A Japanese Mirror E-Book

Ian Buruma

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In this scintillating book, Ian Buruma peels away the myths that surround Japanese culture. With piercing analysis of cinema, theatre, television, art and legend, he shows the Japanese both 'as they imagine themselves to be, and as they would like themselves to be.' A Japanese Mirror examines samurai and gangsters, transvestites and goddesses to paint an eloquent picture of life in Japan. This is a country long shrouded in enigma and in his compelling book, Buruma reveals a culture rich in with poetry, beauty and wonder.

Leseprobe

A JAPANESE MIRROR

Ian Buruma was born in The Netherlands in 1951. After studying Chinese literature and history at Leyden University he left for Japan in 1975 to study cinema at Nihon University College of Art. He spent almost seven years in Tokyo, writing, making films and acting in the modern Japanese theatre. He is currently the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. He lives in New York.

First published in hardback by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1984

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books, Ltd.

Copyright © Ian Buruma, 1984 Preface copyright © Ian Buruma, 2012

The moral right of Ian Buruma to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The picture acknowledgements on pp vii-viii constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84354-962-8 E-book ISBN: 978-1-78239-836-3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Sumie

Contents

Preface

1

Mirror of the Gods

2

The Eternal Mother

3

Holy Matrimony

4

Demon Woman

5

The Human Work of Art

6

The Art of Prostitution

7

The Third Sex

8

The Hard School

9

The Loyal Retainers

10

Yakuza and Nihilist

11

Making Fun of Father

12

Souls on the Road

13

Conclusion: A Gentle People

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Plates

1

An old fertility stone

2

A fertility goddess

3

Two fertility stones

4

Dance of The Dread Female of Heaven

5

Striptease, Japanese style

6

The lovers in Mizoguchi’s Taki no Shiraito

7

Chutaro being rejected by his mother (Mother Behind My Eyes)

8

The Mother of Japan trying to retrieve her son (A Japanese Tragedy)

9

Imamura Shohei’s favourite woman, Hidari Sachiko, in Insect Woman

10

Mother and son, in a print by Utamaro

11

The ‘Goruden (Golden) Combi’

12

Pathos in a ‘homu dorama’

13

The threatening female

14

Tani Naomi dominating her slavish benefactor in Tanizaki’s A Fool’s Love

15

The old man worshipping his daughter-in-law’s feet (Diary of a Madman)

16

Torture in a run-of-the-mill porn film

17

Tani Naomi being tortured in Rope and Skin

18

An Edo period courtesan, in a print by Utamaro

19

Modern Japanese amusing themselves at a geisha party

20

Scene in a ‘Toruko’ massage parlour

21

Female stars playing romantic male leads (Rose of Versailles)

22

Tamasaburo playing an Edo period courtesan

23

Romance in the Takarazuka theatre

24

Yoshitsune as a fighting bishonen

25

Kirokku in a fighting mood (Elegy to Fighting)

26

A hero of the Hard School

27

Kamikaze pilots

28

The assassination attempt on Moronao in Chushingura

29

A tattooed yakuza hero

30

Death of the oyabun

31

Sugawara Bunta shooting his opponent (Fighting Without Nobility)

32

Takakura Ken purifying his sword with saké

33

Sugawara Bunta, the nihilist hero

34

Good old Tora-san

35

Crowds queuing to see the newest Tora-san film

Figures

Examples from comic-books appear on pages 106, 108–9, 120, 126, 127, 138, 144 and 146.

Preface

Few things date as fast as popular culture and few cultures are as open to new waves, new fashions, new slang, newness of any kind, as the Japanese. Because of the nature of modern mass media – television, Internet, mobile phones – the process of renewal is going ever faster. The most widely read Japanese novels today, albeit almost exclusively by young women, are popular romances serialized almost by the hour on mobile phones. Once popular genres like ‘romantic’ porn films, produced in large numbers by the Nikkatsu studios, have disappeared. As is true in most countries, pornography has shifted almost entirely to the Internet, where it is all much more hard core.

When I wrote A Japanese Mirror in the early 1980s, all this was inconceivable. To a Japanese born in 1983, when the book was first published, most of the characters and stories described in the book, from yakuza heroes to the heart-throbs in girls’ manga, are probably wholly unknown.

To be sure, there are still people – young people, even – who enjoy reading novels by Tanizaki, and watching films by Ozu, Kurosawa, and Mizoguchi. Some may even be buying old manga. But these are becoming rarified tastes and they can no longer be classified as popular culture.

Japanese fashion – Kenzo, Kansai, Mori – was already well established in the 1970s, especially in Paris, and there was an art house (remember those?) audience for Japanese cinema in the larger European and American cities. But even in the early eighties, Japan was still an exotic country to most people. The worldwide popularity of Japanese anime had not even begun. The enormous fame of the Murakamis (Haruki, the writer, and Takashi, the artist) was yet to come, as was the consumption of sushi as a global food. In fact, it is the very lack of exoticism that makes Murakami’s novels accessible to readers everywhere. The same is probably true of Murakami Takashi’s ‘cult of cute’. And the hunger for raw tuna is so universal that these great fish are destined soon to disappear from the seas.

To a contemporary reader, then, A Japanese Mirror will now have acquired a patina of age. Not that everything I wrote about in the book was new even in 1983. Far from it; some of the culture I tried to hold up to the light went back as far as the 11th century. But even historical description reflects the time when it was written. Thus, the atmosphere of the book is of a different Japan from the country today.

