The Genealogy of Japanese Immaturity

J. Keith Vincent

Published in Japanese in Azuma Hiroki, ed. Nihon-teki sōzōryoku no mirai: Kūru japonorojii no kanōsei
[The Future of the Japanese Imagination: The Potential of Cool Japanology]. Tokyo: NHK Books,
2010. 15-46.

People seem to agree that there is something "immature" or "infantile" about Japan. This
is true, it would seem, from perspectives both inside Japan and outside it. As I am sure
you all know, the Japanese government has decided to embrace the image of Japanese
immaturity--making Hello Kitty Japan's minister of tourism in 2008, and promoting
"cuteness" as one of Japan's most lucrative cultural exports. The image of Japan as a
perpetual adolescent has long been prevalent in the political realm, although now that the
Japan Democratic Party has taken control of the government and asserted some autonomy
vis a vis the U.S., journalists are asking if Japan is "finally going to grow up and go its
own way."1 As I was Googling around for other examples of this sort of rhetoric, I found
a store in San Diego selling Japanese manga and anime and other otaku goods called
"Grow Up Japan." I could cite many more examples but I think by this point the
association of Japan and "immaturity" has almost become cliche, so I will spare you.
I am perhaps more aware of this than most Americans since I have taught
Japanese literature for more than a decade now in the U.S. so I see what it is that brings
American college students to the study of Japan. Unlike in the 1980s during years of the
"bubble" there are very few students these days who study Japanese because they think it
will be good for a business career. Students with such grown-up motivations are all
studying Chinese. But luckily for me and my colleagues, the numbers of students
interested in Japan has not declined that much despite the terrible state of the Japanese
economy. There are of course always a few who have been inspired to study Japanese by
reading the Tale of Genji or Natsume Soseki, but the vast majority come because they are
fans of Japanese popular culture, which usually means anime and manga. And for many
of these students, Japanese popular culture is associated above all with a sort of refusal of
the very distinction between childhood and adulthood. In some ways it is the very
"immaturity" of Japanese culture that makes them want to study it.
It is perhaps for this reason that students interested in Japan seem so different
from students who want to study, say , French or Chinese. When I interview students or
read applications for study abroad programs to Japan, for example, students will of
course talk about specific things about Japan that they like (the food, the fashion, popular
                                                                                                               
1
See, for example, Masaru Tamamoto, "Will Japan Ever Grow Up?" Far Eastern
Economic Review, July 10, 2009. http://www.feer.com/essays/2009/july/will-japan-ever-
grow-up.
culture, etc.) but they almost always also talk about their 'love' for Japan as such. Often
they mention how this love for "Japan" has been with them ever since their childhood.
Of course it is important to love what you study--in fact it is necessary to be passionate
about any foreign language in order to truly master it. But still, there is something
obsessive and otaku-like about the way these kids "love Japan." Japan to them is not just
another country. It is another world that seems to promise something that nowhere else
has. While students of Chinese tend to be "fascinated" by Chinese economic growth and
students of Russian to be "intrigued" by Dostoyevsky, students of Japan are head over
heels "in love" with "Japan." The strange intensity of this love may have to do with the
fact that they associate Japanese culture with their childhoods. While American students
of Chinese or Russian or French tend to have discovered these cultures and languages as
adults, some of my students' earliest childhood memories are associated with Japan via
Pokemon and Sailor Moon. So while American French majors harbor very "adult"
fantasies of living in Paris, drinking wine, and reading Camus in cafes on the Left Bank,
many Japanese majors seem to imagine on some unconscious level that studying in Japan
will allow them to relive their childhoods. This would explain why their attachment to
Japan is so powerful and, in some ways, so irrational.
Of course I consider it part of my job to disabuse them of these fantasies and to
get them to think about Japan and Japanese culture in more critical, not to say "grown-
up," ways. My focus is on modern literature so I have them read lots of Soseki and
Karatani Kojin, and this usually helps a little. The ultimate goal is to get them to stop
thinking about "Japan" per se and start thinking about the people who live there and the
books they have written and how these might both relate to their own lives and stimulate
them intellectually. I suppose in a way you could say that I am trying to get them to
"outgrow" the Japan of their childhood. But at the same time I want them to hold on to
their memories of an "infantile" Japan and think about where this image might have come
from historically. So rather than just "outgrowing" their fascination with Japan I hope
they will use the image of an infantile Japan to think through how our understandings of
childhood and "growing up" have themselves taken on powerful ideological meanings in
the modern world. I would even say that one of the best reasons there is to study
Japanese literature is the opportunity it provides for us to re-examine our assumptions
about what constitutes maturity and childishness.
Why is this? Because the notions of maturation and development that underlie
Japanese modernity have for so long been not only naive goals but also critical questions
on the Japanese intellectual and cultural landscape. Saitô Tamaki has argued, for example
that the process of henshin ("transformation") that is so ubiquitous in manga and anime
is a metaphor for accelerated maturation--and reflects the child's desire to grow up.2 It
may also allude to a larger social preoccupation with the process of growth and
development that can be traced back to the Meiji period. Japan's experience of
accelerated modernization from the Meiji period onwards was, after all, a sort of
collective henshin. In some respects the sheer speed of this transformation proved
traumatic, but it also contributed to a heightened critical awareness of the ideologies
attached to notions such as progress, maturation, and "civilization." As Karatani Kôjin
                                                                                                               
