by Ian Buruma
What is remarkable about this story is that Chutaro, despite obviously ‘crying inside’, never shows any resentment. On the contrary, knowing that his presence as a known gambler would damage his mother’s business and his sister’s chances of a good marriage, he makes his final exit. Turning against his mother would cause too much guilt. The real sacrifice, in this case, is his.
But sacrifices are never made quite for nothing. Mother’s business might prosper, but she’ll still suffer. Chutaro has made his point, like a slighted child vowing to kill itself to spite Mummy and Daddy. This kind of one-upmanship in guilt is very common in Japanese entertainment, although it is never presented in those terms of course: demonstrative suffering is shown as a sign of sincerity or earnest intentions. Both mothers and children indulge in it.
Emotional blackmail is of course not unknown in other cultures – the most famous example, celebrated and lamented in almost equal measure, being the Jewish mama. But in Japan people are especially defenceless against it, for there is nothing to fall back on, no stick to fight it with; not reason, certainly, for it is immune to that, and not humour either – there are no Japanese Woody Allens making fun of the Japanese mama. In the words of the psychiatrist Kawai Hayao: ‘One can imagine how hard it is for a people who have never known a patriarchal religion to stand up and fight against the Great Mother.’12
Humour, especially the ironical kind, needs a certain distance, and this the clinging mother–child relationship clearly prevents. The immunity to reason is perhaps more serious. One could possibly argue that social etiquette is itself a rational system, resistant to emotional manipulation. But even the social rules are not really fixed by any laws. They are to a large extent governed by the gut feeling of what is appropriate in a certain situation.
The word gut, hara, is used in many cases where one would normally assume that the brain was involved rather than the stomach. Haragei, for example, literally ‘the art of the gut’, is the art of guessing other people’s motives, of figuring out what is in another person’s mind. Businessmen and politicians have to be good at this.
But far from being resented, all this emotional judo is considered by the Japanese to be a sign of warmth and tenderness, of a uniquely Japanese sensitivity. Yasashii (gentle, tender, soft) is how the Japanese describe both their mothers and themselves. This is contrasted with Western ways which are cold, blunt, even brutal to the Japanese mind. Reason, to many Japanese, is the exact opposite of sensitivity.
The golden age of the gentle, tender and soft ‘mother things’ in the cinema was the 1950s, an age when film, not television, was still the main family entertainment. Both ‘Mother’ and ‘A Japanese Tragedy’, as well as several versions of ‘Mother Behind My Eyes’ were made then. But the same stereotypes are now alive and well on television in so-called home-dramas. These are broadcast in serial form, usually in the morning, in between commercials for baby powder and washing detergents.
The typical home-drama is family orientated, traditional in outlook and often mawkishly folksy, usually set in romantic rusticity or cosy, warm-hearted urban quarters. To make it even more safely unreal, the action often takes place in the past when things were simpler and more traditional; long enough ago to seem faintly exotic, but not so long as to seem remote: the 1920s are ideal, though the immediate post-war period is popular too: there was an abundance of suffering war widows then.
It is usual for home-drama heroines to lose their husbands somewhere around the second or third episode. A common cause for this quick despatch is the Second World War. The men are seen off at the station with much tearful flag-waving and are never seen again. This serves a double purpose. It confirms the popular myth of the Japanese as the prime victims of the war, and the heroine can now devote herself fully to her brood. The critic Ishiko Junzo has pointed out that ‘a fundamental principle of the Japanese mother-film is that the mother must sacrifice her womanhood; she can’t fall in love, or get married again. She must live for her children and then die.’13
Few of these mothers become doctors or bank-managers: I, at least, have never seen one on television. The typical working widow mother runs a little restaurant, manages a public bath or a pub. These kinds of jobs offer plenty of scope for her maternal instincts: motherhood goes public, so to speak. She becomes everybody’s favourite mama. Luxury and wealth, though common in home-dramas of another sort, are not usually part of the ‘mother thing’ fantasy: after all, the mother must suffer.