There are links, of course, between the present time and the pop culture of the 1970s, and, if you look hard enough, the 11th century. The sweetness and cruelty of Murakami Takashi’s slick modern art, derived from comic books and anime, can be found in Japanese art and entertainment of the quite distant past. Likewise, some of the sexual fantasies projected on the Internet today can doubtless still be discerned in different forms in the movies, comic books, or 18th century woodblock prints described in the book. Often, if you study the artistic expressions of an old nation, you will find continuities behind the façade of constant change. I suppose that is what we might call ‘national identity’.

To give some idea of this identity, of Japaneseness, was one of my aims in writing the book. Hence the comparisons of modern striptease parlors with ancient Shinto fertility rites, or of young heroes in girls’ comics with the rakes of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th century The Tale of Genji, or 18th century Japanese Robin Hoods with modern gangster pictures, and so on.

There is a risk involved in such intellectual enterprises, of going on a wild goose chase for something essential in a culture that is far too varied and fluid to be reduced in that way. Certain Japanese intellectuals, perhaps as a reaction to more than a hundred years of rapid and sometimes abject Westernization, are prone to pinpoint and celebrate the uniqueness of Japaneseness. This can serve as a theoretical justification for crude chauvinism. The ‘theory of Japaneseness’, Nihonjinron, was so fashionable for a time, especially in the seventies and eighties, that many Western visitors mistook it for a true picture of Japan. Not only was Japan presented as unique in such theorizing, but also as uniquely unique.

In fact, many things claimed by the theorists to be uniquely Japanese are simply human and can be recognized in many places, far removed from Japan. The great scholar of Japanese culture, Ivan Morris, wrote a highly entertaining study of historical Japanese heroes entitled The Nobility of Failure; I was indebted to many of his insights when I wrote my book. But he too gave too much credence to the theories of uniqueness. The noble failures he describes – warriors who die for hopeless causes, from Yamato Takeru in the 4th century to the kamikaze pilots of the Second World War – are to be found in the histories of all nations. Remember, for example, the Alamo, or Masada: most nations have their share of hopeless causes and noble failures.

In trying to sail between the Scylla of cultural uniqueness and the Charybdis of vapid universalism, I aimed to show that although the Japanese have a distinct culture, they are not exotic, or weird, or utterly ‘other’, but human like everyone else. Which leaves us with the question: who are ‘the Japanese’? It is a common fallacy in national history museums, meant to instill a sense of belonging, common purpose and patriotism, to present a timeless vision of a people, as though the Gauls in Roman times were essentially the same people as the modern French, or the people of the Jomon period (14,000-4,000 BCE) already shared typical characteristics with today’s Japanese readers of Murakami Haruki. This is, of course, patent nonsense. Any decent stab at history, including the history of pop culture, must explain change as much as continuity.

A Japanese Mirror is about the ways in which Japanese imagine and reimagine themselves, about fantasies and stories. Naturally, these reflect different times and circumstances. Japanese growing up in the militarized 1930s had different fantasies and different heroes from most Japanese today. In a sense, they were a different people, who happened to speak roughly the same language and eat roughly the same kind of food. And yet, just as the Scylla of uniqueness cannot be entirely avoided, one can’t help noticing certain continuities.

It would be a categorical mistake to take these continuities in the popular imagination as accurate descriptions of what the Japanese are actually like in real life. Our heroes and villains can certainly reveal important things about us, but these often stand in contrast to reality. In their imaginary world – expressed in books, pictures, movies, comics, anime, or computer games – the Japanese often admire the heroic loner, the outlaw who pays the price of nonconformity by being a permanent outsider, rather like typical heroes in American Westerns. In fact, Japanese society is marked by a high degree of conformity. Community is highly prized and social isolation is seen as one of the cruelest punishments imaginable. Few people really want to be loners, which is precisely why the outsider is a romantic hero. As the parallel with American Westerns shows, this is not unique to Japanese culture, but (like the nobility of failure) it is certainly a prominent feature of it.

Something that is often ignored by students of cultures is the question of class. Much popular culture is aimed at the lowest common denominator. Some entertainments tell us more about the class of people who enjoy them, than about an entire nation. If one were to define Italian society by the quality of its television shows, one would arrive at an oddly skewed picture. The same is true, obviously, of Japan. Television in Japan tends to be divided between a kind of non-stop slapstick (on the private channels) and deadly earnestness (on NHK, the public broadcaster). Again, the contrast with real life is instructive, especially in the case of the slapstick. People appearing in game shows, quiz shows, chat shows, or comedy shows, tend to dress up in zany costumes, laugh crazily, and screech and jump about like hysterics. Their behaviour, in other words, is the opposite of common everyday Japanese behaviour which is, on the whole, modest, restrained, undemonstrative – even timid. Showtime is a chance to let down one’s hair, and for others to enjoy this spectacle vicariously. The question, which is more authentic, the screeching or the restraint, I shall leave to the psychologists.