2
Sentô bishôjo chapter 5
put it, writing about the Meiji period, "We Japanese witnessed with our own eyes and
within a limited period of time the occurrence in condensed form of a process which,
because it had extended over many centuries, had been repressed from memory in the
West (Karatani 36)." Of course for Karatani it was really only Sôseki who was able to
turn this experience into a form of critical or theoretical awareness. But it remains true
that no student of modern Japanese history and literature can ignore the ideological,
rhetorical, psychological and other ramifications of the felt imperative to "grow up," to
"modernize," to become a "first-class country" (ittô koku) in Meiji or, more recently, a
"normal nation."

While it is possible, then, to trace a concern with "Japanese immaturity" back to the Meiji
period (Soseki rued the "immaturity" of Japanese literature already in 1905) it was during
the U.S. Occupation and the postwar period of high economic growth that the notion of
an infantile Japan truly took hold. One can trace two consistent and intertwining
discourses that sought to "explain" the phenomenon of Japanese immaturity. One was
the notion that Japan's defeat in the war and subsequent occupation had somehow
"castrated" the Japanese and left them both impotent and infantilized. The other, often
complimentary, idea was that Japan had become a so-called "maternal society" (bosei
shakai). In this scenario, as the country's fathers toiled away creating the "Japanese
economic miracle" its mothers remained in the domestic space, burdening and even
suffocating their sons with desires unmet by their husbands. As you will have noted,
"Japan" in both of these scenarios is allegorically represented as a male and both models
rely primarily on psychoanalytic models.

Infantilization by Castration/Homosexualization

Douglas MacArthur's infamous statement in 1946 that Japan was like a "12-year old boy"
is often quoted as epitomizing the fate of Japanese masculinity after the war. Writers like
Oe Kenzaburô, Nosaka Akiyuki, and Kojima Nobuo3 responded with novels that
portrayed Japanese men as groaning under the humiliation of the Occupation and
continued dependency on the U.S. Oe's early works are particularly good examples of
this trend. His protagonists are invariably young males unable to "grow up" in the
suffocating atmosphere of postwar Japan, often in thrall to older, maternal prostitutes
who tend to be simultaneously involved with American GIs. His
1958 novella "Kuroi kawa omoi kai" is a case in point. The sexual immaturity of this
novel's protagonist is a typical example of the "castration" theory of Japanese immaturity.
The following passage is from early on in the novel.

