by Ian Buruma
The combination of cruelty and adoration, of sentimental sadism, as it were, in ‘mother things’ and Mizoguchi’s films, is also quite evident in porno. Not surprisingly, the most popular porno stars combine the savage and the maternal. The most celebrated example is a woman called Tani Naomi. This actress, who decided only recently that enough was enough, spent almost her entire career being tied up, beaten with whips and shoe-horned by impotent brutes. Like the mother heroines in television dramas, the more she suffered, the more popular she became. Fans and critics alike waxed lyrical in their praise of the ‘sweet look in her eyes’ while being tortured with some horrible instrument.
Tani Naomi even looked like a Japanese mother, her ample breasts tucked into a matronly kimono. She was the ideal object for men to take their anxieties out on, like the patient mother being pummelled by her sons. She was the Mother Goddess in bondage, the passive cross-bearer of masculine inadequacy.
One sometimes wonders who the real victims in these entertainments are. Is it, in the final analysis, really the woman who suffers most? Physically, undoubtedly so. Mentally, I am not so sure. If we take the average husband of the rape victims for example: he is always depicted as a passive weed, the sort of person left in the corner at parties; the typical ‘salaryman’ who spends his off hours in porno cinemas or reading porno comics in rush-hour commuter trains, pushed together with people just like him, hiding their faces in similar literature, sometimes using the stifling congestion to feel up some hapless young secretary, too meek to protest. (This furtive form of violation is very common in Japan and the anonymous assailant, the so-called chikan, is a popular figure in porno fantasies.)
So are the male readers not really the victims? Twenty-six-year-old Shimako in the film ‘Hot Skin of the Love Hunter’ has an impotent husband and, says the publicity folder, ‘her nights are unbelievably long’. As soon as she is assaulted by another man, she turns into a nymphomaniac fury with an insatiable taste for the whip.
One senses the masochism of the inadequate cuckold, and by implication of many people in the audience. The female victims in these fantasies often submit to section managers and office chiefs to save their husbands’ jobs or to save them from bankruptcy. Impotence and money problems are intimately connected in these stories, as they are in real life. The real aggressors are of course just the type of people who make life difficult for the kind of ‘salarymen’ (white-collar workers) who form the majority of the audience. What makes it even more piquant is the fact that the fantasy wives rather enjoy being violated by these brutes and in the more passionate scenes they are wont to shout, ‘Oh, you’re so much better than my weakling of a husband!’
Of course these fantasies are not uniquely Japanese. One need only look at the letters column of a British or American nude magazine to know that. What is striking is the frequency of the same stereotypes and the hysteria with which they are presented. The combination of almost suffocating physical intimacy during childhood and the social repression that follows; the idealization of the mother and the trauma at the first discovery of female sexuality; all this could occur anywhere, but nowhere, it seems, is the shock quite so devastating to so many people as in Japan.
5
The Human Work of Art
Love of nature is generally regarded as the basis of Japanese aesthetics. In China and Japan, one is told, man blends with nature; there is no dichotomy, such as exists in the West, where man is inclined to oppose the forces of nature. This argument is frequently supported by pointing to traditional scrolls or ink drawings in which man claims only a modest, sometimes almost invisible place. Natural scenery is not simply a backdrop for depicting man; no, man is part of the natural scene.
In art and daily life Japanese like to use natural images to express human emotions. Japanese novelists are masters at weaving natural metaphors and images into the fabric of their stories. And letters and postcards written by a Japanese always begin with a short description of the season.
The traditional Japanese house is not built like a stone fortress against the elements, as is often the case elsewhere. Instead it is a flimsy-looking wooden building, which can be opened on all sides. It looks as impermanent as the seasons themselves.
In traditional paintings there is no fixed view or vanishing point. One looks downwards at the scene and the higher up in the picture the objects are, the farther away the scene. This gives the illusion of depth, but it is not a three-dimensional illusion; there are no shadows, nothing stands on its own: man, house, nature, all are blended into one.
This concept of the world has its roots both in the Shinto tradition and the Buddhist religion: in Shinto everything in nature is potentially sacred. In the Buddhist view human beings are only one element in the natural cycle of life and death. One could come back in the next life as a frog or a mosquito.
Man is an inseparable part of nature. But does this make him natural? Let us try another analogy: nature is a fertile mother giving us our food and drink. But, and this is the snag, it can also contain terrible forces of destruction; it can suddenly break loose in devastating earthquakes, murderous typhoons and floods. Like woman, that other mysterious force liable to erupt in frightful passions, nature must be tamed, or at least controlled.
The Japanese attitude to nature is not therefore simply a matter of love, for it is tinged with a deep fear of the unpredictable forces it can unleash. It is worshipped, yes, but only after it has been reshaped by human hands. All those beautiful gardens ‘naturally’ blending with Japanese homes are entirely man-made. Nothing wild is left to grow – some of the most prized gardens are made entirely of stones. Japanese love of nature does not extend to nature in the raw, for which they seem to feel an abhorrence.