Because culture has changed since 1983, A Japanese Mirror cannot and should be read as a definitive take on the Japanese character. To be definitive about anything that is subject to change is impossible, and there is probably no such thing as ‘the Japanese character’ anyway, certainly not a definitive one. It is for this reason that I have resisted the temptation to update the book by adding new fashions and fads; by the time you read this, those too might be dated. What I wrote about at the time were things that happened to fascinate me, in film, in print, on stage. If these fascinations added up to a kind of portrait of a people, so much the better. They could also be read as a kind of portrait of myself, as I was then. In the life of a writer, too, there are changes and continuities.

So I offer you the book again, without revision. Cyril Connolly once wrote that any book still in print after nine years is a classic. There may have been an element of self-consolation, of hope more than conviction, in this statement. He was never a best-selling author, but his best books do keep popping back into print. I hope A Japanese Mirror survives as a classic book on Asia, in the company of J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, and Simon Leys’s Chinese Shadows. But that, my dear reader, is for you to decide.

The mirror, they say, ‘reflects eternal purity’. It does not foster vanity nor reflect the ‘interfering self’. It reflects the depth of the soul.

Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

1

Mirror of the Gods

Man has always created gods in his own image. The Japanese are no exception. The oldest gods and myths are not necessarily unique to Japan. Some of them probably originated on the Asian continent, but they were soon adapted to a Japanese way of life and thinking.

In the beginning, however, there were no gods at all. There was, instead, something resembling an egg. Out of this egg came seven generations of gods, including a brother and sister called Izanagi and Izanami. It is with them that the Japanese myth really began.1

These two were groping around in the hot lava of Chaos with the ‘Jewel-spear of Heaven’ when some brine dropped off its tip, coagulating in the sea to make an island. On this island they erected a phallic pillar separating Heaven and Earth. Then they noticed that he had something she did not and decided to put two and two together. The art of kissing was learnt by watching a pair of amorous doves and the rest of the happy union was inspired by the movements of a wagtail.

Izanami gave birth to the Japanese islands as well as to a large number of deities, but the god of fire proved to be too much for her. During his painful birth, she badly burnt her genitals. And after one last exertion whereby she bore the gods of metal, clay and water from her vomit, faeces and urine, Izanami perished and disappeared into the nether regions.

She was followed into the underworld by her grief-stricken brother/husband. She begged him not to look at her in her horrible state, but he could not resist a peek, and seeing her putrifying body swarming with maggots, he exclaimed: ‘What a hideous and polluted land I have come to unawares!’

Thus shamed, the furious Izanami sent the Ugly Females of the Underworld after him with the express order to kill him. He barely managed to escape from these furies and then he was able to stop his sister/wife from catching him only by blocking her way with a rock. Shaken by these events, he announced his divorce from her in the traditional Japanese manner: a word from the husband was enough to sever the relationship. In retaliation Izanami vowed that she would strangle a thousand people a day in his land. Whereupon he replied that he would set up fifteen hundred houses for childbirth in one day.

Back from the underworld, Izanagi took great pains to purify himself from the pollution of the dead. He had a thorough bath in the Tachibana river and once again deities were born: Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, crawled out of his left eye, and her brother Susanoo, the Wind God, emerged from his nose. Amaterasu was allotted the Plain of High Heaven and Susanoo was put in charge of the seas. Far from happy to accept this duty, however, he howled and screamed, desperate to be with his mother in the underworld. But before his descent into the land of darkness, he decided to pay his sister a visit in Heaven.

Apart from having a mother-fixation, Susanoo was a roughneck. After arriving in his sister’s domain, he smashed the divisions in the rice-fields; he relieved himself in a most unseemly manner during sacred rites; but his worst prank of all was to fling a flayed colt into the hall where the Sun Goddess and her entourage were busy weaving sacred garments. This so distressed one of the weaving maidens that she accidentally pricked her genitals and died.2

Amaterasu was a patient goddess and she loved her brother dearly. At first she put up with his behaviour, making excuses for him and indulging him, hoping that would make him stop. But now he had gone too far. In a huff she retired into a dark cave near Ise (which is now a popular tourist spot). As a result the world was plunged into complete darkness.

The gods decided to hold a meeting. In their very Japanese attempt to reach consensus, ‘the voices of the myriad deities were like swarming flies in the fifth moon … ’3 Several attempts were made to lure the goddess from her cave. She would not budge. Finally a tub was placed upside down in front of the cave and Ama no Uzume, the Dread Female of Heaven, climbed on top of it. In the style of an ancient shamaness, she went into a trance, and began to stamp her feet, slowly at first, but progressively faster, rolling her eyes and wildly waving her spear. She went into an erotic frenzy, which, cheered on by the other deities, reached its shuddering climax when she revealed her breasts and then ‘pushed her skirt-string down to her private parts’.4 With all eyes on her sacred genitals, the gods burst out laughing so loudly that the whole universe could hear them.

Amaterasu, who could not bear other people having fun without her, put her head out of the cave to see what was so funny. Immediately a mirror was pushed in front of her and the Dread Female of Heaven cried out that a new goddess had been found. Amaterasu completely lost her composure and frantically reached out to grasp her reflected image. This gave the Strong-handed Male a chance to grab hold of her and he pulled her out of her hiding place. The world was light again.

Culture of any kind is always influenced by many fads and fashions. Japanese culture has been worked on by history, both native and foreign, by Buddhism, Confucianism, and even at times by Christianity. But underneath the changing surface it has never quite let go of its oldest native roots which are connected to the Shinto cult. By this I do not mean the nationalistic State Shinto concocted by politicians in the late nineteenth century when they were pushing for a strong national identity, but the whole range of sensual nature worship, folk beliefs, ancient deities and rituals. It is the creed of a nation of born farmers, which Japan in many ways still is.