"He sat on the bed completely naked with his head bowed. This pose made him feel
effeminate and utterly defenseless. His penis was like a meek little bird huddled in a nest.
A motionless little bird which could only chirp softly.."4

                                                                                                               
3
American Hijiki, Warera no jidai, Miru mae ni tobe, Hôyô no kazoku, etc.
4
彼はベッドに腰を下ろし、床にきちんとそろえた踵をつけ、膝にうでをささえ
た。そして肩のあいだに頭をたれて、自分のやせた腿とちぢこまったセクスをみ
Next door to the unnamed protagonist lives a Japanese prostitute, or panpan, with her
African American GI boyfriend. By the end of the story the boy will be sadistically
seduced by the woman, partly with threats about the boyfriend's violent behavior. The
boy's bird-like penis stands as a pitiable symbol of the reduced state of postwar Japanese
masculinity. And as if this emasculating and infantilizing description were not enough,
the text further emphasizes his passivity by implying that it derives from an undercurrent
of homosexual libido.

“Perhaps, as he sat like this, he would be set upon by a hairy-chested man and forcibly
violated. He felt his pulse begin to beat violently. This was a favorite and frequently
repeated fantasy of his. Whenever he fantasized like this, he worried that one day he
might become a homosexual.”5

Maternalism

The discourse of maternalism takes a different tack, but one equally dependent on fairly
conservative, binarized understandings of gender and sexuality. Yoda Tomiko has
discussed how the notion of the maternal society functions in two influential texts from
Shôwa 40s: Etô Jun's 1967 Maturity and Loss ("Seijuku to sôshitsu) and Doi Takeo's
1971 The Structure of Dependence (Amae no Kôzô). As Yoda points out, both of these
extremely influential texts were premised on the notion that a natural "balance" between
the genders had once existed in Japan but that modernity had somehow brought about an
unnatural dominance of the feminine and the maternal. In "Seijuku to sôshitsu" Etô
discussed a number of postwar novels that he claimed were symptomatic of a disruption
of the "natural balance" between the feminine and the masculine principles. The result
was an excessive attachment to the mother on the part of the male protagonists. Both in
the novels and in society at large this had led to the infantilization of Japanese men. Eto's
solution to this problem was for Japanese men to "... 'grow up’: mature into a true
individual by giving up the nostalgia for the mother and remember[ing]/recogniz[ing] the
lack of the father."
Doi, for his part, described Japan as a society dominated by "amae" or
dependency, a concept that was modeled on the infant's dependence on maternal love.
While part of Doi's point was to valorize the kind of subjectivity that resulted from the
continuation of this dependence into adulthood, and even to hold it up as a legitimate
Japanese alternative to what he portrayed as the Western obsession with an autonomous

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
た。セクスは汗ばんで静かに光り、巣にうずくまってじっとしているおとなしい
仔鳥のようだった。身動きすることも出来ないで、チュッ、チュッと啼いている
仔鳥。"Kurai Kawa, Omoi kai" Oe Zensakuhin vol. 2, 7-8.
5  その姿勢は全く弱々しく絶望的に無防禦な感じだった。そうしているところを

剛い胸毛のはえた男におそわれたら、うむをいわず凌辱されるだろう。かれは動
悸がはげしくなるのを感じた。それはいくたびもくりかえされた彼のお気に入り
の空想だった。そしてそう空想するたびに、かれは自分がやがて男色家になるの
ではないかと疑っていた。  
self, he also considered it a potentially pathological and infantilizing force. 6 As Yoda
writes, Doi's text was "arguably the book that had the greatest influence in inspiring the
widespread perception of Japan as a society dominated by the infantile yearning to
depend on maternal love and nurturing."7