One of the most popular home-drama series, first shown on television in 1977, is called ‘A Wandering Life’ (‘Sasurai no Tabi’): as we shall see later, wandering is part of the Japanese hero’s condition. The heroine of this particular story is Ryoko, a seamstress in a humble dress-shop. She marries above her station into the wealthy Otani family, where her presence is much resented by her mother-in-law. The mother and son relationship being what it is in Japan, one can imagine the kind of jealousy unleashed by the presence of another woman. This is particularly dramatic when all parties live under the same roof, less common these days, but a convention still rigidly adhered to in home-dramas.
When the bullying by the jealous mother-in-law becomes too insufferable Ryoko is compelled to leave the house, leaving her husband behind. Like most husbands in these entertainments, he is a typical mother’s boy, who does not lift a finger to protect his wife from maternal harrassment. What is more he gets a divorce and marries a girl personally picked by his mother.
Ryoko’s ensuing wandering life is very much a three-handkerchief affair and the only thing to keep her going is the memory of her beloved son, Minoru. For him she can bear any hardship and humiliation. Her ex-husband, as one can imagine, plays little or no part in her emotional life. This makes the following twist in her unlucky fate interesting. He is running for parliament and Ryoko falls into the hands of a blackmailer threatening to ruin her ex-husband’s career by exposing her unsavoury life. (Unlikely as it seems, this kind of thing does work in Japan.) Ryoko murders the man and is promptly arrested. Why did she do it? Surely not for the sake of her ex-husband. She gives the answer herself in a long emotional speech on how she could not let the villain destroy the image of the pure, beautiful mother behind her son Minoru’s eyelids. Thus the truth about her wretched life could not be let out.
In court one of those wonderful coincidences that never cease to delight Japanese audiences occurs: her state-appointed defender is none other than her grown-up son Minoru! He hears the truth and grabs his mother’s hands in a harrowing close-up, the camera panning from hands to tearful face, and then utters the final climactic words of the series: ‘Okasan!’, ‘Mother!’
It is interesting to note the ratings of this programme. In the beginning when the heroine has just got married and her problems are still purely domestic, the ratings ran from 12 to 15 per cent, high enough. But when her life really goes to pieces and her wandering life begins, the ratings shot up to 19 per cent.14 One really has to suffer to be popular in Japan.
This does not necessarily mean that most viewers are sufferers too, identifying with the ill-fated heroine. On the contrary, as one housewife said: T find it soothing (anshin) to watch this series, precisely because the heroine is so different from myself. If it were about somebody just like me, leading a peaceful, uneventful life, I probably wouldn’t be watching.’15
The story is actually based on an English novel, written in 1910, called Madame X, A Story of Mother Love. The difference is considerable and highly revealing. In the original blue-eyed version, the wife gets tired of her husband who thinks of nothing but his career. She then leaves him voluntarily to lead her dissolute life. Later, realizing the wickedness of her ways, she begs him to take her back. He refuses, but after more time passes regrets his cold-heartedness. By then it is too late, however: she can no longer be found and both their lives are ruined.
The heroine of this Edwardian melodrama has a strong will of her own. Ryoko, on the other hand, is a passive victim of f
ate, which is exactly what makes her a typical Japanese heroine. Also, the fact that her husband thinks of nothing but his work, in Japan, would hardly be a reason for leaving him. On the contrary, it would be regarded as a source of stability, something to be encouraged, if not always in real life, certainly in a television drama.
Thus, in the Japanese serial, a wicked mother-in-law had to be invented. And the husband actually marrying another woman selected by his mother would have been hard to imagine even in Edwardian England. The mother-in-law, the passive, suffering heroine, the mother-hen-pecked husband, all are Japanese additions which could have been lifted straight out of a seventeenth-century Kabuki play.