The word Shinto was first coined in the seventh century to distinguish it from Buddhism, called Butsudo. It means Way of the Gods, but it can hardly be called a religion, for there is almost no trace in it of abstract speculation, neither is there much awareness of, or even interest in, another world outside our own. Heaven in the minds of the ancient Japanese was a cosy sort of place full of industrious villagers tending rice-fields.5 There is no evidence of a system of ethics or statecraft, such as we see in China. The earliest myths are, in fact, typically Japanese dramas revolving around human relationships, liberally spiced with sex.

Shinto has many rituals, but no dogma. A person is Shinto in the same way that he is born Japanese.6 It is a collection of myths and ceremonies that give form to a way of life. It is a celebration, not a belief. There is no such thing as a Shintoist, for there is no Shintoism.

Women play a somewhat ambivalent, though significant part in Shinto. Virgins still serve in the holy shrines. And one of the most celebrated figures in Japanese life from ancient times to this day is the mother, hence perhaps the importance of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu. In patriarchal societies the sun tends to be masculine. In Bengal, for instance, there is a yearly celebration of the marriage between the earth goddess and the sun god.7 As in the Japanese creation myth, the sun rising from the sea is a symbol of the life force in India, but it is associated with Shiva, a male god. In Shinto, which bears traces of a matriarchal culture, it is the other way round: earth is ruled by a male, the spear-carrying Okuninushi. But the source of life is water and the sun rising from it, the symbol of Japan, is female. So too, is the symbolism of fire. In Japan Izanami gives birth to fire and dies as a result.8 In Greece, which is a patriarchal society, the myth tells of a male hero, Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods and is severely punished for it.

Worship of nature obviously includes sex. Like most Japanese, the gods felt no guilt about sex as such. Once the wagtail showed the way Izanami and Izanagi could not stop. Sex is an essential, indeed central part of nature. There is no question of sin. The brother and sister gods were not the only ones in the Japanese pantheon to so enjoy themselves. The Master of the Land (Okuninushi) had numerous lovers in the world he pacified and the only time he ran into trouble was when he refused to go to bed with his lover’s ugly sister. For this breach of good manners, the Japanese emperors – his descendants – were doomed to be mortal.

It is often said that one can get away with almost anything in Japan as long as one is not caught and thus socially shamed. In other words, hedonism is held in check by social taboos. This is putting it rather simply, but let us compare Izanagi and Izanami with Adam and Eve. The latter were thrown out of the Garden of Eden because Eve took a bite from the apple. They were made conscious of good and evil and only thus was it possible to sin.

Japan has no such myth. Izanagi and Izanami were not directly punished for anything they did. They were certainly not removed from any Garden of Eden. Their crisis came when Izanami was seen by her husband in a state of pollution. The disaster concerned her shame rather than anything she consciously did. Although the gods enjoyed sex with impunity, they were terrified of pollution, especially the pollution of death. Izanagi, seeing the putrid body of his sister, barely escaped death himself. One could perhaps say that pollution is the Japanese version of original sin. One must add that women in Shinto, as in many religions, are considered to be more polluted than men, because blood is a form of pollution. In some parts of Japan women used to be segregated in special huts during menstruation.9

The connection between sex and death is certainly not typically Japanese. Georges Bataille, among others, has written eloquently about this concept.10 But although sex as such is not a sin in Japanese thought, there does seem to be a strong fear of the destructive forces sexual passion can unleash, especially in women. (Needless to say, this too is not uniquely Japanese, as one can see in the work of many Catholic artists.)

Jealousy in particular is one such force the Japanese fear. This explains their deeply ambivalent attitude to women. They worship them, especially as mothers, but also fear them as corrupters of purity. Izanami is the creator of life as well as the personification of death and pollution. Her jealousy further prompted her to vow to strangle a thousand people a day. She had no reason to be jealous of another woman, however, for, as far as we know, there was not one in Izanagi’s life. But she hated losing her marital status. And social status, however hard it may be to be bullied by possessive mothers-in-law or neglected by unfaithful husbands, is something most Japanese women cannot do without. Any threat to take it away from them can unleash jealousy of the most violent kind and there is sufficient evidence that men live in morbid fear of it. It is still customary for brides to wear a white hood at their wedding. It looks like a loosely wrapped turban made out of a bed-sheet and it is called a tsunakakushi, a ‘concealer of horns’, the horns namely of jealousy.11

In ‘The Tale of Genji’, written at the beginning of the eleventh century, a Buddhist monk tries to dissuade a mother from letting her daughter have an affair with a married man. He argues that:

Women are born with a heavy load of guilt. As a retribution of the evil passions in their nature they are condemned to flounder about in the darkness of the long night. If your daughter incurs the jealousy of this man’s wife, she will be shackled with fetters from which she can never free herself in this life or the next.12

In The Life of an Amorous Woman, a seventeenth-century novel about a fallen lady, Ihara Saikaku describes how a group of upper-class women gather in a so-called ‘jealousy meeting’ (rinki-ko) to complain about their philandering husbands.13 One after the other, the women, beside themselves with rage, come forward to vent their pent-up emotions by thrashing an effigy of a woman, symbol of all the wicked ladies who led their men astray. Typically it is always the other woman, and not the husband himself, who has to bear the brunt of jealousy.