If we accept the premise of "Japanese immaturity," there may be some truth to both of
these explanations of what has caused it. The trauma of defeat in war and the suffocating
influence of an overweening mother might very well stunt one's growth. But I would like
to suggest that rather than asking whether the "the Japanese" are or are not "immature,"
we ask instead what kind of ideological work gets done when we claim that they are.
For one thing, panicking about "growing up" and "separating from the mother" invariably
privileges a phallic, and usually heteronormative masculine subject. We saw this in Oe's
story where the boy's infantilism is associated with homosexuality--making it very hard
not to read the text as suggesting that aggressive heterosexuality would be more "grown
up." Doi Takeo also made the stakes here very explicit. In Amae no Kôzô he wrote,
"the essence of homosexual feelings is amae."8 But calling homosexuals "amae" and
blaming mothers for Japan's alleged immaturity are just ways to deflect attention from
structural issues such as the postwar rise of the nuclear family, lack of familial
involvement by fathers and the extraction of free labor from "professional housewives."
And whatever one might say about this question on the level of the individual psyche or
family dynamics, to apply this sort of psychoanalytic reasoning to an entire culture is
deeply problematic. In fact, I would argue that rehearsing the narrative of "Japanese
immaturity" has the effect of consolidating the Japanese nation around a collective
trauma and thereby repressing our awareness that different people experience history
differently. If there is hope for a nation to truly "mature" it lies in the affirmation and
cultivation of this diversity and the recognition of more than just a single narrative of the
postwar. This means recognizing that the nation--or any given generation--does not
move forward in a single lockstep and that "maturity" can take many forms.
It also means addressing what has been called the "modernizationist"
understanding of culture-- the idea that there is some universal timeline of progress, with
the "infantile" or "primitive" on one end and the "mature" or "civilized" at the other. In
the modernizationist way of thinking, particular cultures or individuals are imagined as
existing at some point on this timeline and thus being either "behind" or "ahead" or
perhaps coeval with others. It is surprisingly hard to avoid this way of thinking even
today, when some people would say that we ought to have moved beyond such a linear,
modern way of thinking.

                                                                                                               
6  Doi also explicitly linked amae to homosexuality. "The essence of homosexual

feelings," he wrote, "is amae."  

7
Yoda, Tomiko. “The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in
Contemporary
Japan.” South Atlantic Quarterly 99.4 (2000): 865-902. 870.
8同性愛的感情の本体は甘えである。chap. 4, 192.  
 I believe Murakami-san's art and Kurosawa-san's films both intervene in productive
ways in this highly ideological discourse and it is to a discussion of their work that I now
turn.

Murakami's Intervention:

The question of "Japanese immaturity" has been an abiding concern in Murakami-san's

work and he seems quite certain about what has caused it. For Murakami, writing in the
catalogue for the 2006 exhibition, "Little Boy," the infantilism of Japanese popular
culture is the lingering effect of the trauma of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki combined with Japan's subsequent postwar dependence on the United
States. As he put it in 2001, "...behind the flashy titillation of anime lies the shadow of
Japan's trauma after the defeat of the Pacific War. The world of anime is a world of
impotence." 58 And later, in the catalogue for the 2006 "Little Boy" exhibition he wrote,

"Regardless of winning or losing the war, the bottom line is that for the past sixty years,
Japan has been a testing ground for an American-style capitalist economy, protected in a
greenhouse, nurtured and bloated to the point of explosion. The results are so bizarre,
they're perfect. Whatever true intentions underlie 'Little Boy' the nickname for
Hiroshima's atomic bomb, we Japanese are truly, deeply pampered children. And as
pampered children we throw constant tantrums while enthralled by our own cuteness."9

In his critical writings, then, Murakami would seem to subscribe quite enthusiastically to
the "castration" or "trauma" theory of Japanese immaturity, much like the early Oe. One
look at his art, however, suggests that his strategy there is not direct critique but oblique
appropriation and resignification. In other words, instead of criticizing what he sees as
the infantile nature of Japanese popular culture, he revels in it and turns it into a resource
with which, as one critic put it "to turn the tables against modern Western cultural
authority (Matsui, 96)." Ashis Nandy, writing about the British colonization of India, has
argued that while infantilization of the colonized was a common strategy of colonialism,
it was also complicated by a deep fear of childhood as "a persistent, living, irrepressible
criticism of our 'rational', 'normal', 'adult' visions of desirable societies."10Murakami's
work can be said to activate that fear.

