by Ian Buruma
He is then made to go shopping, running on all fours, with a basket in his mouth. ‘Woof woof’ he goes and the local grocer feeds him peanuts. The grocer then sticks a pair of ears on him and a tail of wire, ordering him to be a pig. ‘Oink oink’ goes stupid Dad when he returns home. This change of identity merits another kick in the face from the devil woman. ‘If you want to be a pig so much, we’ll roast you in the oven.’ In the last picture of this episode we see Dad, his body a mass of horrible burns and bleeding wounds, cowering under the big feet of his wife, who is standing on him like a successful game hunter, while his son dances around him like a mad cannibal.
And so the sad saga of stupid Dad goes on and on in a never-ending round of cruelty. He is thrown into a trap full of thistles; he is roasted alive in a crematorium; he is frozen in ice-cold baths when he is ill. In one episode his wife, out of sheer spite, serves him his only joy in life, his little pet bird, for dinner. I repeat, this is a comic meant for children.
This may seem somewhat puzzling in a country which is often called semi-feudal, rightly or wrongly, and where a strict sense of hierarchy coupled to a strong military tradition would suggest a certain respect for the patriarch. But even a cursory glance at popular culture will show that this comic, though perhaps a little extreme, is by no means exceptional. The father, especially since recent notions of ‘demokurashi’ have further eroded his already shaky position, is very often a figure of fun.
When he is not ludicrous, he is sad; the lonely old man in the corner, drinking away his misery. He is certainly almost never a hero. The family hero, when there is one at all, is still the blessed mother. The strong patriarch as the rock on which the family rests, as one sees in American Westerns, for example, is almost wholly absent from Japanese entertainment.
Although it would surely be wrong to suggest that every Japanese father is a ridiculous weakling or a lonely boozer, the myth is not entirely divorced from reality. Many men are in the life-long grip of their mothers. The power of these mothers can be considerable, as are the hardships suffered by their daughters-in-law. This is one of the main themes of modern television drama – as well as the Kabuki theatre – avidly watched by millions of sympathetic housewives.
The mother-in-law, considering the depth of emotion invested in her son, often has reason to be jealous of the wife, who tends to take over the mother’s role. The husband’s dependence is the mother’s power.
This is not immediately apparent to the outsider. Foreigners who see how meek Japanese housewives are bossed around by loud-mouthed husbands incapable, or at least unwilling to do anything for themselves, often draw the conclusion that men are very much in command in Japan. They note how in the case of elderly couples, raised in less emancipated times, the wives walk a few paces behind their husbands, often burdened with all the luggage too, while the men tell them to hurry up.
I remember the shock of foreign guests at a dinner party, when the Japanese husband carelessly dropped and smashed a plate full of food and, without getting up, ordered his wife to clean up and look sharp about it.
Given the skill of the performers, it is no wonder that this charade fools the average outsider. In many cases the meek, housewifely exterior is a public façade for a tough mother very much in control, while Dad’s growling boorishness hides a helpless man clinging to his masculine privilege. The slave and the sergeant-major are public roles which have little to do with the real strength of individuals. The wife shows respect for her husband in public, because it is expected of her, but it is a respect for his role, rather than for the man himself. What happens in private is quite a different matter.
One is reminded of a comic-book called Kinjiro of the Hard School (Koha Kinjiro) in which the stoic young hero finally, after many struggles and protestations, is ensnared by the charms of (oh horror of the hard school) a woman. To show that he has not lost any of his masculine purity, he orders her to walk several paces behind him as a sign of respect. ‘Yessir!’ she shouts and then turns to the reader with a conspiratorial wink, saying: ‘Isn’t he just the cutest thing in the world?’
The gap between real intentions and public posture is clear to every Japanese. It is an accepted feature of civilized life. It is also the main source of Japanese jokes which, like humour everywhere, are based on precisely that gap between social pretension and reality. And in no case is the gap quite as wide as with the father who is really a child.
