A Japanese Mirror

by Ian Buruma

  Perhaps the most typical and I think the best Imamura film is ‘Insect Woman’ (‘Nippon Konchuki’, 1963). The beginning is set in Imamura’s favourite territory, the cold, muddy and backward north-east of Japan, where superstition and age-old customs still survive. Tome, the heroine, played by Hidari Sachiko, is born into a family of impoverished peasants who discard her as one too many mouths to feed. She is forced to fend for herself in the big city, like so many girls from the country. We are shown with Imamura’s customary sense of irony, how this superstitious, uneducated, but extremely vital and tough peasant woman copes with the modern world. She drifts like an insect through bars, brothels and new religious cults, using men as she goes along.

  Somehow she survives, writing her bad poems and praying to her local northern deities. But ultimately she is defeated by her own daughter, who, with the same utter lack of scruples as her mother, first seduces her mother’s patron and then takes off with his money. Tome and her daughter bend all the social rules when and where it suits them. They are perhaps aided in this by the fact that, as we have noted before, there are no absolute moral rules in Japan. This was perceived quite accurately by Francis Ottiwell Adams, a nineteenth-century observer of the Japanese scene. In his History of Japan he wrote: ‘It seems to me that the Japanese woman is chaste, not from a religious point of view, but because she is ordered to do so by her parents. It is not with her a matter of principle, it is a matter of obedience. I should be glad if the contrary could be proved.’

  It cannot. This may have dismayed a nineteenth-century European, but it amuses Imamura, as it amused many authors of fiction during the Edo period, such as Ihara Saikaku. Imamura sees his heroines as symbols of Japanese life: the native, vital, one is almost tempted to say, innocent life still to be found in the rural areas of Japan. Not Kannon or the Madonna are Imamura’s symbols, but the shamaness, the muddy goddess of the village. He uses this image over and over again, even in a documentary film (‘A Man Vanishes’, ‘Ningen Johatsu’, 1967). The hand-held cinema vérité scenes are punctuated by shots of old country women speaking to the spirits in thick, rustic accents, like the witches in ‘Macbeth’.

  Another film, ‘Tales From a Southern Island’ (‘Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubo’, 1968) shot on a tiny island in the Pacific, ends with a shamaness dancing on the tracks of a tourist train. We see her, but the camera-clicking tourists in their rainbow-coloured Bermuda shorts no longer can, blinded as they are by the modern world.

  All Imamura’s woman are shamanesses of a sort, in touch with the dark mysteries of nature, as links with the earliest gods. It throws an interesting light on modern Japanese history that Tanizaki and Mizoguchi, both born at the end of the last century preferred to use Christian as well as Buddhist images for their idols, while Imamura and other modern artists go back to the oldest native traditions. But then the older generations were not quite so obsessed with the search for ‘Japaneseness’; they were more secure in their cultural identity than the post-war writers and directors who have literally had to pick up the pieces of national defeat. The work of Imamura, Shinoda, Shindo, and many others, can be seen as a search for Japanese roots, to use a fashionable word. Imamura especially has often been likened to an anthropologist, digging for meaning under the mud. When Japanese get obsessed with their native identity they invariably turn to Shinto and that automatically leads them to the matriarchal goddesses that are its backbone.

  3

  Holy Matrimony

  After reaching a certain age, twenty-five, say, the first question one is asked by strangers on a train is whether one is married. If the answer is yes, the next question is how many children one has. For women the age is lower, and to answer both questions in the negative is to brand oneself as someone out of the ordinary. As for unmarried mothers, they are not only extraordinary, but at best to be pitied, at worst to be severely frowned upon. Japan is in many respects a profoundly traditional society. Marriage is one of those respects.

  Marriage is the passport to respectability in most parts of the world, but the pressure is particularly relentless in Japan. To be fully regarded as a woman one has to be a married mother – no matter whether the husband is dead or alive – for only then can one be called ichininmae, a favourite expression meaning both ‘adult’ and ‘respectable’. The popular media – newspapers, comics, films, magazines, television – help to drive this message home.

  Take, for example, the way unmarried career women are depicted in television dramas. This is in itself a new development, incidentally, for unmarried women in fiction, pictorial or literary, used to be almost exclusively prostitutes, geisha, bar ladies and other members of the ‘floating world’ of nocturnal entertainment. Women now constitute about 40 per cent of the Japanese workforce.1 Fifty-two per cent of all office workers are women, and 37.7 per cent of all sales personnel. The average wage for women, however, is only 59.4 per cent of the wages taken home by men and just 6.7 per cent of the women hold managerial posts. Work for women usually means looking charming, answering telephone calls politely and brewing the green tea that fuels the Japanese workforce. Most women, moreover, work before they get married or after their children have grown up, or at least gone to school.

  The ‘O.L.s’ (office ladies) in television soap operas are different. They are generally single and lead superficially glamorous lives which few of the viewers could possibly afford to emulate. What one sees is the good life as dreamed by millions of Cosmopolitan readers. The heroines are fashion designers or well-paid secretaries at smart advertising agencies full of dashing young executives ripe for the plucking.