The most fearsome jealous wives are vengeful spirits who are finishing a job they had left undone when they were still alive. Old plays and folk tales are full of ghosts and spirits of betrayed wives tormenting husbands and rivals, usually ending in cruel and violent death. These horror stories are still performed in theatres and cinemas, traditionally during the clammy summer months, when people are in need of something to chill them.

Like earthquakes and other natural calamities common in the Japanese isles, jealousy, pollution and death simply happen. They will always be with us. But they do not occur because of a sinful act. The concept of sin was, and still is, alien to Japanese thought. The Japanese gods (kami) are like most people, neither wholly good, nor completely bad. There is no Satan in Japan.

One could argue perhaps that Susanoo, the Sun Goddess’s brother, is ‘bad’, but certainly not in any metaphysical or absolute sense. He is the Wind God: his badness just blows. His worst crime, serious enough in Japanese society, is his erratic, selfish and rudely destructive behaviour. He is an unruly adolescent indulging in what is called mewaku kakeru (to cause bother) – a verb, incidentally, often used by the Japanese to describe their behaviour in Asia during the war. Their violence too was like the wind; that it often blew like a hurricane wasn’t their fault: it just happened.

Susanoo’s punishment is a common one in traditional society: he is banished, compelled to be a drifter. This is an unpleasant fate, but it makes him a rather typical Japanese hero.14 The violent man breaking the social rules is not always condemned in Japan – as a fantasy, that is. Social rules, rather than an abstract system of morals, control Japanese behaviour. But they are so pervasive that it takes a hero to break them. The only way for him to do so is to be outside society, for in the end, the community is always stronger than the individual.

So in their hero worship the Japanese often have it both ways: the security of a closed social system is preserved, but the heroic outsider lets people taste vicariously the forbidden fruit of extreme individualism. Also the impetuous violence of the unruly hero (burai) and his contempt for the rules of society are sometimes seen as forms of sincerity, of pure nature reasserting itself against man-made rules. Finally, the hero resembles nothing so much as an angry child ranting and raving against uncomprehending adults. Thus, far from being a model of evil, the screaming Wind-God is regarded with a certain affection. His badness is not evil, but simply a part of human nature which civilized people can learn to suppress, as indeed Susanoo himself manages to do after getting most respectably married to the Rice-Princess. With her he settles down to a life of the blandest domesticity.

Amaterasu’s reaction to her fierce brother’s abominations is quite compliant at first. She indulges his whims like a doting mother blind to her boy’s faults: after all, he cannot help the way he is. When things finally go too far, it is she who retreats into the cave, not he. One could conclude, as many casual observers of the Japanese scene do, that men rule their women like spoiled despots. This is a superficial view, however, for at a very basic level (and Shinto is fairly basic) women have an awesome power over their men.

In myths the magic of the vagina is more potent than that of the phallus. There is a phallic god called Sarutahiko, blessed with a long, red nose. This walking penis, symbol of the force of life, is so powerful that demons flee at the sight of him. And yet it is said that when the Dread Female of Heaven pushed down her skirt-string even he lost his strength and wilted like a dead flower.15

The exhibition of the Dread Female’s private parts, which so greatly amused the gods, probably had a magical significance. Early sculptures have been excavated showing female divinities exposing their genitals.16 This image was later transposed to Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy.17 ‘Going to see Kannon’ is still a popular slang expression for visiting a striptease parlour. And only in Japan would an internationally known film-star insist on kissing his mother’s genitals publicly at her funeral. This was widely reported in the press, with respect rather than shock or even much surprise.18

There are many legends about the magical qualities of the female organ. To mention just one: two women were chased by a group of demons. They tried to get away in a rowing boat, but still the demons kept up their pursuit. Then, just at the critical moment, a goddess appeared, advising the women to reveal their private parts. She proceeded to do so herself. The women, a little bashfully at first, followed her example and the demons gave up the chase, roaring with laughter.19

This laughter among gods, demons and men is not just a sign of good fun. It may be that too, but it is also a liberation from fear. Laughter in Japan, like anywhere else, is often a mechanism for breaking the tension, in the same way that people laugh at violence in the cinema. The female sex in all its impenetrable mystery is feared as much as it is worshipped. Or, more accurately, it is worshipped because it is feared. As in many cultures, there are legends about this fearsome side of female power: about clam-like vaginas that snip off male genitals like steel traps.

Buddhism helped to strengthen these fears. There is no room for women in Buddhist Nirvana. They have to be reborn as men first. According to a well-known sutra ‘woman is an emissary from Hell; she will destroy the germ of the Buddha. Her appearance seems holy, but she has the heart of a demon.’20

The female body is a source of pollution. Murasaki Shikibu, the authoress of ‘The Tale of Genji’, certainly not a prudish work, described the naked body as ‘unforgettably horrible’. None the less nudity in Japan is a strange and paradoxical thing, for people do take baths in public, in certain rural areas even mixed baths. Yet a large number of schoolboys and old ladies are hired as part-time workers at Japanese customs offices to delete with ink and razor any pubic hair that might be showing in imported publications. But striptease of the crudest kind is allowed to take place in Japan unimpeded. Morality is very much a matter of time and place and nothing is absolute.