There are many examples of this. A typical television commercial for, say, processed cheese, will start with an image of father silently scowling: the disgruntled sergeant-major. In comes mother with the cheese. ‘What’s that?’ growls dad, screwing up his face in distaste. ‘Try it and see’, says mother. This he does with rather bad grace, and the effect is astonishing: suddenly disgruntled Dad is like a demented little boy, hooting and screeching with his children, as if the product contained a drug inducing hebephrenia. We move to a close-up of mother who has done it again. Turning to the camera, she smiles indulgently, thinking how adorable they all are.
Everywhere men are ruled to a certain extent by their public roles, feeling that they have to live up or down to them, as the case may be. It is because the public roles are so theatrical in Japan that the gap between public and private seems so obvious. The higher the public role, the funnier the pretensions are. This is why the Japanese are good at social satire, which, besides a universal type of scatology, is their main, if not only, comic tradition.
Japanese comedy thrives on deflating public pretension, on bringing things back to human proportions. The great comic figures of Edo-period fiction are pretentious pedants, corrupt, pompous officials, arrogant warriors or wealthy fools, exposed by their very human weaknesses. A typical and not very elegant comic poem of the period goes: ‘I am at a loss about the lavatory, says the warrior in armour.’1 The idea of an earnest warrior having to dispense with all his social trappings for such a simple human function must have seemed extremely comical to the Edo townsman. And indeed the blustering warrior and the stupid lord (baka tono) are still stock comic characters in Japanese vaudeville, to be seen nightly on television.
The pompous father trying to uphold his public image in the home is clearly part of this tradition. Many comedies are about cutting father down to size. A good example is the so-called ‘Company Director Series’ (‘Shacho shirees’), made during the 1960s, but still endlessly revived on television and in local fleapits. The format, as usual in these series, is similar in every film. The company director, always played by an actor called Morishige Hisaya, is invariably a pompous fool. But he is none the less the shacho (director) and has to be treated accordingly: having his shoulders massaged by obsequious subordinates; ordering people to do this and that and making long, unwanted speeches at public occasions. The joke lies, of course, in the contrast between his public and his private persona. He bosses his employees like a general, but he is putty in the hands of his daughters, who needle him mercilessly, blackmailing him into buying them expensive presents and generally doing what they want. He will not allow his secretary to marry the girl he loves, but he has several mistresses himself. The mistresses, moreover, are more like faithful mothers in whose presence he becomes a petulant little whiner, making them cut his toe-nails and clean out his ears.
Despite all his huffing and puffing he always turns out to be a good man in the end, which only adds to the joke. In one film he almost drives a woman to her deathbed because he will not let her marry one of his underlings. She recovers, but he is tricked into thinking that she has not, which makes him feel so guilty that he relents. He looks absurdly foolish, standing there in the hospital room wearing his kimono and carrying his cane, his basic decency unwillingly revealed by an elaborate hoax.
Traditionally the father’s role was perhaps taken more seriously than it is now. Father was a model for the son to live up to; a distant figure of authority often bearing little relation to the actual person wielding it. For many children he might
have remained a shadowy figure because the education in the home was handled almost entirely by the women. For the male child, to quote an American social scientist, ‘the mother became a symbol of lifelong dedication and sacrifice, the father, an image of unapproachable authority’.2
In traditional society one’s role was more or less predetermined. The son of a carpenter usually became a carpenter too, the same was true of an actor, a samurai or a priest. In these terms, ‘to become like your father’ made sense. Obviously the higher the father’s social status — within his class — the more sense it made, particularly if he was the head of the whole family.
It is probably true to say, however, that the patriarch’s authority was strongest amongst the samurai. Even in traditional Japan the father’s authority was certainly not absolute in poor households where mere economic survival could depend as much, if not more, on the mother.
