely able to contain her emotions (she is ‘crying inside’ as the Japanese saying goes), gets up as if to stop him; then she stumbles and upsets the teapot; she hesitates a moment – will her mother’s heart win after all? – but no, she turns and picks up the pot, still preferring order to disruption: even cheap genre films abound in this kind of quite sophisticated symbolism. Chutaro has gone. But his sister persuades his mother to go after him and by the time they catch up Chutaro has killed another dozen men: ‘If none of you have parents, don’t expect any mercy from me.’ His mother and sister scream his name. But he hides behind a tree and speaks the famous lines that never fail to produce the handkerchiefs: ‘How could my sister live with a no-good brother like me? I’d better not look at them. Whenever I want to see mother, I’ll just shut my eyes, and there she’ll be, right behind my eyelids.’