This includes, of course, human nature. Baudelaire’s maxim, ‘la femme est naturelle, c’est à dire abominable’, echoes traditional Japanese sentiments exactly. People, especially women, have to be redecorated as it were, ritualized and as far as humanly possible, turned into works of art. Of course form plays a large part in what any of us do, anywhere in the world, and for similar reasons. Moreover, certain sections of Western societies have shown – and sometimes continue to show – a similar obsession with style. But, to say the least, many cultures, including those of China and Korea, Japan’s closest neighbours, leave more room for individual spontaneity than is the rule in Japan.
The traditional Japanese aesthetic is often expressed in an artificial and rather anonymous kind of beauty. In his novel Some Prefer Nettles (Tade o Kuu Mushi, 1928) Tanizaki describes this with reference to the puppet theatre:
The real O-Haru [name of a courtesan and character in the puppet play] who lived in the seventeenth century, would have been just like a doll; and even if she weren’t really, that is the way people would have imagined her to be in the theatre. The ideal beauty in those days was far too modest to show her individuality. This doll is more than enough, for anything distinguishing her from others would be too much. In short, this puppet version of O-Haru is the perfect image of the ‘eternal woman’ of Japanese tradition.
There is another doll-woman in the same Tanizaki novel called O-Hisa. She is the mistress of an old rake of impeccable taste in Kyoto. Or, rather, as his son-in-law, Kaname, puts it, she is ‘one of the antiques in his collection’. The old man dresses her up in old silk kimonos, ‘heavy and stiff as strands of chain’. She is allowed to see only traditional puppet plays and eat insubstantial Japanese delicacies. She is refined and cultivated as the old man’s ‘principal treasure’. Kaname is slightly envious of his father-in-law. Thinking of his own messy problems, he sees ‘the type O-Hisa’ as an escape. ‘Surely one does better to fall in love with the sort of woman one can cherish as a doll … the old man’s life seemed to suggest a profound spiritual peace reached without training or effort. If only he could follow the old man’s example, Kaname thought.’
The aesthetic of the human doll is carried to its extreme consequence in Kawabata Yasunari�
�s novel, House of the Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru Bijo, 1961). Young girls in an expensive and rather specialized brothel are drugged into a deep sleep to serve as silent and wholly passive sleeping partners for wealthy old men. ‘For the old men who paid all that money, it was absolute bliss to lie next to one of those girls. Because they were not allowed to wake the girl, they had no need to feel ashamed of the inadequacies of old age. Furthermore, they could give free rein to all their fantasies and memories of women they had known.’
Several times in the book Kawabata compares these sleeping beauties to Buddhist deities, offering salvation and forgiving the old men for their sins. ‘Perhaps she is the incarnation of Buddha,’ thinks the old man, ‘It is possible. After all there are tales of Buddha appearing in the guise of a woman of pleasure, a prostitute.’ Not only are these drugged girls – and the Buddha – doll-like, seemingly without personal identities like enigmatic Buddhist sculptures; but they are also virginal and pure. They can be approached erotically, but they are ultimately unassailable, for they are innocent sleeping objects. Only through such pure innocence, Kawabata seems to say, is salvation and reconciliation with death possible.
A comparable situation occurs in a recent film by Wakamatsu Koji entitled ‘Pool Without Water’ (‘Mizu no Nai Puru’, 1982). A young ticket collector at a subway station finds the perfect way to rape young women. He creeps up to their homes at night and sprays chloroform into their rooms, using a hypodermic. When they are suitably drugged he has his peculiar will with them. In one scene he arranges three naked girls, all fast asleep, arround a festively laid dinner table. He carefully makes up their faces with lipstick and rouge. The ghostly beauty of this strange, silent tableau is punctuated by the occasional flash of his polaroid camera. This is not an exceptionally bizarre film in Japan. The unknown rapist is such a common figure in Japanese entertainments that the fantasy of complete anonymity must run very deep indeed. One certainly senses a strong sympathy for the anonymous assailant in this film. In the last freeze-frame he sticks his tongue out at us: he has cocked a snook at the world. There is a possible social explanation for this: it is hard to be alone in Japan, in a traditional home well nigh impossible. And the complexity of human relationships, fraught with duties and obligations can be hard to take in a society where social face counts for so much.
On the other hand there is a general horror of loneliness, of being cut off from the physical intimacy of the others. The answer seems to be the anonymity of the crowd. People are soothed by being with others without having actually to communicate with them: hence the thousands of expressionless faces one sees on an average day in Tokyo, mesmerized by pinball machines (pachinko), sitting in long, silent rows like drugged assembly-line workers. Hence, also, the fantasy of the anonymous rapist.
The predilection for doll-women is evident in many other, less perverse ways too. They are a popular feature of modern department stores, for example, where they are especially trained to be as puppet-like as possible. The elevator girls, smartly dressed in uniforms and pure white gloves, greet the customers in artificial falsetto voices followed by ritual arm movements, like toy soldiers, up and down, left and right, always in the same way, indicating the direction of the lifts.