This drama brings to mind another story entitled Taki no Shiraito, the Water-Magician, made into a film in 1933 by Mizoguchi Kenji. The story of Taki the water-magician was written by Izumi Kyoka around the turn of the century. For the first time in Japanese history it became possible in those days for sons of reasonably but not terribly-humble families drastically to improve their social positions by higher education. This still meant a drag on the family finances, however, so for the son to succeed, the rest of the family, especially the mothers and sisters, for whom there was little money left, had to make sacrifices.16
Moreover, climbing the social tree would frequently take these fortunate sons into a completely different world from the one they came from. Embarrassment about their rustic origins, which they would often wish to hide, could easily lead to just the kind of tragedies cinema-goers have delighted in crying about ever since. ‘Taki no Shiraito, the Water-Magician’ must be seen against this background.
After one of her performances of water-tricks in a provincial variety hall, Taki meets and falls in love with a penniless but ambitious young man. His dream is to study law at the Imperial University (now Tokyo University) which was then, and still is to a certain extent, a passport to success. Taki then provides all her earnings to fulfil his dream. Like the mothers of Japan she sacrifices everything for her man. And with such a sponsor, how could he fail?
He doesn’t. But his life in the capital is so exciting that he gradually loses touch with his benefactress. This is painful enough, but because of her debts on account of him she gets into serious trouble with a brutal usurer, who treats her with the kind of sadism usually reserved for villains on the Kabuki stage. After much silent suffering, making her seem ever more heroic, things go too far and she kills him.
She is duly arrested and put up for trial. Once again coincidence proves to be without limits: her judge is none other than the man she supported for so long. His shock is as great as hers, for by now he had completely forgotten about her. Yet she feels no resentment at all. She proudly gazes up at the great man as he pronounces her death sentence in a trembling voice. (He is in fact redeemed by doing the only right thing: he commits suicide.)
Clearly Taki is more mother than lover. This is indeed very common in Japanese drama, starting with the romantic Kabuki plays in which the male lovers are often effeminate and helpless weaklings. In a sense Japanese love stories are all variations of the haha mono. The cult of the mama transcends its narrow genre to spill over into romantic melodrama. It has its roots – like Tanizaki’s worship of the Virgin Mary – in the religious tradition. The critic Sato Tadao sees in Mizoguchi’s women ‘the image of the Sun Goddess, which, as a form of woman worship has influenced Japanese thought since ancient times’.17
The wife of General Nogi, who bravely committed suicide with her husband out of loyalty to the Meiji emperor on the occasion of his death in 1912, wrote that the perfect Japanese wife ought to be her husband’s ‘guardian deity’. In adversity it is her duty to protect him, not the other way round.18
A magazine called Young Lady featured an article (January 1982) on ‘how to make ourselves beautiful’. How, in other words, to attract men. An American or European magazine would then go on to tell the reader how to be sexually desirable, no doubt suggesting various puffs, creams and sprays. Not so with Young Lady, ‘The most attractive women’, it informs us, ‘are women full of maternal love. Women without maternal love are the types men never want to marry … One has to look at men through the eyes of a mother.’
All Mizoguchi Kenji’s films seem to support this notion. Only through the sacrifice of Taki could the young man become a successful judge. A young actor in ‘The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum’ (‘Zangiku Monogatari’, 1939) owes his career to the tireless devotion of the family maid, O-Toku. She dedicates her life to her lover’s success. But his theatrical family will allow him to continue his career only if he gives up seeing the maid. As one would expect, he complies, and while the new star is born, O-Toku dies.
The son in ‘Sansho the Bailiff’ (‘Sansho Dayu’, 1954) manages to escape from a cruel and frightful slave-camp because his sister covers up for him, paying for his freedom with her own life. All the male characters in Mizoguchi’s last film, ‘Street of Shame’ (‘Akasenchitai’, 1956) are kept in various ways by their women who work in a sordid brothel. This image is incidentally quite common in Kabuki plays, where wives are wont to show their devotion by selling themselves to ‘the narrow and willowy streets’ of shame.
