Contemporary Japanese Thought

Orientalism itself, furthermore, was an exclusively male province. Like so many guilds during the modern period, it viewed itself and its subject matter with sexist blinders. This is especially evident in the writings of travelers and novelists: women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing.¹

Accordingly, the Orient is related to “the separateness, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability,”² all of which are also assumed to characterize femininity. Women, of course, are no more creatures of a male power-fantasy than the Orient is that of a European power-fantasy. Both of them were created by Western male discourse as “the other.” Women are to men as the Orient is to the Occident; and difference attributed to them as a distinctive feature defines their “otherness.”

The attribution of this difference tells us more about those who attribute than those who are attributed. Said points out that Orientalism is “a considerable dimension of modern political culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.”³ As Toni Morrison writes in her postcolonial criticism of a popular American bildungsroman—Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—the black people are a necessary shadow in the story, present for no better purpose than to set off the nobility and generosity of the “white identity.”⁴

“The Orient” is a generic term to refer to non-European countries located to the east of the Occident.⁵ When did it start to be related to femininity? This usage began fairly recently, from the time of the rise of European imperialism. The medieval Muslim world, which once surpassed Europe in terms of advanced science and technology and whose military power threatened it, could never be referred to by feminized metaphors. Orientalism is by no means an innocent egoism. It is a discourse of power, another name given to colonialism, which constructs “the other” as inferior. This alone is sufficient reason to feminize it, since “woman” is another name given to a land to be conquered.

In this paper, I take Japan as a particular example of Orientalism and investigate how it is represented in the gendered language of Orientalist discourse. Now, if we consider that Oriental men have been feminized, Oriental women have been doubly feminized. This double feminization complicates the situation of Oriental women when they struggle against their own men, for their femininity has already been appropriated by men themselves. In the process of constructing an Oriental counter-identity—something I am tempted to dub “reverse Orientalism”—Oriental men have exploited femininity. Building feminism is not an easy task in such a cultural context, and I am sure that the experience of Japanese feminism can shed a useful light on women’s experience in other orientalized nations.

When Europeans define themselves as masculine, how is the “feminine” identity of “the other” constructed? This may be best seen in colonized discourse. In theory, there are two possible ways for colonized intellectuals (no doubt male, as they monopolize the production of discourse) to define their own identity. One is masculine: to reject the imposed “otherness” and compete with colonialists for “universal” values. The other is feminine: to accept the imposed “otherness” and attempt to take advantage of it. The former inevitably leads to a dangerous conflict over which side has the best claim to “universality,” since universalism does not admit of plural values—namely, to what Max Weber termed “a battle among gods.” However, when there is a significant power imbalance between the two parties, the inferior tends to prefer the latter strategy; which holds that “the short-term loser is the long-term winner”—a cultural irony.

Throughout Japanese history, “Japanneseness” has been constructed in the shadow of China, and this has given it an irreducibly colonial nature. Premodern aristocrats and intellectuals were necessarily bilingual, since much upper-class written discourse was produced in Chinese, not Japanese.⁷ China has always been an ethnocentric imperial state that has considered its own culture to define the borders of the fully human realm. Though sometimes conquered by nomadic tribes and once invaded by Japan, the Chinese have never questioned their own superiority and universality.⁸ With this overwhelming Chinese presence as a focal point, Japan has defined itself as particular, distant, and differentiated—put more simply, as inferior to the universal standards of China.

What I mean by the Chinese mind is not simply respect for Chineseness and a tendency to fall in with the Chinese; it is rather a state of mind by which people define, argue and judge right and wrong in this world. It is not only the state of mind of those who read Chinese literature; it is also that of those who do not read it, if they follow the same ways. Contrary to the assumption that those who do not read cannot have a Chinese mind, throughout the thousand years of history during which the Japanese people have been affected by the Chinese and followed their ways with respect, the Chinese mind has become an underlying component of the popular mind, and now appears as commonsense knowledge. Having reached this stage, even when people say that they do not act in accord with the Chinese mind, it is because they take the Chinese mind for granted.⁹

This may at first glance seem like cultural relativism, which admits that every culture has a different definition of right and wrong. After all, if the Japanese mind were to make a claim to universality, that would lead to a fatal conflict with the Chinese mind over the definition of the truth. Nevertheless, Motōri did not deny the universality of the Chinese mind—he never suggested that the Chinese mind is just one among various particularisms. Instead, the cultural strategy he applied was subtle and dangerous: he defined the Japanese mind as something differentiated from the “universal” Chinese mind. Thus he made the Japanese mind into a residual category of universalism, while at the same time rejecting universalistic thinking by naming it “the Chinese mind.”