The fascination in religious ceremonies, myths and the popular arts for the sexual organs (the grotesque stylization of male and female genitals in erotic woodblock prints, for example) is as much a celebration of life and fertility as a form of exorcism. It is as if one can ward off the dangers inherent in the mysteries of nature by laughter or stylization, by turning raw nature into man-made symbols. In various parts of Japan there are literally ‘laughing festivals’, where people laugh at local shrines to please the gods. Inside these shrines one often finds images of female and male sexual organs.

Though absolute Evil seems to be absent from Japanese thought, every form of pollution, including wounds, sores, blood, death and even simple uncleanliness is to be feared. The traditional antidote to the polluting forces of nature is purification. Izanagi’s ablutions in the Tachibana river after his return from the Underworld are a typical example. Naturally, purification in one form or another exists in religious ceremonies everywhere, but in few cultures is it taken as seriously and is it as much a part of daily life as in Japan.

One finds evidence of it in the most disparate places: in the wrestling ring, for example, which sumo-wrestlers sprinkle with purifying salt before every bout. Little heaps of salt can also be seen in front of homes, on the doorsteps of bars, massage parlours or any other place where pleasure is bought and sold. The Japanese feeling for purity manifests itself in other, less obvious ways: the ubiquitous habit of wearing white gloves by people performing public functions, for instance. Politicians making speeches wear them, taxi drivers are never without them, policemen and even elevator operators in department stores wear them; everywhere one goes in Japan, one sees this ceremonial white on people’s hands.

Bathing is a cult. Keeping clean is so universal a preoccupation that all one smells in packed commuter trains during rush hours in Tokyo is a faint whiff of soap. Most Shinto festivals involve ritual bathing. The first bathhouses, still a social institution in cities, were part of Buddhist temples, dating from the seventh century. But, like many religious habits in Japan – drinking saké is another – bathing soon became a sensual experience enjoyed for its own sake.

The Japanese have the same attitude to bathing as Frenchmen reserve for eating: they do it with a mixture of connoisseurship and physical abandon. A bath can be enjoyed alone, but it is more often taken with many others, keeping up with the latest gossip while scrubbing one’s neighbour’s back. Bathing has become a major gimmick in holiday resorts built around hot springs. One place features a gigantic heart-shaped bath with room for hundreds of romping honeymoon couples; at another resort one can bathe in a solid gold bath in the shape of a large chicken, which costs 1,500 yen (five dollars) a minute to sit in; and there is even a bath that moves up a mountain on tracks so that one can enjoy the view while soaking in the tubs.

But pleasure has its reverse side in Japan. Purification rituals in Shinto are an example of what has been called the stoic hedonism of the Japanese.21 As in many cultures, though few are as extreme, there is a strong belief in Japan that physical suffering and deprivation are purifying experiences. Standing on smouldering bonfires or wading through icy rivers stark naked in mid-winter – to name but two uncomfortable examples – and sensual pleasure, even erotic ecstasy, go hand in hand in the Japanese celebration of the gods.

These celebrations are called matsuri. They are like Latin carnivals or fiestas, celebrations as well as outlets for popular frustration; every Japanese city, town and village has a matsuri, often more than one. These fiestas have been influenced by Buddhism, but they are basically Shinto, and they are always exuberant, sometimes escalating into real violence. Experiencing a matsuri one has the impression of massive energy constantly teetering on the edge of chaos, like a primitive tribal dance. In some villages huge phalluses are carried through the streets like battering rams, and are violently mated with swaying female symbols held by sweating and heaving youths from a neighbouring shrine.

The novelist Mishima Yukio, who committed suicide in 1970, called the matsuri ‘a vulgar mating of humanity and eternity, which could be consummated only through some such pious immorality as this’.22 What shocked and obviously titillated him as a boy was ‘the expression of the most wanton and undisguised rapture in the world … ’23

Pain and ecstasy, sex and death, worship and fear, purity and pollution are all vital elements in the Japanese festival. The Shinto gods are very Japanese in their tastes: they do not demand sacrifices – apart from some food – prayers or a dogma of faith; instead they demand to be entertained, like the Sun Goddess; they want to celebrate, to laugh. Above all, they want spectacle, masquerade, and the sexier the better. In a sense, they invite the people to break the very taboos they themselves symbolize.

It is this theatre for the gods that forms the basis of popular culture in Japan. This primitive, often obscene, frequently violent side of Japanese culture has persisted to this day, despite the frequent official disapproval of its raunchier manifestations and the superimposition of more austere and alien forms.

The first performer of this kind of spectacle was of course the Dread Female of Heaven. Her sacred striptease was the prototype of what was later known as Kagura, literally ‘that which pleases the gods’. Though Kagura is still performed at shrines it has lost much of its popular appeal. But its spirit can still be seen in more modern dramatic forms. The contemporary striptease parlour is one example.

The ‘Toji Deluxe’ is a well known striptease parlour in Kyoto. It is a garish, neon-lit place in a dark, dreary street behind the station. The entrance is decorated with great garlands of plastic flowers, like colourful funeral wreaths. The customer is led through a purple-lit hall into an inner chamber where the entertainment takes place. It is a huge space bathed in a warm pink light. In the middle stands a large, slowly revolving stage.