After the Meiji restoration in 1868 the official role of the father became even stronger. This was partly a result of the ‘samuraization’3 of Japanese society: the spread amongst all classes of samurai values. Under the civil code adopted by the Meiji government in 1898 the father was given full control over all family property, the right to determine the family members’ place of residence, and the right to approve or disapprove marriages and divorces.4
There is an interesting parallel here with the position of the emperor, who, for the first time in many centuries, came out of his powerless closet. Japanese emperors had hitherto literally been shadowy ikons, well hidden from the public view, divine but bereft of real power. Now, suddenly, there he was: sitting on his horse, dressed in full uniform and sporting a bristly military moustache, ever inch the stern Meiji patriarch. How powerful he really was is open to dispute, but certainly obedience to the father at home and to the emperor as the father of us all, came down to the same thing; one was the logical extension of the other.
Paradoxically at the same time social changes were making the actual grip of the father on the family progressively more tenuous. In a rapidly industrializing society it no longer followed that one did what one’s father did. More and more one’s future was decided by examinations rather than hereditary factors. As a steady stream of sons left their villages to study in the big cities, the old class system began to break down. The father was no longer necessarily an image to look up to, but was sometimes an unwelcome reminder of a rustic background. Moreover, he often expected to be taken care of in his old age by his citified sons.
With industrialization came the age of the ‘salaryman’. Much has been written about his role in contemporary Japanese society. Suffice it to say here that the modern Japanese company has inherited many of the hierarchical characteristics of traditional society, rural and urban, samurai and merchant, while at the same time further severing the family from the place of work.
This separation is an important aspect of industrial societies all over the world, but the implications in Japan are slightly different, because the family system itself is different. In the West, as well as in China, the family is based on blood-relationships. A Chinese in San Francisco feels obliged to offer hospitality to a person from Bangkok if kinship can be proved. Europeans generally do not go that far. All the same, to be related means being of the same kin. Adoptions occur, of course, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
In the traditional Japanese concept of family the dividing line between kin and non-kin is less sharply drawn. Family in Japan is partly based on place, as well as blood, especially the place of work. It is significant that the earliest meanings of oya (parent) and ko (child) were leader of a work group and a member.5 We have already seen how yakuza gangs are structured like families with father-figures (oyabun) and ‘children’ (kobun). To strengthen their relationships gangsters conduct rituals whereby they mix each other’s blood. They feel as much part of a family as many mafia members do, though, unlike the mafia, this is not based on kinship.
Traditionally a daughter-in-law living under the same roof would be considered a closer relative than a real daughter married into another family. It is still quite common for a son-in-law to be adopted to carry on his wife’s family line. Sometimes long-standing employees were considered part of the family under the old system. In fact, one can see many traces of this in modern companies. This is constantly stressed by management: the Yamaha family, the Toyota family. How the average worker really feels about this is open to question, but the ideal, at least, is there.
In traditional society, which still lingers on among artisans, the father played a double role: the master carpenter, the oyakata, was both a father-figure to his employees and to his own children. As such he was – and still is – a highly respected figure, especially if he was head of the larger family, a position of great responsibility. It is certainly a pointer that among father-figures of fun in modern entertainment one rarely comes across a ridiculous carpenter or builder. The ludicrous father is almost invariably a ‘salaryman’. There are examples of pathetic, drunken craftsmen unable to survive in the modern world, but they are to be pitied, never laughed at.
The nuclear family based only on kinship, the kazoku, is a modern (post-1868) concept borrowed from the Western world.6 The modern, salaryman father is not called oya or oyaji, but ‘papa’, an English loanword which retains little of the old respect. A mixture of tradition and modern fashion puts the salaryman papa in an awkward position torn between two families: the company, being the common roof under which he works, and his kazoku, the wife and children. The nuclear family is being pushed as an ideal by advertisers trying to boost consumerism with such modish slogans as ‘mai homu’ (my home) ‘mai kaa’ (my car) and ‘mai famiree’ (my family). The English word ‘my’ is favoured by advertisers and consumers alike, because somehow the Japanese equivalent would sound too possessive, too egotistical, stressing as it does, the private over the collective.