Hasegawa Michiko, a right-wing student of Motōri Norinaga in contemporary Japan, has claimed that his position can indeed be summed up by the phrase “cultural relativism.”¹¹ As noted above, this is difficult. Motōri cannot be a simplistic cultural relativist because he defines “the Chinese mind” as a cultural perversion which accepts the universality of another culture, the product of the validation of China’s ethnocentrism. By tagging Motōri a cultural relativist, Hasegawa fails to grasp important aspects of his argument: as Hasegawa herself points out, the Chinese mind is not the mind of the Chinese but the mind of the Japanese who accept and accord with the Chinese mind. When Hasegawa calls the Chinese mind “cultural perversion,” what does this say about the Japanese mind, which is no more nor less than the child of this “perversion”?

Hence “the Chinese mind” is a Japanese product. It has worked its way into the foundations of Japanese thought and society and is long since past the point where it could have been eradicated. Given this, we can see how there has been a curious coexistence and “division of labor” between the Chinese mind and the Japanese mind in Japanese culture.

History tells us that the écriture of the Japanese mind was carried out in kanamoji, which is a Japanese script made out of Chinese characters; the term means, literally, “fake script” (as opposed to the “true” Chinese script). At the point in history when Chinese écriture was used for official documents, kanamoji were used for storytelling and poetry—that is, to express the emotions left behind after everything official had been subtracted.

Motōri is also known as a student of The Tale of Genji, the world’s oldest novel, which was written by a court lady in the Japanese script in the eleventh century. It is easy to understand how closely the Japanese mind is related to the women’s world, because women at the time were excluded from the public world and prohibited from writing in Chinese, which actually helped them develop their own literature in Japanese. While men had both the public and private spheres, women were assigned solely to the private sphere. Aristocrats and bureaucrats wrote and read official documents and poems in Chinese, then expressed in Japanese the sentiments which could not be represented in the official language. For men, the Japanese mind was thus from the outset the residue of the public sphere, and Japanese was in particular the language used to express “affairs among people” or relationships with women in the private sphere. Thus, when the idea of écriture feminine from French differentialist feminist thought, such as Irigaray’s and Cixous’s, was introduced to Japan, some people argued that there was no need to import it because it already existed in Japan in the form of women’s literature from antiquity.

There is a trap in the concept of écriture feminine itself, for if we admit the French écriture as universal and feminists define it as man-made language, then this automatically leads to the conclusion that women’s share is the “residue of the universal”—namely, that it must be characterized by a lack of all reason and logic and must therefore descend to the incomprehensible. Écriture feminine can only be defined as what is not man-made language, differentiated from and deviating from the universal language. Here is the significant parallel between the Japanese language and écriture feminine. This is not to say that the former resembles the latter; rather, the differentiation of the Japanese language from the Chinese language is parallel to the differentiation of écriture feminine from the universal (and, accordingly, masculine) language.

Colonialist discourse has been familiar to Japan from the earliest stages of its cultural formation. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the West replaced China as the universal center. Chino Kaori, an art historian, argued in her 1994 Nihon bijutsu no jendā [Gender in Japanese art history] that cultural discourse on Japanese art was reproduced in this colonialist configuration for more than a thousand years. Given this background, it was relatively easy to assimilate a new Western-centered discourse to the previous discourses by substituting the West for China at the center.

As in the case of Flaubert, who visited the Orient and later fantasized about it in feminized form through an account of his affair with an Oriental prostitute, Kuchuk Hanem, Pierre Loti wrote an opera, Mme. Chrysantheme, feminizing Japan in the guise of his native lover.¹² Though there were in fact some violent reactions by Japanese men, for instance at Namamugi in 1864, in which samurai from Satsuma attacked and killed a British citizen named Richardson, Japanese men have been gradually deprived of their masculinity since the samurai were disarmed.¹³

Sex serves as a path through which men can access “the other” at a deep level. Said, for instance, repeatedly points out the “almost conformist association between the Orient and sex” in European literature.¹⁴ When obtained by force, sex is nothing but rape. At this point we become witnesses to the birth of a cliché in the minds of conservative Japanese intellectuals. In their narrative, modern Japan is symbolized as a poor woman raped by the West. The policy of opening up the country by force and imposing unequal treaties, which favored the West, seems to them comparable to rape.

This rape, the narrative continues, was reproduced in 1945, when Japan lost World War II, with the rapist this time being the United States instead of the European powers. The surrender forced on Japan by the atomic bomb was the “second threat” by the West, while the Constitution imposed by the Occupation Army is held to have colonized the Japanese nation. This logic can be used to justify starting the war with the United States: it is called self-defense, for Japan had no other way to survive. A nationalist intellectual, Hayashi Fusao (1903–1975), wrote a controversial book, Dai Tōa sensō kōteiron [In defense of the Great Asia War] (1964), in which “the Great Asia War” is a euphemism for Japan’s invasion of Asia carried out by the Japanese Imperial Army during the war. Hayashi insists that European imperialism forced Japan to start the war.

