Permitted And Prohibited Desires

Mothers, Comics, And Censorship In Japan

Anne Allison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000315707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Desire is both of and beyond the everyday. In an ad for running shoes, for example, the figure of a man jogging at dawn on the Serengeti Plain both evokes a fantasyof escape and invokes a disciplinary norm to stay fit. The bottom line for thead, of course, is to create a desire to consume, the promise being that with thepurchase of these shoes, the consumer can realize yet also transcend the daily exhortationto perform.To say this differently, there is something both real and phantasmic about desire.Yet this notion seems contradictory. Isn't there a difference between the desireto be fit, for example, which is realizable, realistic, and, in these senses, realand the desire to escape routine everydayness, which, for most of us, is inescapablemost of the time? But is exercise real or phantasmic? Certainly noteveryone works out, and even those who make exercise a part of their reality maydo so in order to pursue a fantasy about themselves. And are escapes from dailyroutines phantasmic or real? An escape from the everyday is far more realizablefor some people than even fitness. But here too what is fantasy blends into (andbecomes indistinguishable from) the real: A vacation away from work may be ameans of ensuring a higher level of work performance when one returns.

1
Different Differences: Place and Sex in Anthropology, Feminism, and Cultural Studies

I begin this book with two stories. One is mine as I embarked upon a postdoctoral research project on Japanese motherhood in 1987; the other is of a Japanese professional as he embarked upon his career in 1932. I return to them throughout the book as a means of commenting on my project: to examine divergent, multiple, and sometimes inconsistent constructions of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan and to test various theoretical strategies for understanding the specific conditions for, and operations of, gendered and sexual behaviors in Japan today.

Story 1

One morning as I was watching television with my children in Japan, the following scene caught my eye. Cartooned breasts, naked, rounded, and full, were rising slowly in a space resembling a sky. The context was a song about mothers, sung sweetly in the high-pitched voice of a young woman; the words about devoted mothers who tirelessly and selflessly tend to their children were printed at the bottom of the screen. As each verse of the song was sung, more realistic sketches of mothers were shown in various acts of taking care of and nurturing their children. Yet the floating breasts returned for every chorus, accompanying the refrain about motherly gifts for which children were told to be grateful.

I was struck, of course, not by the motherhood theme itself but by the device used to represent it: breasts. And they were not depicted as they might be on a show such as Sesame Street in the United States—by realistic photography in which a mother is seen discreetly nursing her child without revealing much, if any, breast—but rather cartooned and crafted to be explicitly naked and boldly displayed. These breasts lingered in my mind, fascinating to me in a way they obviously were not to my Japanese friends. Most of those I asked, also mothers of nursery school children who watched Ponkiki in the mornings, had not even noticed the breasts. Those who had found them unremarkably “cute” (kawat). Yet as I reflected further, their unremarkable cuteness was what I found to be so striking—naked breasts standing for motherhood on a show targeted to young children.

Such a convention of representation was different from those with which I was familiar in the country I had just left, the United States. Granted, breasts generate no less interest or attention in the United States than in Japan, but the fixation in the United States is exclusively sexual, particularly in the medium of public or mass culture. This fixation undoubtedly accounts for the discomfiture that surrounds even the inadvertent slippage of maternal breasts into public view. It was not until summer 1994 that women succeeded in getting legislation passed in the state of New York to stem the discrimination they constantly face when nursing in public. Exposing their breasts was said to be inappropriate and unseemly, and women were told to vacate the places they were patronizing—stores, boutiques, restaurants, even alternative bookstores. One doubts that any of these women would be similarly challenged were their breasts revealed through sexy dressing.

In maternal representations across such U.S. media as television, cinema, magazines, and advertisements, mothers are invariably clothed. Their bodies are covered—and much noted when not, as when the pregnant Demi Moore posed nude on the cover of Vanity Fair—and their motherhood is largely conveyed through such depictions as hugging, reading a book to, or making breakfast for a child. Would the gaiety and fleshiness of the bouncing breasts on Ponkiki be regarded in the United States as offensive or just strange? Would such a depiction amount to a transgression of the boundaries by which motherhood is marked and womanhood differentiated? Turning from such thoughts on that morning, I focused my attention again on the screen. The breasts were uniformly shaped—beautifully round, filled full like balloons, with nipples erect—and each was moving with the gracefulness of a cloud gently percolating in the pastel, skylike background. What were these figures signifying of motherhood to the children parked in front of their screens? As objects, their qualities were mixed: firm yet light, full yet soft, steadfast yet playful. So too was the image projected of mothers: tender and sweet yet confident, commanding, and tough.