I feel a little strange talking about Murakami-san's work right in front of him and I am
painfully aware of the fact that whatever I say can only address a miniscule fraction of his
                                                                                                               
9
戦争に勝とうが負けようが、アメリカ型資本主義経済を温室で大事に育てて膨
れ切った実験場がこの６０年間の日本の実態だ。そしてそれは見事なまでに奇妙
な物に育った。広島原爆の愛称「Little Boy」の真意はどうであれ、我々は見事
におこちゃまだ。おこちゃまのまま、ただをこねつつ自分かわいさに生きて来た。
141.
10  Nandy  58.  
enormous output. But let us just look at two of his better known pieces, "My Lonesome
Cowboy," (1998) and "Hiropon," from 1997.

**SHOW "MLC"**

One can't help but smile when one sees "My Lonesome Cowboy." This spunky lad is not
exactly MacArthur's 12 year-old boy. And he provides quite a contrast to Oe's
protagonist with the bird-like penis. The contrast is surely also deliberate and places the
work very much in dialogue with the discourse of Japanese immaturity. Instead of a
timid boy vulnerable to the predations of prostitutes and GI's, "My Lonesome Cowboy"
has a stance like Elvis and seems ready to lasso a stallion with his semen. The expression
on his face is cocksure and exuberant. He seems utterly in control and ready to take on
the world--but also narcissistically self-sufficient. Ayelet Zohar has discussed "My
Lonesome Cowboy" in relation to Freud's famous comment about the Ego and the Id:
"Thus in relation to the Id, the Ego is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check
the superior strength of the horse."11 While Freud's image makes one think of a rider
trying desperately not to be thrown, Murakami's Cowboy is very sure in the saddle, his
ego the confident master of his desires. The unbridled joy on the boy's face suggests not
the absorptive vulnerability of orgasmic sensual pleasure but a fantasy--or perhaps a
parody-- of phallic empowerment. Even the orgasm becomes a tool in his hands and the
solipsism of masturbation is directed outward toward the world.

The 1997 piece "Hiropon" seems to engage the other half of the discourse of Japanese
immaturity we have been discussing.

***SHOW HIROPON***

What does this girl have to say about the "maternal society?" Named after a slang term
for methamphetamine, "Hiropon" is like a wet nurse on crack. But like "My Lonesome
Cowboy's" semen lasso, her lactated jumping rope is meant for her use and her pleasure
alone. There is no question of "smothering" here--no blissful dyad of a mother nursing
her baby, none of Doi's "Structure of Dependency" ( "Amae no kôzo" )-- just a vacuously
narcissistic skipping-in-place.

As I said earlier, in Murakami's writing he tends to be very clear about both the historical
origins of "Japanese immaturity" in the genbaku and the Occupation. Many critics--
Marylin Ivy and Thomas Lamarre in English--have expressed concern that attributing this
single traumatic origin to so much of contemporary Japan's popular culture can lead only
to the fantasy of a "whole" Japan, uncastrated, adult, and capable of fighting its own wars.
I have to say that I tend to agree with this critique when I read some of what Murakami-
san has written. But looking at "My Lonesome Cowboy" and "Hiropon," they seem like
hilarious send-ups of the ideologies of modernization, maturation, and adulthood.
Perhaps Murakami-san can tell us more about it later, but I guess I prefer to read these
two statues as willful perversions of the violent logic of maturation.