Hasegawa, referring to this book, states that it is necessary “to see correctly the historical fact that the whole of Asia was confronted by a fatal crisis, and consequently Japan coped with this critical moment in a right way.”¹⁵ There is nothing new or original in her argument; what is astonishing is that the nationalist discourse, which is almost a cliché and which was once upheld by Hayashi, an old conservative born in 1903, has acquired a new voice in a woman, Hasegawa, born in 1946, after the war.

Hasegawa continues to argue that this rape is being repeated today in the form of “internationalization.” She investigates the etymology of the term, originally defined as “to bring a country or territory under the combined government or protection of two or more different nations;” in her paraphrase, it is correctly understood as “to share a territory among imperialist powers.”¹⁶ If “internationalization” is rightly understood as being heavily political and referring to power relationships, no one can naively put forward the slogan that we should “internationalize ourselves.” This political naiveté, the passive acceptance of Western justice as universal, is exactly what Hasegawa would call “the Chinese mind.” The binary opposition between the Chinese mind and the Japanese mind is visible to this day, she would maintain, and this proves the enduring validity of the paradigm put forward by Motōri.

In 1984, during the drafting of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law—hastily slapped together in time to meet the requirement to ratify the United Nations Treaty for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (hereafter the U.N. Treaty for Women), which required that existing domestic laws be fitted to the treaty—a controversial article entitled “The Equal Employment Opportunity Law is Destructive to the Ecology of Japanese Culture” appeared in the mainstream magazine Chūō Kōron. The identity the author assumed was simply that of “a housewife and schoolteacher.” Opposing the law from the point of view of “a Japanese woman,” the paper attracted public attention and caused a great controversy in the same journal. The “housewife and schoolteacher” was later proved to be an associate professor at Saitama University by the name of Hasegawa Michiko.

It seemed to Hasegawa that the Japanese government was forced to ratify the U.N. Treaty for Women unwillingly. Even worse, she saw the drafting of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law as a raped woman demanding more subordination in total ignorance of her own rape. Hasegawa was frustrated, first, with the diffident attitude of the Japanese government toward confronting the forcible “Western powers,” and then with Japanese feminists who demanded the ratification of the U.N. Treaty, only to become subject to Western ethnocentrism. To her, this ignorance and naive subjugation to the values of the West was a prime example of “the Chinese mind.”

Japanese feminism is often misunderstood as a Western import, and therefore no more than another form of Western universalism. I have already analyzed how this misunderstanding was created and whose interests it serves, and will not go into further detail here.¹⁷ Japanese feminism has its own raison d’être, its own history, and its own voice, and the charge of being an import was created to attack feminism by reducing it to mere Western influence. What I would like to highlight here is the reversed gender bias of reversed Orientalism, which complicates the situation of Japanese feminism considerably.

As I have already argued, Orientalism is gendered. Oriental men are feminized by Orientalism, and Oriental women are doubly feminized. Accordingly, if a European man is a “real human,” then Orientals should be either women or feminized men. When Oriental women protest against their already feminized men in this doubly colonized situation, they face the frustrating alternative of either being blamed by Oriental men as agents of Western colonialists or being forced to join the struggle against Western colonialists to build the world envisioned by their men, which often has patriarchy as an integral part of it. In such “anticolonialist” struggles, men always exploit women, as is the case with Islamic fundamentalists who force women to wear veils. In Japan in the 1980s, this exploitation took the form of a female writer criticizing the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in the name of “the ecology of culture.”

In a forcible binary opposition, if you are not on our side, you automatically become an enemy. There is a fatal oscillation between friends and enemies, and nothing in between. In this context, the struggle against Oriental men is beneficial to imperialists. It is important, however, to note that, at least in this case, a double negative does not equate with an affirmative; “a plague on both your houses” cannot be reduced to a blessing for one of them.

The doubly gendered bias in the relationship of Orientalism with feminism comes out clearly in the tale of how Ivan Illich was accepted by (male) Japanese intellectuals in the 1980s. Known as a counter-industrial critic, Illich has a wide influence over intellectuals in the Third World. His writings, such as Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1976), were widely welcomed by anticolonial intellectuals in such countries of the margins as Australia and Mexico, which took his work as theoretical ammunition against Western hegemony.¹⁸ He was also influential among “progressive” male Japanese intellectuals, who were searching for counter-industrial values.