Significant as well was the fact that each breast was separate but indistinguishable from the others. This was a pattern of social organization I had noted at my son’s nursery school, where crayons, for example, were not communally shared; each student was required to purchase crayons, and they had to be the same kind as every other student’s. All the floating breasts in the mother-song cartoon were exactly the same; none was smaller or bigger than any other and each moved at exactly the same speed. Was the message one of uniformity of motherhood or uniformity of the mother-child relationship or uniformity of children’s behavior as they enter the institution of school (or all or none of the above)? Or perhaps these repeated and duplicated images reflected the never-ending presence of a mother in her child’s life.

The breasts were designed to both stand apart from and stand for the realism of motherhood. Crafted as self-propelled and disembodied automatons, they were larger than life as well as reductive—distilling mothers to their breasts but making these breasts-mothers into the very essence of life itself. Imaginary, these mounds were meant not only to represent mothers, as they unambiguously did in my mind, but also to elicit the response by my neighborhood friends that they were charmingly “cute.” And then, of course, they were naked and drawn not with a staidness that muted or veiled the flesh but rather with a joyousness that celebrated and highlighted it. These were breasts that resembled apples—fresh, rounded, and firm. Wholesome but sensuous, they were a somewhat different evocation of motherhood than that triggered by the imagery of apple pie.

Story 2

In 1932 Kosawa Heisaku¹ traveled to Austria to deliver a paper to Sigmund Freud. Kosawa, the founder of psychoanalysis in Japan, was meeting Freud for the first time and presenting to him a theory he imagined the master would receive with great interest. Labeled the Ajase complex, his concept was built on the Freudian premise that children become adults by assuming their place within a social order whose rules and norms are internalized to shape the psychological desires and motivations of the self. Although Kosawa agreed with the assertion that a process of this kind is universal, he disagreed with the notion that it necessarily takes the shape of what Freud termed the Oedipus complex. The latter assumes a familial scenario in which the father’s role is central: By threatening castration, he compels the child to individuate from the mother and form an identity and love object apart from the family (Freud 1964a; 1964b; 1975). By contrast, Kosawa argued, socialization in Japan proceeds according to a different set of family dynamics. Dyadic rather than triangular, the family centers almost entirely on the relationship between mother and child, and there is a gradual development of this bond rather than an abrupt disrupture at the time of adolescence. In a process that barely involves the father, maturation is marked by the child’s ability to not break from the mother but remain bonded to her while recognizing her as a person rather than an omnipotent ideal and while overcoming the feelings of resentment this recognition initially engenders (Okonogi 1978, 1979).

Kosawa developed his theory of the Ajase complex to explain facts of Japanese social life different, he believed, from those implicit in Freudian concepts such as the Oedipus complex. He argued that these differences principally lay in three areas: dominant social values, family structure, and construction of self. Further, these areas intertwined, in Japan’s case, in a complex of psychosocial behavior regulated by a maternal principle rather than a paternal principle, assumed to be universal by Freud. In this context Kosawa presented the tale of Ajase—the Japanese version of the Indian prince Ajatasatru, a contemporary of the Buddha whose legend appears in Buddhist scriptures—as paradigmatic of the process of identity formation in Japan. The story, briefly told, is of Queen Idaike, who desires a child as a means of keeping her husband as she ages and loses her beauty. Consulting a seer, she is told that a sage living in the forest nearby will die within three years and be reincarnated as her son. Unable to wait, however, Idaike kills the seer and bears a son shortly thereafter. But the queen’s happiness is short lived, and fearful of being cursed by the dead sage, she tries twice to kill her desired child. Unsuccessful, Idaike accepts her fate and becomes a loving and dutiful mother.

Happy as a child, Ajase learns the history of his birth (and near death) at the time of adolescence. Disillusioned with the mother he has idealized, Ajase attempts to kill her. Failing, he is wracked with a guilt that brings on a disease so offensive that no one will approach him. His mother, however, stays by his side and attends to him with such love and devotion that Ajase loses his resentment of her. Idaike, too, forgives him, and the two reunite in a bond of mutual forgiveness.