  Okura Junko, heroine of The Dazzling Desert’ (‘Hanayaka na Koya’) is of this kind. She is single, pretty, in her thirties and a successful designer. Everything, in short, that a modern girl would want to be. And, to be sure, according to government statistics an increasing number of girls want to remain single working women if they have not yet found Mr Right by the time they reach their late twenties.2 But is Junko happy? No, and this is the point, she is miserable. Her life, as the title of the series implies, may be dazzling, but it is also a desert. At one point she laments that ‘when a woman becomes like me, it’s the end of everything’. This is of course a reassuring thought for the many housewives watching this kind of programme.

  Marriage is essential to a woman’s happiness. Love, on the other hand, seems less so. In the morality of the samurai (warrior) class in traditional Japan romance and matrimony were two completely separate things; personal feelings were irrelevant and sometimes even antagonistic to the interests of the clan. It was different among the vast peasant population in the countryside: they often did marry for love.3 But modern Japan has been strongly influenced by the samurai mentality, and love, though increasingly desirable, is not yet deemed essential for a marriage to succeed.

  One of the most haunting scenes of a traditional marriage comes into a film directed by Ozu Yasujiro. It is called ‘Late Spring’ (‘Banshun’). The grown-up daughter insists on living with her widowed father. But he patiently explains that ‘marriage is a necessary step in the course of a human life’. In the end she is half tricked into marrying somebody she has hardly ever met. We see her being tightly harnessed in her ceremonial kimono. There is no trace of joy in her face; all emotions are hidden under a mask of chalk-white make-up. The last shot of the film is of her father, all alone now, sitting in his chair, peeling a bitter-sweet fruit. Only a slight twitch in his throat gives his loneliness away. Such is life, Ozu implies, and there is great beauty in the melancholy inevitability of its passing.

  This film was made in 1949 and Ozu, despite his great cinematic reputation, is considered to be very old-fashioned now. Things have changed, one is told. And so they have … but only to a certain extent. It is true that love marriages (renai kekkon) have become much more common and the effects of ‘samuraization’4 are slowly wearing off. Television and cinema heroines who insist on their right to pick their own mates are even shown with
a certain amount of approval. Even so, up to 50 per cent of all marriages in Japan are still arranged by parents and go-betweens (partly, perhaps, because boy-meets-girl situations are hard to come by in a society where the sexes still keep very much to themselves in work and play). One has the right, of course, to turn prospective partners down, but especially in conservative families there is a limit to this. Many girls, and indeed boys, still settle for the person their parents think most suitable. ‘I don’t dislike him’ (or her), is enough for a start.

  A fascinating insight into contemporary attitudes to marriage is offered by those great architectural sugar cakes, known as wedding ceremony palaces. These function as ceremonial conveyor belts rushing happy families from the initial ritual right through to the final banquet. So many people are fed through these institutions in the course of one day that the tables have to be cleared while the toasts are still being proposed. The only advantage of this unseemly haste is that long-winded speakers are sometimes hurried a little by the sight of another family nervously waiting to get in at the door.

  Advertisements for these places are to be seen everywhere: in subway trains, buses, magazines, on television. Since they deal with a natural event in everybody’s life, it seems perfectly logical that one would often find them right next to another advertisement recommending a ‘nice, quiet cemetery’.

  The texts for these commercials are remarkable. I remember one in particular, written in bold characters under a large photograph of a dejected-looking boy dressed in a tight suit: ‘Get married! The final act of filial piety’. One marries to please one’s parents, to fulfil one’s social obligations.

  I do not wish to be too cynical about this. There is no reason to believe that traditionally arranged marriages, unburdened by romantic expectations, are any less likely to succeed than the romantic Western kind, where the wife has to be a Madonna and a whore as well. There are good reasons to assume that quite the opposite might be true. The divorce rate is certainly lower in Japan: about 1 per cent, compared to around 4 per cent in the U.S.A. and 2.5 per cent in Britain.5

  This is not to say that romance is not pushed as an ideal at all. It is, especially in women’s magazines. Being ‘happee’ with one’s loved one, living in the lifelong glow of a ‘romanchiku moodo’ is perceived by many young girls as their goal in life. Unfortunately the contrast with reality in many cases could not be greater, for society is not yet geared to fulfil these dreams.

  This explains, perhaps, why most divorce cases are brought to court in recent years through the complaints of wives rather than of husbands.6 This is a dramatic change from pre-war Japan when husbands could still send their wives back home – often because of problems with possessive mothers – while wives had no such rights. And to be sent home meant disgrace to their families. Since 1948 husbands and wives are equals before the law and the economic clout of women in an industrial society has obviously increased. But old ways die hard. The idea that it is disgraceful for a woman to get divorced still appears strong, and is encouraged by the mass media-on the widely watched ‘real life’ programmes on television, for example.