Turning his attention to the gender issue, Illich published a book entitled Shadow Work in 1981, and a second, Gender, in 1982. When translated into Japanese, both works were welcomed with enthusiasm by male intellectuals, a fact which highlighted the colonization of their minds. Western feminists either ignored Illich’s work or severely criticized it. They were perfectly aware that Illich had stolen his ideas from anticolonial feminist thinkers such as Maria Mies and Claudia von Werlhof¹⁹ and transformed them to serve a contradictory purpose.

In Gender, Illich creates a strange distinction between sex and gender which is totally alien to the feminist use of these terms. He defines gender as “vernacular gender” and sex as “economic sex”; the former is embedded in the indigenous culture with “ambiguous complementarity,” while the latter is imposed by industrial societies on both men and women as no more than a gender role assignment, mainly for economic reasons. He stresses the oppression of the “unprecedented gender apartheid” in industrialized societies but tends to romanticize the harmonious gender complementarity in the “vernacular gender.” By using the term “ambiguous complementarity,” he implies a general antagonism and potential hostility between the two genders; although it remains clear that, in contrasting industrialized societies and preindustrial societies, he finds more value in the latter.²⁰

The twisted alliance of Illich and male Japanese intellectuals who are more or less progressive (in other words, critical of industrialization) clearly explains the dilemma of Japanese feminism. Male intellectuals took advantage of Illich’s idea of “vernacular gender” to justify their sexist society and exclude external interference. Look, our gender relationship is harmonious enough for us to complement each other, they said, and we have no desire for interference by Western societies. Moreover, Japanese women have been powerful throughout history. There is no need for them to be more liberated … ²¹

Hasegawa’s argument against the Equal Employment Opportunity Law fits neatly into the general scheme of these gender politics. The U.N. Treaty for Women was regarded as the “third threat” from the West, which thus forced “sexist” Japan to open up to the rest of the world. Illich was invited to be a guest speaker at international conferences and symposiums in Japan. On one such occasion Hasegawa was invited to speak as well and was anointed by Illich as an expert on Japanese gender issues.

When anticolonial discourse takes up gender in its own cultural context, it turns into an oppressive discourse that justifies the sexist status quo. In this context, Japanese feminists were blamed as agents of American imperialism and promoters of industrialism. To be honest, some women did show an uncomfortable degree of “Chinese mind.” They tried to increase the external pressure by arguing that Japan was exceptionally backward in women’s issues, under the assumption that the Japanese government would never change without interference from the international community.

I have taken this detour to demonstrate that the familiar clichés about the feminine characteristics of Japanese culture are in fact the products of Orientalism. It is impossible to know whether Japanese culture is really “feminine” because that depends on one’s definition of masculinity and femininity. Psychological gender scales show that Japanese men are more feminine than French women, but this cannot be taken as conclusive because the gender scales in question are defined in Eurocentric terms, with masculinity including such traits as self-assertiveness and individuality. Hence they produce self-fulfilling prophecies, not objective results. It is, after all, not very surprising to find that a Eurocentric gender scale defines European men as the most masculine.

It is easy enough to see the Occident orientalizing the Orient. The question here is how the orientalization of the Orient by Orientals themselves was constructed, and why. To put it in gendered terms, when the Orient is feminized by the Occident, Oriental men accept this and feminize themselves; thus European Orientalists first feminized Japan, and Japanese intellectuals assimilated this.

The construction of femininity is only possible as a residual category of masculinity. As Said points out, women are nothing but “creatures of a male power-fantasy.” Woman is defined by differentiation from the center, which is the male ego, and therefore as a negative mediator of masculine identity. As the Orient is feminized, femininity is defined as inferior. How is it possible for Oriental men to accept this imposed femininity, with its definition of inferiority?

According to Motōri, “the Chinese mind” is the attitude of judging one’s own culture from a “universal” point of view. Motōri performed a grand piece of sleight-of-hand in taking advantage of Orientalism to reinforce his cultural identity by contrasting the Japanese mind with the Chinese mind. If you impose your “universalism” on us, he said, we will accept it. We are only the shadow of your civilization, a residue of your universality. However, we belong to another empire, that of particularism, which you can never understand. Our sovereignty can never be interfered with by external powers …

This is what I call “reverse Orientalism.” Most theories of Japanese particularism can be seen as versions of this. We should note again that it was the European Orientalists who imposed particularity and uniqueness on the Orient in the first place. But reverse Orientalists accepted Europeans’ ethnocentric logic, reversed their discourse, and created a counter-discourse following the same logic. Certainly we are unique, reverse Orientalists claimed, and this is exactly where your universalism falls down.