As analyzed by Kosawa, the Ajase myth is a morality tale revealing the path a boy must take in order to mature into a man. According to Freud, of course, the Oedipus myth tells the same story, yet as Kosawa aimed to point out, the two versions are significantly different. In the Ajase myth, morality is reached through both guilt and forgiveness. Kosawa labeled Ajase’s type of guilt penitence. He argued that penitence forms the basis of Japanese morality and suggested that it differs from the kind of guilt motivated by fear of punishment as modeled in the Oedipus myth and incarnated by Freud in his doctrine of the castration threat. Boys, according to this model, obey the social law tabooing sex with their mothers (incest) because they fear being castrated by their fathers. In the Ajasean paradigm, by contrast, boys are compelled to abandon not eroticism for their mothers but hatred and resentment, and they are motivated to do this by a mother’s forgiveness rather than a father’s threat. Although in both cases a loss ensues, its nature is different. Losing his mother as an eroticized object, the oedipal child starts to individuate from his family and separate more definitively from his mother. For the Ajasean child, the loss is of mother as an idealized figure, and this loss enables rather than obstructs the continuation of the mother-child bond.

The Ajase myth encodes a social value of interrelatedness and mutual forgiveness that is conditioned by a family scenario in which mother is dominant and father, almost irrelevant. This social value is productive of a self that is defined and developed in terms of social relationships. The psychosocial complex crystallized by the Oedipus myth is quite different: Social law is based on a set of clear-cut, incontestable rules (incest taboo), enforced by the phallic authority of fathers in families where mothers are mere objects of desire, and constructive of a self individuated from others.

The theory Kosawa crafted with the Ajase tale was intended, in part, as an application of psychoanalytic methodology to a cultural area where it had not yet been applied. In part as well, however, it was a treatise on difference, on the patterns of psychosocial behavior in Kosawas part of the world that did not correspond to those described by Freud as being worldwide. And in this observation of cultural difference, Kosawa implicitly launched a challenge to the universalism and objectivism claimed by Freudian science and to its ethnocentrism and biases. Yet in Kosawas mind at least, he was not contesting at all the value of psychoanalysis, and he remained until his death in 1968 a devoted practitioner and teacher of psychoanalysis in Japan. Still, what he sought from Freud in the 1930s—recognition of the validity of the Ajase complex and admission that different cultures organize the socialization and construction of the psyche differently—was never granted by Freud himself and was also not granted, for close to forty years, by members of the international community of psychoanalysts.

Divides Between Theory and Ethnography

I started with the stories of animated breasts and contested theories for several reasons. First, I wish to address at the outset the issue of positionality and the thorny and problematic enterprise of studying culture, particularly in terms of differences. In this age of multiple posts—postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcoloniality, postcritique anthropology—there are those who no longer recognize the presence of entities bounded by history, geography, and customs that can be properly identified and differentiated from others as cultures (West 1992; Ferguson 1992). “Properly” is the key word here, for no one is blind to the fact that people everywhere identify themselves in terms of communities that share forms of language, everyday practice, and sets of meanings. The objection to the word “culture,” however, is to the tendency to reify and essentialize it. That is, to see behavior conditioned by a number of factors such as history, politics, and race as being only and thus unalterably cultural. “Culture,” in other words, is a simplified and reductive descriptor; it hides complexities of realities whether intended or not.

One corrective to such myopia, of course, is to abandon using “culture” altogether. Another is to refocus attention on those ways in which cultural borders are crossed, transgressed, or made fluid: transnational globalisms, intercultural contact zones, people who have either multiple cultural identities or none (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Still other scholars, those active in the debates about multi-culturalism, for example, speak directly about difference and position: Multiple cultures are gathered within boundaries of nationality or have been seized under colonialist or imperialist ones (Spivak 1988; Mitchell 1995; Bhabha 1992). Within hegemonic power structures, different cultures are assessed and treated differently, and power compels the production or obstruction of cultural identities every day (Gates 1987) and in every part of the world, as we all are keenly aware from recent events. That culture must be studied within the context of power is almost a commonplace these days. Also, attention is increasingly placed on differences within groups or categories of people such as African Americans, women, homosexuals, and the U.S. middle class (Lorde 1992; de Lauretis 1987). The positionality each of us assumes in different groups is also critical: We all are products of multiple factors, histories, and relationships that affect our experience of and treatment within (not so) shared identifiers. Thus from many different schools of thought and many kinds of political activists we hear that identities, including those recognized as somehow cultural, are shifting and unstable rather than timeless and fixed, and differentiated and power-laden rather than singular, unified, and pure.