Mizoguchi is often called a ‘feminisuto’ in Japan. As with all Japanese-English terms, one cannot be too careful with this. Mizoguchi was never a fighter for women’s rights. There is no evidence that he seriously considered possible, or even thought desirable, a real change in the state of affairs he so movingly depicted in his films. It would be more accurate, as the American film critic Audie Bock pointed out, to define a feminisuto as a worshipper of women.19 This Mizoguchi undoubtedly was.
Like Tanizaki, Mizoguchi used Buddhist as well as Christian symbols for his worship. The last scene of ‘Women of the Night’ (‘Yoru no Onnatachi’, 1948) for instance. The film has a typical Mizoguchi heroine: a ruined war widow. Rejected by her family and cheated by her friends, she ends up, like so many women just after the war, on the streets as a pan-pan, a whore specializing in members of the American occupation forces. Towards the end of the film she finds her sister involved in a territorial brawl with another gang of prostitutes. Bitten, slapped and kicked from all sides, the sisters embrace, screaming in misery. Slowly the camera pans up to reveal a faded image on a broken wall of the Madonna and child.
This is not cinematically the happiest of Mizoguchi’s images perhaps. But it is a good illustration of the way in which foreign images are borrowed quite unselfconsciously to express Japanese feelings. Logically speaking Mizoguchi could have borrowed a more appropriate idol from the exotic West: Jesus Christ. In their willingness to bear their men’s crosses, Mizoguchi’s heroines are more like Christ than his virginal mother. Men, like sinners in Christian thought, are never truly worthy of this sacrifice. The women are abused, rejected, betrayed and degraded, but still they will suffer for their men, and ultimately forgive them, like Taki gazing up at her judge.
In this they are also like Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, who plays such a large part in Tanizaki’s imagery, as indeed in the work of many male Japanese authors.20 The embrace of the merciful goddess is the salvation of men. In this light, choosing the Madonna instead of Christ is wholly understandable. Woman’s remission, like God’s in the confessional, absolves men from their sins. Sin, in this context, is of course not sin against some holy ghost, but sin against the Mother whose sacrifice and devotion no son could ever hope to repay.
Mizoguchi’s favourite actress, appearing in most of his later films, was Tanaka Kinuyo. It is said that Mizoguchi was in love with this petite, plump, classically beautiful woman: round face, small, cherry-like mouth, narrow eyes. Tanaka herself, no doubt rightly, maintained it was her image he loved rather than herself.
Let us compare her to more modern goddesses created by a contemporary worshipper of women, Imamura Shohei. The women in his films, which, as Japanese critics never fail to point out, veritably reek of mud, are just as motherly as Mizoguchi’s heroines. Physi
cally, they are even more so. His ideal woman, according to his own description, is ‘of medium height and weight, light colouring, and smooth skin. The face of a woman who loves men. Maternal. A lukewarm feeling. Good genitals. Juicy.’21 Moreover, says Imamura, she binds herself to men who are weaker than she is.22
Imamura has little time for Mizoguchi’s women. He doesn’t believe those self-sacrificing heroines really exist. But he is no fighter for female rights either, even though he, too, is often called a feminisuto. Not only are his heroines stronger than men, as indeed they are in Mizoguchi’s films, but they beat them at their own game. And their power rests to a very large extent in the male addiction to mothers.
In ‘Intentions of Murder’ (‘Akai Satsui’, 1964), for example, we see how a weak whiner of a husband curls up in bed with his wife, burying his head in her voluminous breasts, murmuring the by now familiar words: ‘ ’kachan’, ‘Mummy’. In ‘The Pornographers’ (‘Jinrui Gakku Nyumon’, 1966), the eldest son, a healthy teenager, still sleeps with his mother. And her lover finds he is impotent with anyone but her, so that when ‘ ’kachan’ dies, he has to make do with a plastic doll. And as a last piece of maternal symbolism, in the final shot of the film, he drifts off in his boat into the sea to disappear forever. (This is a parody by the author, Nosaka Akiyuki, of the last chapter of a seventeenth-century masterpiece by Ihara Saikaku, in which the lecherous hero, after a life of complete dissipation, drifts off in his boat in search of The Island of Women.)