Such clichés as the following are still in circulation: “Foreigners cannot understand the essence of Japanese culture”; “Japanese literature is impossible to translate into foreign languages”; and the like. Though undeniably colonial, such ideas reflect an effort to restore national pride at some level, however humble. In this sense, nationalist discourses lie within the Orientalist perspective and are no more than by-products of Orientalism, despite their self-conscious particularism. Nationalists are, in the literal sense, reactionaries—people who formed themselves in reaction to the Occident. Conservative discourses are destined to be reactionary and therefore to be products of crisis, a fact which inevitably gives them an air of tragic heroism, of comedy, or even of a farce whose action ends up being all in vain.

Feminized discourses on Japanese culture and nationhood have been nourished by theories of Japaneseness. The representative arguments in this field are found in Doi Takeo’s well-known Amae no kōzō [The anatomy of dependence] (1971) and Kawai Hayao’s Bosei shakai Nihon no byōri [Psychiatry of the mother-dominated society, Japan] (1976). Most of these theories stress the strong emotional ties between mothers and sons in the Japanese household, ties considered unique to Japanese culture.

However, a strong bond between mothers and sons is not necessarily unique to Japanese culture.²² For example, it is common also in Italian and Jewish families. Moral masochism, which characterizes Japanese mothers, is also found among Jewish mothers. There is nothing unique in the dominance of the mother within the household. Nevertheless, there is one common thing which characterizes all so-called mother-dominated societies: they are very patriarchal. Ironically, patriarchal society seems to place more value on mothers than on fathers. Jewish law defines a child born from the marriage between a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father as a Jew, whereas a child born to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is not registered as a Jew (as if patrilineality were to be distrusted, since there is always the chance that wives might commit adultery). Apart from the blood relationship, this shows that Jews believe in cultural inheritance through mothers rather than through fathers. And, as this fact highlights, reproduction of the patriarchal system is not possible without the cooperation of women.

Kawai is careful to adopt the term “mother-dominated society” and yet to avoid the concept of matriarchy or matrilineality. Though a matrilineal society is often confused with a matriarchal one, it is in fact totally different. A matrilineal society is a form of patriarchy in which the male bond is based on matrilineal kinship ties rather than patrilineal kinship ties. Regardless of the lineality, matrilineal or patrilineal, power is in the hands of men of the same kinship group. And despite all the myths and fantasies about ancient matriarchal societies, not one has ever been certainly identified by historians.

In patrilineal and patriarchal societies, women can only survive by producing sons, successors to the male line of the household. The most prudent strategy for a woman lies in controlling her sons and becoming the mother of a head-of-household in the next generation. I call this informal power of women behind the scenes “the power of the dowager.” Cherishing the expectation of reaching power by becoming the mother of a patriarch in the next generation, women are willing to become accomplices in patriarchy.

In a matrilineal society, where membership in a kinship group and its patrimony is inherited through the matrilineal line, women are more likely to value daughters rather than sons because daughters are more secure members of the community than sons, who will become related to women of other lineages. Thailand is known for its matrilineality and matrilocality, with a succession rule by which the youngest daughter inherits the household of her parents, together with the obligation to take care of them. This matrilineal social structure serves as the basis for a prosperous sex industry and consequently an epidemic of AIDS in rural districts in Thailand, since prostitution is considered no more than a profitable business for women who have the responsibility of supporting their parents. Prostitution is not stigmatized in rural Thailand, and once a former prostitute goes back to her home village with money, she is welcomed as a good member of the community and marries a man in the same village. Thus the tragedy of transmission of AIDS through a mother to a young baby can occur in very remote areas in Thailand.

I bring up the case of Thailand as a matrilineal society in order to contrast it with a mother-dominated society. Mother dominance is by no means an attribute of a matrilineal society but, rather, it is the product of a patriarchal one. Mother dominance reflects the power of a mother in a patrilineal household and has nothing to do with matrilineality, much less with matriarchy. When theorists on Japaneseness, such as Doi and Kawai, argue about the psychological aspects of mother dominance and the overly close relationship between mothers and sons, which can prevent Japanese men from reaching full maturity, they are talking about harmful aspects of Japanese patriarchy, not matriarchy. As Mizuta Noriko accurately points out, “Sons dependent on mothers are no more nor less than the product of patriarchy, not matriarchy.”²³

Karatani Kōjin, a postmodern literary critic who long refrained from talking about feminism, uses the term “bilineality” instead of the confusing “matrilineality” to refer to Japanese culture and society.²⁴ He chose this concept in order to reflect the particularity of Japanese culture and differentiate it from Western patriarchy. According to Karatani, Japanese society is unique in that it combines bilineality—the coexistence of patrilineality and matrilineality—with the lack of a well-established patriarchy, unlike Christianized Western societies. Karatani’s assumption implies that the enemy of Japanese feminism cannot be a Western type of patriarchy, and that Japanese feminist strategy cannot be the same as feminist strategy in the West.

