A Japanese Mirror

by Ian Buruma

  Fear of female power need not necessarily result in male masochism: slavery can just as easily turn into aggression. This can be more or less disguised, as in Mizoguchi’s films. The violent degradation of his women is painted with such loving care that it seems like a kind of aesthetic revenge. In this sense Mizoguchi was like that other great sensualist of the early cinema, Erich von Stroheim, the infamous Hollywood German of the 1920s.

  Von Stroheim, under his campy dictatorial façade, was a moralist. His films are about the way people are corrupted by money and power and the humiliations they inflict on each other because of it. His moral indignation, like Mizoguchi’s, was no doubt genuine, but one cannot help feeling that it was superseded by his aestheticism. Corruption is also erotic; it is bad, of course, but fascinatingly and beautifully so.

  Mizoguchi’s attitude to women was equally ambivalent. In his own life he was quite a philanderer, particularly in the red-light districts of his beloved Kyoto. Like Von Stroheim, he had the reputation of humiliating women. And it is said that his wife died of the syphilis he gave her. There is a well-known story that he once broke down in a V.D. clinic in a room full of prostitutes, telling them it was all his fault, begging their pardon over and over again. If the story is not true, it ought to be, for it seems so typical of the man. He both adored and hated women and above all he wanted them to forgive him for their humiliation.

  He also had a profoundly religious streak, carrying the votive idol of the Buddhist saint Nichiren with him to film festivals.9 Mizoguchi’s aesthetic is infused with what the Japanese call mono no aware, the pathos of things, or lacrimae rerum. It is a melancholy, even tragic sensibility inspired by the Buddhist resignation to the suffering of life. Yes, life is sad, but what can one do about it? And after all, is that sadness not rather beautiful too? This attitude is behind most traditional Japanese art. In Mizoguchi’s work the victimized woman, prostrated on the floor (his favourite image), suffering the full cruelty of life, thus becomes a symbol of great and melancholy beauty.

  But aggression is by no means always this guarded or beautiful. Modern Japanese pornography is overwhelmingly sadistic, as anyone can find out by spending five minutes in any Japanese bookshop. This is not a new phenomenon. Some of the most extreme examples of aesthetic cruelty are to be found in the so-called decadent art of the late Edo period (mid-nineteenth century), in the woodblock prints of Kuniyoshi, and especially in those of his pupil Yoshitoshi, or in the grotesquely violent paintings by Ekin. They shared an artistic fondness for tortured women. One of the most telling images by Yoshitoshi is of a pregnant woman suspended upside down over a fire, while an old hag is sharpening her knife to slit her stomach open. In an almost identical print by the same artist we see a man actually slashing a hanging woman to pieces.

  This form of torture is something of a cliché in Japanese art-and, it seems, in reality: it is first mentioned in the Nihonshoki, an eighth-century chronicle of Japanese history. Apparently in A.D. 500 the emperor Buretsu ‘had the belly of a pregnant woman opened for an inspection of the womb’. In the Kabuki play ‘Hitori Tabi Gojusantsugi’ by Tsuruya Namboku, a pregnant woman is tortured, cut open and her child is tossed up in the air. This form of violence is perhaps the most extreme expression of anger at having lost the pure Arcadia of early childhood. It is also a transgression of one of the strictest taboos. In an utterly perverse manner the transition between life and death is stood on its head.

  Aesthetic cruelty, in Japan as elsewhere, is a way of relieving fear, of exorcizing the demons. Because female passion is thought to be more demonic than the weaker, male variety – it is she, after all, who harbours the secret of life – and because of her basic impurity and her capacity to lead men so dangerously astray, it is Woman who has to suffer most.

  Judging from what is readily available I cannot think of many countries more inundated with pornography than Japan: not the hardest, perhaps, but the most. The smallest neighbourhood bookshops are well stocked with pornographic magazines, comics and books. There are vending machines, conveniently located on street corners, offering a large variety of porno-comics and ‘dirty pictures’. One of the largest surviving companies of the once great Japanese film industry now produces nothing but soft porn – except for the occasional film for children – at the rate of one new picture a month.