Not only are these girls drilled to sound like female impersonators on the stage, but the precision of the ceremonial bow is practised as a fine art. I was once shown round a training centre by a proud personnel manager. He explained how the girls are taught the perfect bow by a machine. It is a stainless-steel contraption standing in the middle of a spotless room. A steel bar in their backs pushed the girls into the desired angle: 15 degrees, 30 or 45, all minutely registered on a digital screen. ‘This isn’t just for newcomers, you know,’ the manager assured me, prodding a young employee with a stick, ‘senior employees like to use it too from time to time, to get in a bit of bowing practice.’ Some stores actually went one step further, and, as an economy measure, decided to introduce real dolls instead of living ones. It did not work: customers complained that it lacked the human touch.
Television is a remarkably rich showcase for doll-women. Late night shows, for instance, feature so-called ‘mascotte-girls’ whose only function is to sit in a chair, blink provocatively at the camera and remain absolutely silent. One sees this type of thing in the West too: perched on top of cars at trade shows, for example. But bikinied beauties on Western television at least pretend to serve some function, if only to hand props to a quiz master. In Japan they are simply there, passive and pretty.
Teenage talentos are often dolls. They are choreographed, directed and drilled to such a degree that any spontaneity that might have been there to begin with stands little chance of surviving. Every move, every gesture, every smile, every phrase is the result of thorough training. The most extreme example in recent years has been a singing duo called ‘Pink Lady’, two leggy girls whose dizzy heights of popularity lasted for about three years. Not only did they sing and dance in perfect unison, they would even speak in unison, and always in elevator-girl falsettos.
This went on for several years. But then, very occasionally, a dim light of emerging humanity started to shine through the plastic façade: a small inkling that ‘Pink Lady’ were actually human beings and not just clever robots. It was precisely at that point that they started to lose their goddess-like status with the very young. When the dolls came sufficiently to life to turn down an appearance in the highly prestigious annual New Year television extravaganza, the end of their fame was assured.
Obviously many so-called ‘personalities’ on, say, American television are as carefully rehearsed and as far removed from their supposedly ‘real selves’ as the Japanese. The act is different, however: in the U.S.A. people train to seem natural, informal, in a word, real. One acts ‘naturally’; people are not supposed to see that it is all fake. T.V. performers are, after all, personalities.
In Japan it tends to be the other way round. People are not interested so much in ‘real selves’ and no attempts are made to hide the fake. On the contrary, artificiality is often appreciated for its own sake. Performers do not try to seem informal or real, for it is the form, the art of faking, if you like, that is the whole point of the exercise. This is not to say that professional television performers in Japan all behave like anonymous undertakers. Quite the reverse is often true: television can be a licence to carry on outrageously – screaming and screeching like manic clowns – for it is not the real world. This, needless to say, is as artificial as the formal school.
If we take the traditional puppet theatre as an example, the cultural difference will be clear. In Western theatres the manipulators remain hidden in order to make the puppets seem as real as possible. In Japan the puppeteers stand on stage with the puppets: there is no reason to hide them. People want to see them so they can appreciate their skills, just as the earliest Japanese cinema audiences were as fascinated by the projector as by the flickering images on the screen. Now, both the American personalities and the Japanese talentos may be puppets, but the average American audience does not want to be made aware of this, while the Japanese do.
The same principle applies to social life. The more formal a society, the more obvious the roles people play. In this respect the Japanese are quite scrutable. Acting, that is, presenting oneself consciously in a certain prescribed way, is part of social life everywhere. But an increasing number of people in the West are so obsessed with appearing ‘genuine’ that they fool themselves they are not acting, that they are, well … real. Carried to its extremes, rudeness is seen as a commendably honest way of ‘being oneself’. In Japan it is still in most cases a necessity to subordinate personal inclinations to the social form. Being a polite people, most Japanese spend most of their time acting.
Most of them of course realize this. The gap between the public and the private persona is often striking. As soon as the elevator girl is off duty, the pitch of her voice drops several octaves: she becomes a different person. Obviousl
y Japanese have individual personalities like everybody else. But personal feelings are reserved for those (often alcoholic) occasions when intimacy is called for. Feelings vented at those times may often seem excessively sentimental, but then that too is another form of acting.
All this does make life in Japan seem highly theatrical to the outsider. Even the way people dress often appears a little stagey. Japanese, on the whole, like to be identified and categorized according to their group or occupation, rather than simply as individuals. No Japanese cook worth his salt would want to be seen without his tall white hat; ‘interis’ (intellectuals) sport berets and sunglasses, like 1920s exiles on the Left Bank of Paris. And gangsters wear loud pin-striped suits over their tattooed bodies. In brief, everybody is dressed for his or her part: even vagrants look like stage tramps in their impossible rags and with their hair hanging down to their waists in knotty ropes.
This tendency to conform to stylized patterns is perhaps most visible in the traditional arts. These patterns, or forms, are called kata. The Kabuki theatre, for example, is based on kata: a series of traditional postures and movements learnt from an early age by mimicking one’s masters. Because of this the choreography, even down to the smallest details, of every stage role has remained unchanged for centuries, apart from slight personal additions by famous actors which are only noticeable to connoisseurs of the art. Significantly many of these postures and gestures in Kabuki were lifted straight from the puppet theatre.