When Karatani began to talk about gender, he immediately raised the suspicion that he would betray feminists, as had happened so many times before, with Illich and other male thinkers. Dealing with gender issues, so-called progressive intellectuals often unconsciously slip into the masculine mode. Mizuta Noriko has advanced the following explanation of why Karatani kept silent for so long.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, feminism and gender perspectives have made an undeniable contribution to social science, literature and literary criticism, posing fundamental questions that no one can avoid. In this cultural space of discourse, it is certainly mysterious why Karatani, a leading contemporary critic, has shown a lack of interest in gender issues…. In the meantime, all the efforts of Western literary theories, such as structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, semiotics, and new historicism, can be seen as an attempt to answer the question of gender that was raised by feminism. It is almost impossible for him to exclude himself from this current.

Nevertheless, seen from a different perspective, the absence of gender in his writings is understandable, because all his inquiries concerning “outside,” “the other,” “singularity,” “exclusion,” “difference,” “communication,” and “modernity” include a gendered perspective on a deep level. Since all these themes in his research are inevitably related to gender, which is a central concern of modern thought, he does not have to refer specifically to gender.²⁵

But is it really true that Karatani had no need to talk about gender because he had already argued about “the other”? Or was he simply being cautious? For any literary theorist in a North American intellectual community, it would be impossible to avoid the question of gender. Karatani is familiar with the North American literary scene, and Mizuta’s description of him seems as much of a challenge as a narrative.

Karatani originally borrowed the term “bilineality” from Takamure Itsue (1894–1964, one of the most important indigenous feminist thinkers in prewar Japan, who gave enthusiastic support to ultranationalism) and her historical study of ancient matrilineality.²⁶ The concept of bilineality in Takamure is itself controversial, and Karatani’s use of this concept has nothing to do with kinship structure. In his writings on Motōri, he calls the mixed use of Japanese and Chinese in one sentence “bilineality.” This linguistic mixing finally resolved the bilingual situation, enabling Japanese to assimilate the Chinese language into the Japanese language’s own structure, instead of distorting Japanese. Hasegawa argues that this mixed usage of the languages was “a successful trick to avoid the domination of Japanese by Chinese.”

Karatani uses “bilineality” as a metaphor in literary criticism. However, his understanding of this concept as a kinship term is incorrect to begin with, and the concept itself is arguable at best, even in its original context. Karatani shows little interest in kinship structure; indeed, he ventures to adopt the term only because he was trying to distinguish patrilineality from bilineality, which he thinks characterizes Japanese culture.

One question remains: why does Karatani propose an idea which fits so well with the theory of Japanese uniqueness and which is, accordingly, easily captured within the framework of American revisionists who blame Japan for cultural conflicts? On top of that, by redefining “bilineality,” Karatani implicitly criticizes Japanese feminism as a follower of Western feminism, since the enemy of Japanese feminism cannot be the patriarchy in a Western sense. In making “particular” Japaneseness his enemy, he even becomes patronizing, telling Japanese feminists “to be first of all modernist” instead of adopting a postmodern strategy. By so doing, he ignores the existing discourses of feminism critical to modernity and reduces feminism itself to mere modernist enlightenment.

The psychology of mother-dependent sons that characterizes Japanese masculinity has become a dominant principle of Japanese society and is symbolized by the feminized figure of the emperor as a mother. In a book on Takamure Itsue, the historian Yamashita Etsuko writes about mother dominance as a symbol of leaderless, “soft” fascism, a ruling system of interdependence in which no one takes responsibility as an individual person.²⁷ In this context, the Japanese imperial system is interpreted as maternal dominance.

The iconography of imperial figures tells us that in the late Edo period the emperor was symbolized in a feminized mode, with cosmetics and darkened teeth like a court lady. He was a powerless center to be fed and served for survival. Moreover, the samurai class feminized aristocrats surrounding the emperor because aristocrats as a class represented cultural sophistication in manners and rituals. After the Meiji Restoration, however, a more masculine visual representation of the emperor was created, in which he dressed in military garb and sported a kaiser mustache. And with the establishment of the “nation-state” ideology before World War II, there was a division of labor between the emperor and the empress. A formulaic photo of the imperial couple, distributed to all primary schools for use in school ceremonies, symbolized them as “a strict father and a nurturing mother.” This is evidence that, from 1868 until 1945, the figure of the emperor was carefully kept away from feminized imagery.