  In the early nature-worshipping stage of Japanese history there was no pornography. Pornography cannot exist with natural innocence. The phalluses and vulvas carved out of wood or stone were, and sometimes still are, magical objects to be used in rituals promoting good crops and female fertility. Significantly the first examples of what could perhaps be called pornography, such as obscene drawings, go back to around the tenth century, when Buddhist morality had already had several centuries to make its impact felt.10 These drawings of monks indulging in all manner of mischief and abbots entertaining aristocratic ladies may well have been part of a popular reaction to what was still essentially a foreign creed. They also suggest social satire rather than purely erotic titillation. Certainly the fact that these early erotic drawings were called warai-e (comical pictures) does not point to a strong sense of sin, however hellish Buddhist warnings may have been.

  The tension between the earthy, hedonistic side of Japanese culture and an imported morality imposed by the authorities (in medieval Japan the clergy played a strong political role), was at its height during the Edo period (1615–1867). This time it was not Buddhism but Confucianism that the government deemed to be most effective in keeping the populace under control.

  The people in the cities found an outlet in the Kabuki-culture of the licensed quarters: the theatres, teahouses and brothels. Pornography played a vital part in this. Most popular artists, including the most famous, such as Utamaro or Hokusai, made many erotic pictures and a large number of authors wrote erotica. Many pornographic images satirized the stuffy Confucian classics in the same way that tenth-century erotica made fun of Buddhism.11 Nevertheless, anything that could conceivably be construed as criticism of the government, however oblique, was strictly forbidden.

  Pornography under the rule of the Tokugawas was not only a secretive hobby of a socially frustrated upper-class, as was the case in Victorian England or Imperial China, but also a spontaneous expression of a people whose spontaneity was suppressed in every other way. Hence certain Japanese critics and scholars like to present the Kabuki-culture as a form of political protest. This is dubious. Political protest needs an ideology, whether political, religious or both. This the Kabuki world certainly never had. It is true, though, that despite their wealth, merchants, artisans and even samurai, who suffered more than anybody from the constraints of Confucian morality, were politically muzzled. And so, in a sense, pornography and violent entertainment took on a subversive meaning far beyond its original intentions.

  Even now a large number of critics, film-makers, writers and political activists see pornography as a subversive weapon against the authorities. And yet again a foreign religion plays a part in this. Since the nineteenth century Christianity has cast its shadow on official morality. Not that Japanese politicians and law-makers are Christians, but the anti-obscenity laws passed since the Meiji restoration in 1868 have certainly been influenced by a desire to appear ‘civilized’ in Western eyes.

  Thus pornography still sometimes becomes mixed up with an odd kind of paranoid nationalism. There was a famous case, for instance, involving a film (‘Black Snow’, ‘Kuroi Yuki’, 1965) directed by Takechi Tetsuji. The film is about an impotent young man who gets his kicks by shooting American soldiers, and making love with a loaded gun. The connection between the American occupation and Japanese impotence is in fact quite a common theme in the work of artists who went through that period; indeed, one gets the impression that losing the war had a most traumatic physiological effect. In any event, Takechi’s film was originally banned for its pornographic content and he was even sued by the Tokyo Metropolitan police. Eventually he won his case, b
ut not before the Japanese intelligentsia had made a huge fuss about it.

  Takechi saw his film as a political statement against ‘American Imperialism’, a popular target in those heady days. He still describes himself as a minzokkushugisha, literally an ethnic nationalist, a position that has strong racialist overtones. This is evident in the film. Not only does the young hero murder a G.I., but it has to be a black G.I. (This, incidentally, has become a standard cliché: whenever G.I.s are shown in Japanese porno films, invariably in the act of outrageously raping Japanese maidens, they are very often blacks to make the outrage seem even worse.)

