Adoration and Castration

A few weeks ago I read an article by Kinya Tsuruta, ‘The Images of Westerners in Modern Japanese Fiction: Adoration and Castration’ from a 1988 collection The Walls Within.

Tsuruta suggests that based in their general unfamiliarity with Westerners, early 20^th century Japanese authors tended to either demonize or idealize their white characters. Novelists would caricature physical features (eye colour/hair/odour), with the ‘implicit assumption that external appearance confers information about internal character’ – thus by emphasizing the physical differences between Westerners and Japanese, the point was made that Westerners were also unlike Japanese in modes of thought and behaviour, enhancing the perception of distance between the two. By dehumanizing / animalizing Westerners, readers more readily accepted unrealistic portrayals of unpredictable ‘discontinuous (sub-human) foreigners’. This wasn’t confined to negative images. In some women’s writing white men became the sincere, gentle and passionate ‘knights in shining armour with a ticket to a Western utopia’, unsurprisingly the positive depictions of men’s literature focused more on sexualized physical aspects of white women.

Tsuruta explores the inferiority complex found within postwar literature. Western models replaced Chinese not only in the realms of technology and administration, but also culture and aesthetics, and the typical Japanese body seemed especially far flung from the ideal of Greek statues, creating ‘a sense of physical inferiority unmitigated by Japan’s subsequent economic success’. The immediate postwar situation however meant that ordinary Japanese acquired first-hand experience in dealing with Westerners, and so literary treatment required more definite, realistic consideration, no longer utilizing these characters as ‘clever literary devices or vague symbols’.

Included was this interesting quote from Gregory Clark, “The Japanese are quite open to thoughts and cultures from outside, but they are closed to people from the outside. The French are the reverse; they are open to people but not to foreign cultures”.