The emperor, as the center of the Great Asia Community, had to be represented as masculine. As a military dictator, he symbolized not maternal benevolence but paternal authority to ultranationalists. Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), the postwar nationalist, cultural conservative, and well-known writer who committed suicide in 1970 in the anachronistic samurai fashion, by hara-kiri, expressed his resentment toward the late emperor for declaring himself to be no more than a human after Japan’s 1945 defeat. When Mishima demanded of the emperor why he had become a human being, resigning from the throne of God, he was definitely seeking a paternal figure, not a maternal one.

It appears to me that the modern emperor has been feminized since the sixtieth anniversary of his reign in 1986. Hasegawa was invited to a celebration organized by the right wing, where she made a speech openly referring to the emperor as the mother of the nation. Coming from a contemporary conservative intellectual, who reproduces the mainstream discourse of nationalism faithfully, it was surprising that her speech did not induce anger among authentic male nationalists.

Since the mid-1970s, it has also become popular to use another metaphor, “an empty center,” as a contemporary image for an imperial system lacking all responsibility. This term, once used to berate Japanese ultranationalism, is now applied to explain the secret of the continuing survival of an old-fashioned Asian monarchy in such a highly developed society as Japan. It may be right to call the emperor an empty center if he holds a nominal position as a symbol of the unity of the nation. One prewar political scientist, Minobe Tatsukichi (1873–1948), argued to this effect in his theory of the imperial system as ruling machinery with a double-edged effect—one for the rulers, as an efficient bureaucracy, the other for the ruled, as a dictatorship. But with the growth of ultranationalism, Minobe had to resign his position in the House of Peers because of his theory. No one could correctly call the emperor “an empty center” when he exercised military dictatorship during the war.

The rise of the “empty center” discourse occurred as part of the postwar imperial system, in the context of the prosperity that followed the rapid economic growth of the 1960s, and it coincided with the transformation of the imperial figure from a military leader into a civilian. When he reached his seventies, the late emperor showed himself as a powerless, pacifist, old “grandpa.” There was a corresponding rise in discourses that associated supreme nobility with this passive, powerless being who was to be fed and served by the people in exchange for his passion to accept pain for the benefit of the nation. In this context, age was identified with innocence.²⁸ In 1988, when he was on the brink of death, Emperor Hirohito attracted the attention of young people, who visited the imperial palace to show their empathy for his passion. One young social critic, Otsuka Eiji, observed that high-school girls at the time referred to him as “cute.”²⁹ On his deathbed, a new folktale of the emperor was created: it was reported in a newspaper that this dying old man showed concern for the year’s harvest, as if assuming a final responsibility as the highest priest of the agricultural rituals of the imperial court.

The city which I am talking about [Tokyo] represents a precious paradox; a paradox that this metropolis certainly has a center, but an empty center. The entire city is built surrounding this prohibited area, covered with green and protected by a moat, the locus of the imperial palace where the emperor lives without being seen by anyone.³⁰

The phrase “empty center” quickly became popular among Japanese intellectuals. First applied to describe the nature of the contemporary emperorship, the metaphor later became ahistorical and was used to symbolize the “essence” of the Japanese imperial system, because it provided a good explanation for the long survival of a system with an emperor in nominal authority. It should be noted, however, that there is no such thing as an ahistorical essence of the imperial system. Historians understand that the rule of the emperor took different forms in different historical contexts; in some cases it was nominal, but in other cases it was not. The newly adopted postmodern term “empty center” successfully conveys the current Japanese emperorship’s ahistorical, benign, pacifist, and, accordingly, feminine nature.

By now, we have perhaps said enough about the politics of discourse that feminizes Japaneseness. The problem is that “the Japanese mind” as opposed to “the Chinese mind”—and femininity as opposed to masculinity—are asymmetrical dualisms created and deployed by men. Better still, we can call them male discourses in a colonized situation. According to Motōri, femininity is a way of thinking and acting, a cultural attribute that can be adopted by men as well. His concept of masculinity and femininity is close to the culturally constructed concept of gender; for him, anatomy is not destiny, for men can cross the border of gender by using feminine language. This tradition of men as “transvestite” writers started back in the thirteenth century, when the aristocrat Kino Tsurayuki wrote down his personal memories of a trip in kanamoji, the “feminine” Japanese script used only by women of the time. In the guise of a woman writer, he began his story with the following sentence: “I will try to write a journal, as men do.”

Is transvestite patriarchy unique to Japan? It seems to me an inevitable path for colonized male discourse to take. In transvestite patriarchy, women are doubly marginalized. In the forced alternatives of either masculine or feminine, in the frustrating oscillation between men and women dictated by gender dualism, any counter-discourse of woman against transvestite patriarchy becomes, in turn, “masculine.” In just this way, in the recent past, feminized Japan exercised masculine power over its colonies such as Korea and Taiwan. We ourselves can hardly expect to avoid this trap in the future, unless we can refuse the forced alternative dictated by binary constructions and insist on a future that we ourselves define, rather than a “reactionary” mirror image of that which we are resisting.