  These melancholy shows are broadcast in the mornings so that the maximum number of housewives can watch them. They feature ‘real people’ with ‘real problems’. Wives who have walked out of disastrous marriages are hauled in front of the cameras and confronted for our amusement with their irate husbands. These often hang on pathetically to a couple of howling children who are terrified of all the shouting and screaming under the glare of studio spotlights. ‘Look what you’re doing to them!’ roars the husband, pointing at the cowering kids; and he is vociferously backed by a panel of well-paid counsellors’, usually showbiz personalities or pop psychiatrists who spend more time on television than in their offices. To the general approval of these television sages, the woman is usually bullied into resuming her miserable existence in the home, sobbing convulsively in cruel close-up.

  Television, the most modern of the mass media, is also in many ways the most old-fashioned, precisely because it is so popular. Traditional values are both reassuring and unlikely to offend a large number of people. To be conservative shows good business sense. It must also be added here that the press, gutter and serious, very rarely attacks the basic values of the majority of people in Japan. It may attack the government from time to time, but it is nevertheless much less independent than the American or Western-European press. Far from subverting the basic assumptions upon which Japanese society is based, it sees itself rather as the Confucian guardian of the public status quo.

  There is a type of story called kanzen choaku, literally ‘reward the good, punish evil’. This would seem to contradict the idea that there is no such thing in Japanese thinking as absolute good and bad. Actually it does not. These moral tales are based upon mainly Confucian rules of conduct. They are usually set in the Edo period, when those rules were at their pinnacle, and the star is often a samurai dispensing a kind of inspired justice to all and sundry. Typically this justice has little to do with law books. Everything is dealt with, as they say in Japan, case by case. These wise samurai are almost obsolete in the cinema, but on television they live on in a remarkably pure form, as do so many relics from the past for the edification of the family.

  The perfect example is a series called ‘Chohichiro Tenka Gomen’. It is set in the eighteenth century and the hero is a wise samurai called Chohichiro. One typical instalment featured a woman who became a successful comb merchant in Edo. The snag is, she had to leave her husband and child behind in her village in order to succeed; and now she has succeeded she wants her child back. After a long and complicated search she finds her daughter, who either cannot or will not recognize her: the classic estranged parent-child situation.

  The mother is in despair, but just then Chohichiro, the samurai hero, steps in. The woman tells him her sad story: how her husband spent all their money on drink; how their daughter fell ill, and how she came to the capital to earn money to save the child. ‘Everything I did was for the child’, she cries. A good ‘mother thing’ heroine, one would think. But the earnest warrior in his supreme wisdom decides to give her a piece of his mind: ‘Either you behave like a good mother, or you will go to hell!’ (Heroes in these entertainments tend to speak in booming exclamation marks.)

  The story then goes on. It transpires that her chief clerk, an evil little man, wants to take over her business. With the help of a corrupt official and several other shady characters, he kidnaps his employer’s child. The woman is then forced to hand over the deeds of her business in exchange. Once this dirty deed is done, the villains decide to kill the mother and daughter, for, as the saying goes, they know too much. But before this can happen, in comes the hero once again, like a deus ex machina.

  What follows is a classic cliché of period dramas: the hero reveals his true identity as a relative of the Shogun. In a flamboyant Kabuki-like gesture he whips his kimono open to reveal his illustrious family crest. Immediately the villains fall to the ground, knocking their heads in the dust like grovelling dogs. This is feudal theatre at its best! The shining prince, however, shows no mercy. He makes them stand up and fight to their deaths, one by one. And with a deft flick here and a well-timed swipe there, heads roll all over the screen.

  This hour-long drama ends with a final homily from the hero to the mother: ‘I trust you’ll mend your ways and become a true mother from now on!’ She promises, deeply moved, and as if by some miracle the child then recognizes her mother for the first time. ‘Okasan!’ (‘Mother!’), she squeals, and rushes into her arms. Though we see the drunken father, he is never more than an insignificant figure shuffling in the background. Good motherhood has nothing whatsoever to do with him whether he is drunk or sober, good or bad.

  Of course television is but an imperfect mirror of society. Not every Japanese conforms to the strict Confucian morality advocated in this kind of drama. More and more women are filling other roles besides motherhood. But eve
n if the national mass media do not reflect what is real, they do offer a picture of what is proper, just as Hollywood did until recently in America.

  This does not stop with fiction. Real people in the camera eye are made to conform publicly to moral stereotypes in a way that comes very close to Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. This is especially true of those television super-stars manufactured to appeal to the very young: the talentos, a Japanese-English term meaning a performer without one specific talent, like an instant Jack-of-all-arts with a pretty face. Talentos sing and dance in variety shows, act in teenage movies, smile a great deal, and do as they are told by an army of producers, advertisers and various assorted middlemen.

  Talentos are products of advertising companies using the most sophisticated marketing techniques. They rarely last long, but while they are around, their ubiquitous and inescapable presence makes them a major social influence. Everything they say or do is immediately transmitted to millions of fans through gossip magazines and television shows. What they say is carefully programmed by the people who created them. It never veers from the most conservative social morality: how wonderful it is to be Japanese, how glad they are for all the help from their seniors, how hard work is the prime virtue of the Japanese people and finally how they would love to get married and raise a family. Even known homosexuals – though this is never openly stated – are constantly linked in the popular press to various suitable partners in a ‘will they, or won’t they’ game, right until the final decision that they will.