                                                                                                               
11  quoted  in  Zohar,  117.  
Kurosawa's Two Alternatives:

Although in very different ways, Kurosawa-san's films also address the question of
"Japanese immaturity." His "Ningen Gôkaku," about a young man who wakes up after
10 years in a coma at the age of 24, is a fascinating exploration of what it means to grow
up. As a 14-year old trapped in a 24-year-old's body, the protagonist Yutaka has a lot to
learn. But by superimposing two ages, two "stages of development" on top of each other
in the same person, the film manages to capture the complexity of "growth" without
succumbing to the teleologies of progress and maturation.

His 2008 film, "Tokyo Sonata," tells the story of a father who is laid off from his job
but is too "immature" to tell his wife and two sons. The father shows himself to be
tragically unprepared for life outside the corporate system that had sheltered him and so
many others. With the loss of his job, the facade of his authority collapses and he is
exposed as a coward and a hypocrite. The wife and sons, meanwhile, turn out to have
quite surprising--and inspiring--reserves of strength and determination. While the
immediate crisis in the film is caused by the father's loss of his job, thus making the film
speak clearly to the current recession, the starting point of the narrative is informed by the
two discourse of Japanese immaturity discussed earlier: male castration at the hands of
the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, the excessive attentions of the mother. The image it
presents of the nuclear family--consisting of an emasculated father, a wise and loving
mother, and resourceful and resilient children is familiar from postwar Japanese film
since Ozu. The father's plight echoes Oe and Murakami's critique of the "emasculation"
and "castration" of Japanese males--although here it is the forces of globalization (when
the father's job is taken by cheaper Chinese labor) that initiates the crisis. The two sons
have different responses to their father's breakdown, which can be read as competing
solutions to the dilemma of Japanese immaturity.

The older son is named "Takeshi" in the film and played by Koyanagi Yu. For reasons
that are not entirely clear, Takeshi is unable to imagine a future for himself in Japan and
decides to take advantage of a program that allows Japanese nationals to join the U.S.
army. He does so, he explains, in order to "protect Japan" and to share his good fortune
(shiawase) with "the world." In the following scene, Takeshi has asked for his father's
signature on the enlistment application. Not surprisingly, his father experiences this as a
further blow to his already damaged pride--a national humiliation piled on top of his own
failure to provide for his family. When his wife intervenes he asks his son to work for
Japan instead.

SHOW CLIP 1

The conflict between father and son is not resolved and it falls to the mother to see her
son off at the bus to Narita. As the bus pulls away, the film seems to endorse the break
with the mother that is crucial to the Oedipal model of adulthood. As Takeshi salutes her
from inside the bus the national is superimposed over the domestic once again, the
Oedipal bond is broken and the stern and just "father" that is the U.S. army takes the
place of the castrated Japanese father.

SHOW CLIP 2

While this scene seems an unambiguous instance of "Japanese immaturity" being

cured, in fact the film remains ambivalent on the question of how and whether the
Japanese ought to "grow up." The film is clearly referencing the argument made on the
right by neonationalist critics like Katô Norihiro --that maturation and masculinity have
something to do with fighting in wars and that both are therefore impossible for Japan
under the U.S.-imposed "peace constitution." On the one hand, by naming this argument
as the motivation of a boy who is, precisely, immature (he has to ask his parents for their
signature because he is still a minor), the film suggests that the argument itself is
immature. This is made clear towards the end of the film, when Takeshi is able to
recognize his own former naivété. He writes his family a letter from (Iraq??
Afghanistan??) to say that he has realized that "America is not the only country that is
right" and tells them of his decision to stay on in the Middle East as a private citizen to
try to understand the culture better on its own terms. "Don't worry about me. I'll be
fine," he writes, sounding very much like a grown-up with a fully formed "modern self."
But are we to assume that this new-found maturity is the result of his having realized that
going to war was not the solution? Or are we supposed to draw the conclusion that taking
part in a war was necessary in order for him to reach this realization? Was fighting a war,
any war, a necessary developmental step in the process of his maturation? Is Takeshi's
hard-won future enabled by his having been a soldier?