Ueno Chizuko, “Orientarizumu to jendā” [Orientalism and gender], in Bosei fashizumu [Maternalist fascism], vol. 6 of New Feminism Review, ed. Kanō Mikiyo et al. (Tokyo: Gakuyō Shobō, 1995), pp. 108–131. This essay first appeared in English in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English supplement, no. 13 (1997), pp. 3–25, and is reprinted here (with several minor changes) with the kind permission of the author and journal.

5. According to its distance from the European world, “the East” is divided into different categories, such as the Near East, the Middle East and the Far East. There is a real irony in the use of “the Orient” by Japanese. Prince Mikasanomiya, a younger brother of the late Emperor Hirohito and supposedly a pacifist who tried to stay away from politics, was involved in archeology. He founded the Japanese Society of Oriental Studies—meaning study of the Near and Middle East. Thus while Japanese do not care to call Japan “the Far East,” it is clear that they view “the Orient” through Western eyes and therefore assume that they themselves do not belong to it.

6. This binary opposition, founded basically on the one between nature and culture, comes from the structuralist paradigm of Lévi-Strauss, which was later criticized by feminist anthropologists such as Sherry Ortner, Michelle Rosaldo, and others. See here Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).

7. It might be confusing to call premodern Japanese intellectuals bilingual in a literal sense, because what they actually did was create a way of reading Chinese in accordance with Japanese grammatical structure. Their knowledge of the Chinese language was limited mainly to its written form, and they preserved the old pronunciation of Chinese characters from the Tang dynasty (618–907). Though they did not speak or comprehend contemporary Chinese, Japanese intellectuals could always read and understand written Chinese, even as its pronunciation changed throughout history.

8. In the sixteenth century, when “barbarians from the south” (i.e., Europeans) arrived in China, took over a couple of cities in coastal areas, such as Amoy, and set up their first colonies, the Chinese government of the time found it difficult to admit that there was another spot on Earth that was on the same footing as they themselves were and that had to be dealt with as an equal. In their view, China was simply the world itself; they could not accept any heterogeneity in their space.

21. The Illichian school of social critique in Japan published a series of books on “vernacular gender,” in one of which they invited a woman philosopher, Kawano Nobuko, to discuss the “harmonious complementarity of vernacular gender” in premodern Japan. See Kawano’s “Rōdō kara mita jendā” [Gender in the perspective of labor], in Sei, rodō, kōnin no funryū [Outburst of sex, labor and marriage], ed. Yamamoto Tetsuji and Kabayama Kōichi, vol. 6 in Series: Unplugging (Tokyo: Shinhyōron, 1984).

22. Mother-dominance in the household is not only not unique to Japanese culture but also historical. I have argued elsewhere about the particular historical nature of mother-son ties as a modern product in Japan. See “The Collapse of ‘Japanese Mothers,’” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English supplement, no. 10 (1996), pp. 3–19.

Kano referred to my original Japanese paper on reverse Orientalism, and made some critical comments which came earlier than this English version. It gives me an opportunity to respond to her. She makes two points: First, though I criticized Karatani’s misunderstanding of an anthropological kinship term, bilineality, it does not work on him, as he uses the concept in a totally different way. What is to be criticized is his ahistorical essentialism on Japanese culture. Second, by attributing the femininity and semicolonized situation to Japan throughout history, I, too, end up constructing ahistorical essentialism. Concerning Kano’s first point, at the roundtable discussion she referred to, I made both these points. While Karatani admitted my first point on his misuse of the technical concept of bilineality, he stuck to his idea of Japanese singularity of cultural experience. As regards Kano’s second point, she is right that I was trapped by transhistorical cultural essentialism, though it was the very target I was attacking. Motōri revived the ancient chronicles and the classic literary texts so as to construct the transhistorical Japaneseness. This is exactly why nativist thinkers repeatedly come back to Motōri’s texts. I could add two supplementary points to avoid misunderstanding. First, the construction of Japaneseness by Motōri is fictitious, or at least discursively performative; in addition, the formation of Japan itself is highly controversial. Second, there were actually historical moments when Japan took a masculine guise facing the other. Gendered Orientalism takes various forms in specific historical contexts, to which we should be attentive.

26. Takamure Itsue, “Bokeisei no kenkyū” [Studies on matrilineality], in Takamure Itsue zenshū [Collected works of Takamure Itsue] (Tokyo: Rironsha, 1966). First published in 1938. See also Nishikawa Yūko, “Japan’s Entry into War and the Support for Women,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English supplement, no. 12 (1997), pp. 48–83.