  Takechi, who also regards film editing in ethnic terms – ‘Japanese editing must reflect our unique spiritual values’ – described the attack on his work in wholly traditional terms:

  The censors are getting tough about ‘Black Snow’. I admit there are many nude scenes in the film, but they are psychological nude scenes symbolizing the defencelessness of the Japanese people in the face of the American invasion. Prompted by the CIA and the U.S. Army they say my film is immoral. This is of course an old story that has been going on for centuries. When they suppressed Kabuki plays during the Edo period, forbidding women to act, because of prostitution, and young actors, because of homosexuality, they said it was to preserve public morals. In fact it was a matter of rank political suppression.12

  It seems ironic that once again foreigners are involved and blamed. But what is interesting here is not that ‘Black Snow’ is an eloquent political statement – which it is not – but that it should be regarded as such both by the author and the authorities. The same is true of Oshima’s ‘Realm of the Senses’ (‘Ai No Korrida’), a much better film. Using the not unreasonable slogan, ‘what’s wrong with obscenity?’ Oshima has been putting up a courageous fight in the law courts for years. Thus a film entirely about sex has again become a political issue. And even entirely commercial porno films are often regarded on university campuses and in late-night cafés as subversive statements.

  It is unlikely that Japanese intellectuals, the so-called ‘interi’, really believe that soft porn producers are political activists. But it is certain that pornographic books, films and comics are regarded as weapons in the continuing tug of war between the ‘muddy’ culture of the people (with the ‘interi’ as their self-appointed representatives) and the authorities who are trying to stamp it out.

  A typical example of this on-going moral struggle is the great pubic hair debate. Rape, sadism, torture, all this is permissible in popular entertainment, but the official line is drawn at the showing of pubic hair. This is more reminiscent of schoolmasters measuring the length of their pupils’ unruly mops than an indication of any deep moral conviction.

  The rule is constantly being tested by film directors, photographers and artists, by no means all in the porno trade, who stretch it to its absurd limits: woman in comic books crouch down awkwardly in front of men, who spout great shafts of empty space into willing female mouths and hands, suspended somewhere in mid-air; girls are photographed wearing the sheerest of see-through panties, hiding absolutely nothing, or they simply shave the offending hair off, which, for some reason, makes it all more acceptable. The latest round in this curious contest seems to have been won by ‘the people’, for the government has announced that ‘there will be about a 5 per cent reduction in the number of black dots and squares that are painted on pictures that the authorities consider to be harmful to public morals.’

  In many Western porn movies, even of the crudest kind, it is at least sometimes suggested that mutual enjoyment is part of the sex act. In Japan this is rarely the case: either the female is an innocent victim of rape, or she is a compulsive man-eating ogress consumed by her sexual savagery. One often leads to the other: defiled innocence becomes man-eating ogress. Either way, she is punished for taking off her maternal mask. What is truly remarkable, however, is that after all that she often ends up putting it on again.

  A fascinating example is a ‘political’ pornographic film jointly directed by Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao, who later fled to the Middle-East because of his alleged links with the Japanese ‘Red Army’ terrorists. The film has a ‘message’, but it is entirely symptomatic of commercial erotica in Japan. It is entitled ‘When the Foetus Goes Poaching’ (‘Taiji ga Mitsuryu Suru Toki’, 1966). In it a manager of a department store lures one of his salesgirls to his flat. There he immediately proceeds to tie her hands and feet to his bed, after which he tortures her with candles, whips and even a razor. Throughout this messy ceremony he wears pure white gloves.

  Just as it becomes too unbearable to watch (though it did not seem to faze the Japanese watching it with me), the scene turns into an illusion: the concrete wall of the bedroom becomes like a great big womb, sucking the manager inside. He screams, ‘Okasan!’ (‘Mother!’). The girl, blood pouring from a mass of wounds, then sings him the sweetest lullaby until the man, exhausted by his labour, falls asleep like a baby.

  In a review of this film the critic and German literature scholar Tanemura Suehiro, a somewhat flowery ‘interi’ with a taste for the macabre, called this torture session a ‘purification ceremony’. ‘Purified by the whip, the woman, in a sea of blood, changes into an unborn foetus. Trussed up in ropes, like an animal being consumed by a snake, she goes through the spasms of birth.’13 By so punishing or ‘purifying’ the sexual female, the hero presumably regains his ‘sweetly, dimly white dreamworld’ of the maternal bosom. (A very similar process is at work at many Shinto festivals. They also start off with often painful purification ceremonies and end in a crawling mass of naked bodies, without ego or identity, crushed together in a pitch-black shrine.)

