Session 16: Evil in Japan

Session 16: Evil in Japan
Chair: Justin Messner

What it Means to do the Wrong Thing in Japanese Popular Culture
Charles Nuckolls
Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL & Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

Manga, or Japanese comic books, not only represent mass entertainment but present simplistic moral narratives that simultaneously critique and reinforce the power of the state to define collective action.  In the immediate post-war years, popular manga routinely emphasized the capacity of individuals to define spheres of action in contrast to the state.  Little overt deference was paid to the traditional frameworks that had limited discussions of “good” and “bad” to the question of service to the military state, especially during the war years.
All of this has changed since the decline of the Japanese economy after 1990 and the appearance, simultaneously, of a broadly resurgent political nationalism.  Popular manga now define “the good” as a collective response to threats against the moral connections that bind society.  The manner in which this done is the subject of my paper.  I focus on the hugely popular manga series “Sensoron” (On War) whose author, Kobayashi Yoshinori, defines “evil” (using the English word) as the encroaching Western value system based on individualism. Opposed to this is what Kobayashi considers the natural order of human beings, one in which individuals bear collective responsibility for the preservation of their identity.
He makes this argument, however, by linking the problems of the present (drug abuse, school violence, divorce) to the problems of the past — specifically, to the history of Japan in World War II.  As he reconfigures this history as one of the heroic defence against and liberation from the forces of Western imperialism, he also presents a critique of the modern Japanese state.  This state, he believes, is subservient to the West (and the United States in particular); it has allowed and encouraged the “cult” of the individual to invade and attack the nation.  Japan can only fulfil its mission as an Asian power when it re-embrances its past, overcomes its misplaced guilt, and returns to the robust international posture it once attempted to project.
Kobayashi’s work stands at the forefront of a new wave in Japanese popular culture, one which other Asian nations (especially South Korea and China) view with increasing alarm.  The “nation” (kokku) is being reconfigured according to a new ideas about what constitutes the public good.  As Japan debates the repeal of Article Nine of its Constitution — which defines Japan as a peaceful nation that abrogates war as an instrument of diplomacy — these new ideas stand to make a dramatic impact.  The paper, therefore, will attempt to trace the conceptual outline of the new moral discourse and relate it theoretically to current discussions on the “banality” of nationalism (e.g., Billig) and the wider concern in anthropology with cross-cultural moral reasoning (e.g., Shweder.)

Oriental Nightmares: The ‘Demonic’ Other in Contemporary American Adaptations of Japanese Horror Film
Colette Balmain
Department of Film Studies, Buckinghamshire Chilterns UC, United Kingdom

In ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’ (1979) Robin Wood argues that [American] capitalist patriarchal society relies on two forms of repression: primary and surplus. He contends that whilst primary repression is essential to the operation of [any] society, surplus repression is the repression and oppression of all that society constitutes as “other”, and is signified in the horror film through the symbolic body of the monster onto which cultural and/or personal fears are inscribed and in particular, anxieties around ethnic and racial difference. In The Powers of Horror, (1982) Julia Kristeva writes about the ‘abject’: a term which designates that which is necessary for society to repress in order to construct and concrete the mythology of the white, male, bourgeois self.
This paper discusses the re-positioning of the “oriental” other as evil and demonic in two recent adaptations of popular Japanese horror films: Ringu (Hideo Nakata, Japan: 1998) / The Ring ( Gore Verbinski, USA/Japan, 2002) and Ju-on The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, Japan: 2003) / The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, Japan/USA: 2003). The tile of my paper, ‘Oriental Nightmares’, refers to the manner in which in both American films the twin constructs of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japaneseness’ – at the level of both narrative and mise-en-scene – articulate American [and Western] fears around reverse-colonialism and imperialism, which are expressed most fully by the discourse of what Toshiyo Ueno terms techno-orientalism. I suggest that the abjectification, objectification and “othering” of the ‘oriental’ self in both remakes represents the perpetuation of racist myths around the irreducible alterity of the Far East in the Western imagination and within mainstream Hollywood cinema.