None of the foregoing is new, of course, but I am coming to the first point I wish to make with my stories. Namely, being an anthropologist these days or one who is committed, for whatever reason, to studying the behavior of people who share some, and to some degree, common boundaries is exceedingly tricky; those of us who proceed anyway do so warily, as if there were land mines on our path ready to detonate at any minute. As I choose an image from a Japanese children’s show and use it to ponder conventions of representation, meanings of the female body and nudity, and practices of motherhood in a land where I am considered by everyone around me a nonnative and outsider (gaijin, a term that means literally outside person and one that even the women I became closest to never fully abandoned), I am faced with the possibility that I am just making up a story. I see in these breasts something paradigmatic of what my later research revealed of mothers, motherhood, and mothering in the Tokyo neighborhood I studied, yet these breasts shaped a story for me in a way they did not for my Japanese friends.

I could call this story the art of anthropology—seeing and depicting human behavior in novel ways that open up understanding—and yet this art is uncomfortably close to what Malinowski called the anthropologists “magic” (1922): the wand we wave that clarifies the realities of others based on our training as anthropologists and our skills as ethnographers. Malinowski has been rightly criticized for the arrogance of what Clifford calls his assumption of “ethnographic authority” (1988): speaking for a group of which we are not a part and with a representation that is crafted by us and neither solicited nor necessarily approved of by them. Anthropologists have been heavily bombarded by both internal and external critiques since the early 1980s over just such issues as the position we take in studying cultures and cultural difference (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Said 1978, 1989; Alcoff 1991). As a result, many have taken a turn toward reflexivity, studying ourselves and the groups of which we are members or, when studying others, inserting ourselves clearly and visibly in the process.

Yet in such trends as turning away from other cultures and turning more toward ourselves, we run the danger, of course, of slipping back into the ethnocentrism and cultural narcissism we had intended to escape. We study ourselves so as not to impose our categories onto others, but then we produce and use theories that reflect only our own realities and retain rather than challenge the old power structures. Cultural difference, that is, stays at the periphery of theory. Feminists of color, for example, have noted that although their work is increasingly assigned in women’s studies classes in universities across the country, it is included much more for the worlds they describe than the theories they present.² These works are brought into the curriculum to overcome and correct for cultural bias, but differences (racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, sexual) are often simply reghettoized rather than integrated into theory.

Feminist anthropologists (Babcock 1993; Behar 1993, 1995; Lutz 1990, 1995) have similarly noted that the theoretical canon taught in graduate programs of anthropology rarely includes the works of women such as Ruth Benedict or Elsie Clew Parsons and even more rarely the works of such interesting minority women as Zora Neale Hurston and Ella Deloria. As Behar further elaborates, Margaret Mead, one of the most popular anthropologists, who found a way of making cultural difference interesting and relevant to the masses of nonacademics, is typically taught in introductory classes. Because she is categorized as a good ethnographer or good crafter of ethnographic stories, her work is relegated to the backwaters of theory. Such is also the fate of others similarly categorized. For example, Laura Bohannan, also known as Eleanor Bowen, adopted a style of imaginary realism in the 1950s that is thought to be quite chic today. Her ethnographic novel Return to Laughter is also a staple in introductory classes.

My point is that we need to find and explore new paths in integrating cultural studies (meaning here the study of culture[s] whether in anthropology, cultural studies, or other disciplines) and theory and that as cautious as we need to be, we also need to take risks. I feel this need to be particularly pressing in my own specialty, Japanese studies. As Kosawa discovered more than half a century ago, Japan is all too often relegated to a case study from the viewpoint of western academics. Freud read Kosawas paper on the Ajase complex not as a theory, as Kosawa had intended it, but as an account of behavior so different that it was dismissed as theo...