  Before sexuality can be purified it must first manifest itself. In Japanese pornography this usually means rape. The victims are symbols of innocence: schoolgirls in uniform, nurses, just-married housewives and so on. These women always fall in love with their rapists. Or perhaps love is not the right word: ‘They are betrayed by their bodies’ is how the film distributors put it in their publicity handouts. They become addicted to the forbidden fruit. They are polluted, or rather, their inherent impurity manifests itself.

  This pollution is often shown at the beginning of the film in a very literal way: the female victim is dragged through a rice-field, for example, or thrown into a rubbish dump or sent into the streets naked. In short, exactly the sort of thing that goes on at the start of a Shinto ceremony, when men roll in the mud or run through the village naked.

  Very few women in the Japanese world of porno become savages of their own free will. Their impurity, as was the case with Izanami, is simply a consequence of nature. It is no sin: they cannot help it, but neither can they escape it, for it is in their blood. This is the meaning of the following English language synopsis handed out by a company of soft porn producers: ‘This is the story of three sisters. They becom [sic] sluts, not so much out of their own free wills, but more at the mercy of their lascivious blood of their parents that runs through their blood.’14 Or this one: ‘No matter how chaste a girl like Natsuko may be, once she is raped, the traumatic experience is apt to change her whole life.’ Understandably so, one thinks, but then the pamphlet goes on: ‘Violently assaulted in an elevator, Natsuko had sobbed convulsively back in her room over the loss of her virginity. Then to her friends’ amazement, she changes completely. Natsuko goes after all the men she thinks she can hook.’15

  In the case of blondes (all foreign ladies are fair-haired in this fantasy world) it is even more clear cut: the blue-eyed ones need not even be raped for their savagery to manifest itself. In one of the many erotic comic-books on sale – millions are sold every week – I once saw the following story: a fair-haired foreign woman living in a suburban apartment block seduces every healthy Japanese boy she can find: the milkman, the postman, the laundry boy; nobody, but nobody is safe from this man-eating tigress. Finally they decide something must be done and they ambush the woman, tie her to a tree and then torture h
er. ‘Oh!’ she cries (foreigners always cry ‘Oh!’ in Japanese comics), ‘in my country it is quite usual to do what I did.’ The boys are naturally horrified and torture her even more.

  Actual intercourse in films is usually a joyless affair of spasmodic motions filmed behind a chair or a flower-vase to avoid those wicked genitals from coming into view. Although the victim is naked, the man is usually fully clothed, rarely taking his trousers down below the upper thighs. Sometimes there is no need to take the trousers down at all: whips, candles, pistols and shoe-horns do nature’s job just as well.

  After seeing the umpteenth shoe-horn scene it becomes clear what these films are really all about; what anxiety in particular is being exorcized: a desperate fear of masculine inadequacy.16 Not that this is even hidden by the pornographers. Porno in japan is remarkably honest about its intentions. But the realism of these anxious entertainments goes further. The assault is often followed by an agonized confession by the rapist that this is the only way he can get any satisfaction. This is the cue for the maternal instinct to reassert itself, and the victims end up comforting the aggressors.

  Natsuko falls in love with the rapist in the elevator, who turns out to be an impotent lorry-driver. Junko, a just-married housewife, takes care of a thief who enters her flat and violates her with a jack-knife. The sex scenes following the male confessions seem to be lifted straight out of the ‘mother things’. Well, almost …

  As if possessed, the men throw their arms around their former victims, frantically sucking their breasts, dribbling and drooling and smacking their lips. Love scenes are traditionally called nureba, wet scenes. Sensual experience in Japan is often associated with water, the most maternal of symbols. Thus in comics and films the climactic moments of sex scenes are often followed by shots of crashing waves or cascading, foaming waterfalls. Both are standard clichés of the genre. And a favourite trick to make love seem even wetter – and more infantile – is to pour some liquid such as beer, rice-wine, or best of all, milk over the woman’s breasts so that the man can slither and slobber over it.