But still, the average salaryman spends most of his time with his company family. This is perhaps more a matter of peer pressure than choice, though one cannot be sure – the look of utter boredom on many a papa’s face as he drags along with his family on Sunday afternoons in his ‘leisure wear’ suggests something less than delight. Nevertheless the pressure is intense – even sometimes from his own wife. There is the often quoted case of the non-conformist husband returning straight home after work, instead of going out drinking with his colleagues, which is the done thing. His wife soon put a stop to that, because, she said, the neighbours were gossiping. ‘Have you noticed how he returns early every day … Maybe he’s not doing well at work … There must be something wrong with him … ’ There is no doubt about it, the ‘mai homu papa’ is ridiculed rather than respected.
The typical salaryman as described and depicted in comics and films is weak, irresponsible and interested only in sex – always unsuccessfully – and money. The archetype was played by a comedian called Ueki Hitoshi, hero of the so-called ‘Irresponsible Series’ (‘Musekinin Shirees’). He is the salaryman who wins no respect and pretends not to care. All he wants are his creature comforts. The series was made in the early 1960s, just as the Economic Miracle started to heat up. The theme song goes:
Suisui Sudarara
The chairman and the section chief like to play with girls
Shame lasts for an hour, but money a whole life
Who wants to be serious, responsibility I’ve never known.
Salarymen in comic-books are invariably pathetic. When they are not busy licking their boss’s boots, they are peeping under the secretaries’ skirts. The most enthusiastic readers of these comics, by artists such as Sato Sampei and Shoji Sadao, are salarymen.
Stripped of responsibility and thus of respect, the father can no longer be a model. This is one of the underlying themes in the films of Kurosawa Akira, an artist who keenly feels the loss of samurai values in modern society.
It has been pointed out, rightly I think, that the relationships in Kurosawa’s films between
older and younger men are all variations of the father–son relationship.7 One thinks of the experienced police officer and the young rookie in ‘Stray Dogs’, the doctor and the gangster in ‘Drunken Angel’, and the judo teacher and the young boy in ‘Sugata Sanshiro’. In Kurosawa’s view spiritual guidance is part of imparting a skill; in fact, true enlightenment can only come through work. His ideal father-figures are all spiritual guides in the way that traditional fathers sometimes were and modern fathers can no longer be. In the only two films in which the ‘father’ is not a man with a particular skill to impart, but a real ‘papa’, the sons will not listen. The father in ‘Living’ (‘Ikiru’), a petty bureaucrat dying of cancer, is totally ignored by his beloved son; the father in ‘Record of a Living Being’, obsessed with the danger of nuclear war, is treated like a maniac.
Not only does the modern papa, especially if he is a salaryman, have little to teach his sons (and if he has, he is ignored), but the gap between private and public status can make it hard for him to assert any authority at all. One of the funniest and most melancholy comedies in Japanese cinematic history is Ozu Yasujiro’s ‘I Was Born, But…’ It was made in 1932, but it still rings as true as ever. In a typical salaryman suburb of Tokyo a group of little boys argue about whose father is most important. The brothers Keizo and Ryoichi are convinced their father is more important than little Taro’s, who is actually his boss. They win the argument conclusively because they are bigger and stronger than Taro.
One day they are invited to a party at Taro’s house. Taro’s father then proudly shows his newest home film, a tremendous symbol of status in those days. To gales of laughter from all the guests Keizo and Ryoichi’s father suddenly appears on the screen, jumping and clowning and pulling faces, acting the fool to please his boss. The boys are deeply shocked. The man they were taught to look up to, the most important father in the neighbourhood, is suddenly reduced to this pathetic, obsequious fool dancing for his supper.