High above the spectators is a second tier of revolving stages made of transparent plastic. The walls and ceilings are completely covered with mirrors, multiplying the ten or so girls into a kind of cubist harem painting.

The audience is welcomed by a male voice crackling through a loudspeaker and several women dressed in flimsy nightdresses toddle on to the ramps (some hastily handing their babies to colleagues backstage), carrying what look like picnic hampers, neatly covered with colourful cloths. These baskets are placed on the stage and the cloths carefully spread out. Then, with an exquisite sense of decorum, the girls unpack their accoutrements, vibrators, cucumbers and condoms and put them side by side, in a neat little row, as if preparing for a traditional tea-ceremony.

This done, the girls stand up and to the loud and scratchy tune of ‘Strangers in the Night’ they adopt a few perfunctory poses; not so much a dance as a series of tableaux vivants. Their faces remain impassive. Japanese dancers, classical and modern, often seem to wear a mask of complete detachment, as if their motions are automatic, the human will numbed into submission.

But then a slight smile shines through: not the plastic grin of American show-girls or the studied naughtiness of the French music-hall, but more like a maternal assurance that there is nothing whatsoever to fear.

Still smiling they invite members of the audience to join them on stage. Blushing and giggling, neatly dressed men on company outings are pushed on to the stage by their colleagues. Their ensuing attempts to have sex with the dancers are part of the entertainment. Not surprisingly in the circumstances, these attempts mostly fail, much to the merriment of the audience.

The show must go on, however, and with more blushing and giggling the young company employees are hastily pushed off the platform, whence they struggle awkwardly back to their seats with their trousers still dangling round their ankles. The best part, the real show, the thing that most men have paid to see, is still to come: the Tokudashi (special event), also known as the ‘open’, for reasons that will become clear.

The girls shuffle over to the edge of the stage, crouch and, leaning back as far as they can, slowly open their legs just a few inches from the flushed faces in the front row. The audience, suddenly very quiet now, leans forward to get a better view of this mesmerizing sight, this magical organ, revealed in all its mysterious glory.

The women, still with their maternal smiles, slowly move around, crablike, from person to person, softly encouraging the spectators to take a closer look. To aid the men in their explorations, they hand out magnifying glasses and small hand-torches, which pass from hand to hand. All the attention is focussed on that one spot of the female anatomy; instead of being the humiliated objects of masculine desire, the women seem in complete control, like matriarchal goddesses.

The tension of this remarkable ceremony is broken in the end by wild applause, and loud, liberating laughter. Several men produce handkerchiefs to wipe the sweat off their heated brows.

All this is a long way from the austere, controlled, exquisitely restrained, melancholy beauty most people in the West have come to associate with Japan. It is true that the contrast between the native, Shinto-inspired, popular culture and the more aristocratic, Buddhist-inspired aesthetic is so strong that one could almost speak of two separate cultures.24

This is partly a matter of class. Foreign influence is generally felt first by those with the time and money to indulge in exotic fashions. Indeed much in the aristocratic tradition was imported from more sophisticated societies (mainly China and Korea). Thus the first Buddhists in Japan were aristocrats at the court of Prince Shotoku in the beginning of the seventh century. And during the Heian period (794–1183) all the male literati wrote in Chinese – the women did not and consequently they were the pioneers in native Japanese literature.

Importing upper-class culture is not a typically Japanese phenomenon. French culture in Europe was eagerly lapped up in the nineteenth-century salons of the upper classes. But the impact of foreign importations, usually at a much higher stage of development, on an isolated island culture was enormous and in some ways traumatic. Moreover Buddhism and Confucianism with their strong emphasis on ethics and morality were useful tools to keep the masses under control. The seventh-century rulers of Japan deemed Buddhism ‘excellent for protecting the state’.25

But the native tradition never disappeared. Unlike Europe, where Christianity was quite successful in squashing or at least replacing ancient forms of worship, primitive cults in Japan were never crushed by more sophisticated official creeds. Though the distinctions, especially at the most popular level, are somewhat blurred at the edges, Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines still exist side by side. Rites of both creeds are observed, though not always at the same time or place. This might be due to the Japanese lack of concern for ideology or dogma. Instead great importance is attached to externals, to the attitudes proper to assume on each occasion, because ‘appearance’ is more important than ‘being’.26

Aristocratic culture, because of its Buddhist influence, emphasizes restraint and austere perfection to the point of morbidity: not surprisingly, the Japanese, high and low, use Buddhist rituals to bury their dead. In popular Shinto culture everything human and sensual is stressed and sometimes grotesquely exaggerated. Again not surprisingly, marriage is usually a Shinto ceremony, though nowadays many young couples, though not in any sense believers or even formal members, find it more chic to marry in Christian churches, which are most willing to oblige. In terms of traditional culture this means that the austerity of the No theatre, suffused with Zen Buddhism, co-exists with the violent extravagance of Kabuki.

Nevertheless, if one should ask a Japanese if he is a Buddhist or a Shintoist, he would not know what to say. Both, is the most likely answer. Or he might mumble something about the Japanese being non-religious. There are, however, hidden conflicts between the morality of the rulers and their officialdom, supported by Buddhism, Confucianism or even State Shinto, all depending on the period in history, and the Shinto way of life. Power in Japan has never rested so much on the letter of the law, as on a type of social totalitarianism. People were often made to behave according to imported codes, which they did not really share. Thus the tension between official and popular culture is always simmering under the surface. The harder the official pressure is, the more grotesque the manifestations of popular culture become. This was most apparent during the Edo period (1615–1867), the influence of which is still strongly felt today.