Writing about the neonationalist movement to revise article 9 of the Japanese constitution,
Marylin Ivy draws our attention to the importance in this discourse of the notion of
forward moving, linear time. According to their logic, it is the "seriality of wars,"--
namely the possibility of fighting another war in the future-- that determines not only the
legitimacy and authority of a nation state, but the very possibility of futurity itself. As
long as Japan is not able to fight its own wars, then, it will not be a "normal" state and it
will be trapped in a deadly stasis.

Describing the way Kato describes the temporality of the "postwar," Ivy writes,

"What is crucial to note here is the sense of a time without movement toward the future, a
time without contingency. Equally crucial is both the stunningly obvious yet critically
elusive corollary of this deathly stasis of the postwar: Japan is frozen at the moment of
defeat because there is no more war to come. Without the futurity of war, there is no real
escape from the postwar. The last war, the war of total atomic defeat, stands as the origin
and telos of Japanese nationality. In this logic, only the possibility of another war can
release Japan from the nightmare of traumatic repetition that is the postwar."12

                                                                                                               
12
Ivy, M. “Trauma's Two Times: Japanese Wars and Postwars.” positions: east asia
cultures critique 16.1 (2008): 165-188. Web.
Only by fighting in a war and leaving Japan altogether has Takeshi managed to escape
the doldrums of recession-era Japan. He is a little like one of Oe Kenzaburô's early
protagonists who were always hoping to get out of the stultifying atmosphere of postwar
Japan to go somewhere where history still happened and forthright action was still
possible. But unlike Oe's characters, Takeshi actually does escape. His narrative in the
film, then, is not unlike the rhetoric used by thinkers like Katô. It endorses a linear, and
teleological temporality that highlights the stagnation of Japan's endless postwar. This is
one solution.

But Takeshi's solution is not the only one on offer in Tokyo Sonata. Another possibility
is imagined in the person of the younger brother Kenji, who chooses music--namely
piano--as his way to "grow up." The film ends with a breathtaking but spare rendition of
Debussy's "Clair de Lune" played by Kenji at an audition for music school. Futurity
(attending school, working hard) is a possibility in this scene, but not at the price of war.
And yet more effective than any such "uplifting" message is the way the film uses music
formally to introduce an alternative temporality. The film critic at the Washington post
praised Kurosawa for avoiding the trap of milking the music for its sentimental effect and
instead "simply let[ting] his film dissolve into music." 13 In the closing scene we see
Kenji as he plays the piano, which locates the music within the story time of the film.
But the moment and the music are so transporting that we feel we have been taken
outside of the linear temporality of the narrative. Kenji is supposed to be a prodigy but
he has only been taking lessons for a few months, which makes the quality of his playing
hard to credit realistically. And yet this very lack of realism actually serves to strengthen
the impression of having somehow sidestepped the unitary, linear time of development
and "growing up." Music (or perhaps art more generally), the film seems to say, has its
own complex temporality and is capable of producing its own value, not by reversing the
"stagnation" of a still postwar Japan, but by leaving the realm of the "post" altogether.

SHOW CLIP 3

Background music in film, we are told by psychoanalytic theorists, works by

recapturing the pleasure of the pre-Oedipal, bodily fusion with the mother, which the
infant experienced primarily through sound. By returning us to this state, it has the effect
of lowering our resistance to belief in fiction and thereby aiding our enjoyment of the
film. Perhaps this is why we are so willing to believe that Kenji has become a concert
pianist in a matter of weeks. Kenji is the youngest character in the film but also the most
"mature." And yet this is no simple reversal. Just as his piano playing blurs the
boundary between the story and its frame, the film asks us to rethink the boundary
between child and adult--as the logic of generations and the lockstep of history are
displaced by a different, less panicked temporality.

