MORE THAN 100 years ago, May 31, 1883, to be exact, the brothers Goncourt wrote in their journal that dinner conversation had been about kissing and that “somebody who had lived for many years in Japan said that the kiss did not exist in Japanese love-making.” This early, then, the West knew of Japan’s odd ideas on the kiss.
Nowadays, of course, Japan is full of it. Just look aroundbillboards, magazines, TV itself, lots of kissing. . . and more. But this was not always so and even now the kiss in Japan does not quite mean what it does in the West.
To begin with, there wasn’t any kissing—at least, not officially. In Japan, as in China, the kiss was invisible. Lovers never kissed in public; family members never kissed. The touching of the lips never became the culturally encoded action it has for so long been in Europe and America.
Nonetheless, some people kissed. One knows this from the erotic prints. Yet, even here, the full kiss is rare. It is almost as though it were an occasional practice, a further perversion, rather than the standard fare it is in the West. Certainly, it was something one did only when carried away by passion itself. And, of a consequence, the kiss remained only, singularly, sexual.
Imagine then the surprise felt by early Japanese abroad who found mothers kissing children and fathers kissing mothers, and all in public. Yukichi Fukuzawa, the later statesman and educator, in the United States in 1860 as a member of the retinue of the Shogun’s envoy, has mentioned this surprise in his journals.
As befits a statesman and diplomat, he realized that he was viewing a cultural aberration. This indiscriminate pressing together of mouths did not shock him. He viewed the odd practice somewhat as Americans of the period were viewing Eskimo nose-rubbing.
At the same time, however, kissing was not among the foreign customs introduced into the rapidly modernizing country. Still, kissing was so much a part of the Western world that it kept intruding itself. For example, in modern novels being translated into Japanese. Donald Keene writes of one such example in the early translation of Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers —fittingly Japanized as A Springtime Tale of Blossoms and Willows.
In it the hero speaks of his satisfaction “if I could get one kiss from those coral lips.” This the translator, doubtless after some thought, translated as “if I could get one lick of your red lips.” Though there existed in the new dictionaries a word for “kiss,” the translator preferred hitoname (literally, “one lick”), doubtless feeling that licking was, after all, a more decent activity than kissing.
In the event, Alice, she of the coral lips, “hid her face with her hands.” In Japanese, however, Arisu “hid her face with her sleeve and though she would speak could find no words,” so affected was she by what had nearly transpired.
Another example was the showing of the early Edison film The Widow Jones—The May Irwin—John Rice Kiss. This protracted embrace had gone unremarked in 1886 New York but became a sensation in 1887 Osaka. It has been said that the film became a smash hit, people crowding in to view the enormity. The police, hearing of it, came as well, but the benshi—that narratorinterpreter of early films in Japan—saved the day by explaining that this was the accepted Western salutation. These people were simply saying hello.
Nonetheless such a public appearance of kissing was shortly more thoroughly condemned. It was even made a statutory offense, punishable by fine or detention if”committed” in public. What outrage had occurred to make such a law necessary is not recorded, but it remained on the books from the early 1920s through 1945, when it was finally rescinded by the Occupation authorities.
While it was in force it was also evoked. There was a famous incident in the 1930s when Rodin’s celebrated Le Baiser was to be exhibited. This sculpture is of a completely nude couple in the act of kissing. The police promptly prohibited the proposed exhibition.
The Japanese authorities were scandalized that such a thing would be shown; the French authorities were scandalized that it would not be. Diplomatic pressure was brought to bear and the police themselves suggested a solution. As social-critic Kimpei Shiba has told it, the authorities said that the nudity was, of course, permissible—therefore the work might be shown if just the heads were in some way muffled, perhaps if a cloth were wrapped around them.
It was not until after the Pacific War that the Rodin was seen in Japan. Now it is on permanent display, to be seen anytime by anyone, on the plaza in front of the Tokyo Museum of Western Art in Ueno. Its appearance, however, should not be taken as indication that the kiss in Japan has (in Western terms) been entirely normalized.
Indeed, kissing has only with difficulty become even a semiaccepted convention. Take, for example, the difficulties occasioned by its public debut—in the movies.
Before the war, of course, all kissing scenes were routinely cut from foreign films—at great peril to their continuity. Hero and heroine would look deeply into each other’s eyes. They would move closer and closer together. Then they would snap apart with a suddenness that ought to have set their teeth rattling.
Now, however, post-1945, with Western ways loose, indeed rampant, within the country, the time of the kiss had come. In 1946 the Daiei Motion Picture Company planned “the first kiss scene in any Japanese film.” It was to be included in a picture appropriately named A Certain N(qht’s Kiss (Aru Yo no Seppun). At the last moment, however, Daiei lost its nerve. The director made obscure the important event by having his heroine coyly open her umbrella at the crucial point.
The honors consequently went to a Shochiku film, Twenty-Year-Old Youth (Hatachi no Seishun), where there was an appropriately shameless kiss, right on the lips. An indication of how little kissing was accepted is seen in the degree of sensation which this osculation occasioned. The press wrote of nothing else. Was this kiss “merely commercial” or was it “artistically motivated”? Was it “hygienic”? Did it have “a sexual motive”? And, was it “Japanese or not”?
No agreement was possible but a majority decided against its being hygienic. For some time after, kiss-scenes were faked, and shot from an angle where the fakery would not be apparent. Or, if that proved impossible, then the principals would wear touched up gauze over the lips for the dirty event.
Even now there is the feeling, in public entertainments at any rate, that the kiss is somehow not entirely Japanese. It is telling that the only thoroughly accepted screen kiss in the postwar era was a “foreign” one. This was in a film called A Brilliant Revenge (Kenrantaru Fukushu). The long on-screen kiss was occasioned by the performance of a foreign drama. Since all Japanese were pretending to be foreigners it was perfectly proper, in fact in character, for them to spend periods of time with their lips pressed to each other.
The discrimination continues. There is, for example, a perfectly good Japanese word for “kiss.” It is seppun. Yet, it is rarely heard. Instead, most young Japanese (those doing most of the kissing) use kissu, if they talk about it at all. It is felt that the use of English sanitizes by endistancing. The word becomes a euphemism. It is like (in all languages) calling the toilet a handwashing place. It indicates that though a word is somehow necessary, the designated action is not quite socially acceptable.
The reason that we in the West need not feel funny about kissing and that the Japanese do is that we have a much larger kissing repertoire. We have, as it were, domesticated the act.
We kiss just everyone. Mother, father, brother, sister, wife, children—no one is safe. The Japanese, however, still think of the kiss as an exotic adjunct to the act of making love. For a couple to kiss in public would be for them to publicly indulge in foreplay. And as for kissing Mom at train station or airport lobby, well. . . .
Thus the social role that kissing takes in Japan is narrow. It does not mean affection or reverence or sorrow or consolation or any of the other things it can mean in the West. It means just one thing and that is the reason for the ambivalence which surrounds it.
—1983