From the moment they came to power, the Tokugawa shoguns, who ruled during the entire Edo period, did all they could to suppress anything that could possibly pose a threat to their authority. The creed that served the authoritarian government best was Confucianism, especially the school of Chu Hsi, a twelfth-century Chinese philosopher, emphasizing loyalty and duty; originally to one’s parents, but most conveniently expanded to include one’s rulers, in effect the Tokugawa rulers themselves. It must be stressed that loyalty in Japan became something far more absolute than the original Chinese model.

Being terrified of disorder, the Tokugawa government tried with varying degrees of success to clamp down on the hedonistic, extravagant and erotic aspects of popular culture. This tug of war between officialdom and the common people is indeed still going on. Censorship and other other forms of control were based on the official morality, which was not an internalized religious morality, but included anything that supported the power of the state; the power of the state was the official morality.27

Homosexual prostitution, for example, was officially banned in 1648, although homosexuality was in no way thought to be sinful. Particularly amongst the samurai it was considered quite normal, desirable even. The reason for the crack-down was that upper-class warriors mixed with lower-class actors, hustlers and other members of the demi-monde. Worse still, they affected their habits. This was not acceptable, for Tokugawa power was based on rigid class divisions.

The subservient position of women in feudal society was also given the Confucian stamp of approval. The scholar Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714) wrote that ‘a woman must regard her husband as her lord and serve him with all the reverence and all the adoration of which she is capable. The chief duty of woman, her duty throughout life, is to obey.’ This seems a far cry from the world of the Sun Goddess and Izanami, where shamanesses held sway and even, like Himiko in the third century A.D., became queens of the land; or the Heian court, where promiscuous ladies were the arbiters, if not of real power, at least of taste. The Tokugawa government did everything to stamp out the last vestiges of matriarchy for ever.

To a large degree it succeeded in its aims. It became difficult and even dangerous for people to behave as independent individuals: everybody was judged by his or her rank in the social hierarchy, a habit which has, unfortunately, stuck. The only escape from this oppressive system was, as usual, the spectacle, the matsuri, the cruel world of theatres and brothels.

Within the strict boundaries of licensed areas, permitted and controlled by the government, people could let themselves go. The gods were entertained by female impersonators, male prostitutes, woodblock artists and courtesans. Popular urban culture of the Edo period, especially during the relatively prosperous seventeenth century, was intimately connected to this narrow world of pleasure. Writers, musicians, actors and painters, all were to be found in the officially despised but commonly adored ‘floating world’. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. One could say that little has fundamentally changed: violent entertainment and grotesque erotica are still important outlets in what continues to be an oppressive social system. Thus they have a social and political significance far beyond similar fare in the West.

Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when the Tokugawa regime came to an end, Japan entered the era of ‘Civilization and Enlightenment’ (Bunmei Kaika). She began to borrow from the West in the same wholesale way she had done eleven centuries before from China. This did not mean that the Tokugawa legacy of social oppression could be discarded as easily as the native kimono. Moreover, the influence from the then still highly puritanical West helped push the Sun Goddess even further into her cave.

Released from its self-imposed isolation, Japan became a little self-conscious. The Japanese ‘were like an anxious housewife preparing to receive guests, hiding away in closets common articles of daily use and laying aside comfortable everyday clothes, hoping to impress the guests with the immaculate idealized life of her household, without so much as a speck of dust in view.’28 It seems trains even had signs in them dissuading passengers from the old custom of tucking in the hems of their kimonos: ‘DO NOT BARE THE THIGHS’.29 One still sees similar signs in Western-style hotels, where foreigners might be shocked by the sight of Japanese men walking around in their pyjamas, or worse, their underwear, though both are common enough sights in places not normally frequented by overseas visitors.

But much has changed since the Japanese were first civilized and enlightened. Now that ‘Western’ culture has reached even the simplest Japanese home through television, advertising and organized foreign holidays, the surface of Japanese life has changed almost beyond recognition. All the same, enough remains under the concrete and glass façade of the Economic Miracle to amuse the gods. Despite all the changes Japan is a profoundly traditional country. Every new building has a shrine on the roof, dedicated to the fox Inari, guardian of rice-crops and export figures. In many ways the Japanese continue to be a nation of farmers not quite sure what to make of their new affluence.

The film director Imamura Shohei has called the modern surface of Japan an illusion, ‘Reality’, he says, ‘is those little shrines, the superstition and the irrationality that pervade the Japanese consciousness under the veneer of the business suits and advanced technology.’30

In the last few decades the more primitive aspects of Japanese culture, things ‘reeking of mud’ (dorokusai), have enjoyed a kind of renaissance. The Japanese are now secure enough, it would appear, not to worry too much about specks of dust coming into view – though many would still prefer foreigners not to notice. Since the 1960s especially, Japanese scholars have been digging their muddy spades into the more scabrous corners of popular culture. Certain Kabuki plays, long considered too vulgar for a civilized and enlightened world, are being performed again, albeit somewhat toned down. And the matsuri are enjoying a televised boom.