***
                                                                                                               
13
Kennicott, Philip. “Movie Review: Philip Kennicott on 'Tokyo Sonata'.” The
Washington Post. Web. 28 Feb. 2010.
Before I conclude I want very briefly to address one more discourse of "Japanese
immaturity" that is perhaps of more recent vintage. This is the critique of "otaku"culture
and its supposedly unnatural and "immature" fixation on the fictional. As I'm sure
everyone here knows very well "otaku" are often accused of not being able to distinguish
between fiction and reality, of preferring fictional women to real ones, and therefore of
not being "grown up." I have just finished translating Saito Tamaki's 2000 book Sentô
bishôjo no seishinbunseki which will appear next spring from the same press that
published Azuma-san's Dôbutsu-ka suru posutomodan. When Azuma-san invited me to
speak here today he asked if I would say a few words about what made me decided to
translate Saitô's book. Since I did a lot of work as a gay activist in Japan in the 1990s
Azuma-san and Miyadai-san seem to have been surprised that I would be interested in a
book like this. As Azuma-san put it, " 日本では一般に、「戦闘美少女に萌える」こ
とと「アクティヴィストである」ことは対極だと見なされているからである。

I suppose they must have thought that as an activist I would find the notion of otaku
sexuality too much of an "escape" from reality and therefore somehow devoid of political
significance. I suppose I might have thought that if I had read the book a dozen years ago,
when I was more committed to the idea that a clearly articulated and communally shared
identity was a necessary precondition for political activism. But like a lot of other
people, I have changed my mind since then and become less interested in "essences" and
more interested in the way sexuality and sexual fantasy actually work. I found Saitô's
book, which offers a psychoanalytic explanation of the otaku fascination for the fictional
sentô bishôjo, to be an incredibly fascinating exploration of how sexuality figures in our
understanding of "reality." So fascinating that I agreed to translate it (with the help of a
friend named Dawn Lawson). I was particularly impressed with Saito's ability to write
about otaku without pathologizing them. And, as a queer theorist, I was excited and
inspired by his ability to get beyond the assumption that sexuality, in order to be
"normal" and "mature" must eventually find expression in sex between a living male and
female human being. Of course as a Lacanian this makes perfect sense since, as we know,
in Lacan there is "no such thing as the sexual relation." But Saitô's book makes Lacan
seem almost like a queer theorist. I shared the translation with Michael Moon, who is
one of the most influential queer theorist in the United States, and he wrote me a long and
email in which he said, among other things, "

"I began teaching a grad course this past spring on "Sexualities East and West," which
featured a number of recent monographs about various kinds of "queer sexualities" in
mainland China and Taiwan, India, Africa, and the Middle East, and I don't feel any of
the work available at that time gave the reader as sustained and complex a look at a
sexuality as uncannily "like and unlike our own" as PBFG [sento bishojo no
seishinbunseki] does."

Just before I came here I receive a manuscript in the mail of a book that Moon has just
finished for Duke University Press on Henry Darger. Darger was a so-called "outsider
artist" who shut himself off from society for his entire life, much like a "hikikomori," but
who produced an extraordinary body of work--including hundreds of paintings and the
longest novel ever written. As you may know, Sento Bishôjo has a chapter on Darger and
Moon-san has already written about Saito in his introduction. Moon-san and I both
think that rather than judging people like Darger (or the mythical "otaku" or
"hikikomori") according to a single normative idea of what constitutes a "mature"
sexuality, we should take the chance to learn from them instead. Darger, Moon argues,
was far from the miserable and traumatized person that so many people want to make
him out to be. Instead, "while he appears to have strenuously avoided contact with his
neighbors and fellow workers, he fashioned a populous other world for himself in which
he could live out a virtual existence replete with both the intense excitement and the
lively sociability that seems so conspicuously missing from his allegedly real life."

I suspect that Moon-san and I will not be the only queer theorists in the States who find
Saitô's book exciting. I know I am looking forward to giving it to my students as yet
another example of a Japanese thinker who is helping us to re-imagine modernization and
maturation in a more critical, and I think, queerer, way.