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Japanese youth: With a rebel yell
Japanese youth culture has long embraced bizarre fashion, subversive
comics and sexual graffiti. Now a new wave of violent female fiction is causing
shockwaves.
By Angela Neustatter
May 30, 2005
Hitomi Kanehara, 21, sits on the edge of a leather sofa in a Tokyo hotel, long
legs evident in a pleated schoolgirlish skirt. Sheeny hair frames a startlingly
pretty, childish face and an expression of sweet innocence. You could be
excused, then, for viewing Kanehara as the embodiment of all those enduring
male fantasies of what makes the ideal Japanese woman: naive submissiveness,
ornate femininity and girlish sexuality.
It is a view that alters rapidly when you read Kanehara's first novel, Snakes
and Earrings, a bestseller in her native Japan that has shocked the country
with its violent and graphic opposition to the traditional cultural
expectations of how Japanese women should be.
Kanehara is part of a burgeoning subculture of contemporary women expressing
the same loud, emphatic message through fashion, graphics, comics, subversive
graffiti, photography and fiction. It underscores a growing generational
divide, a significant shift in values and attitudes.
Snakes and Earrings, which won the prestigious Akutagawa literary prize in
Japan, is a visceral, gut-churning tale about Lui, a young, beautiful woman
whose desire for ever more extreme body piercing, tattoos and violent
masochistic sex leads her on a picaresque descent into a deadly, nihilistic
world.
Kanehara describes it as the book she had to write. That urge was clearly
strengthened by her own experience of being a troubled outsider: she was
anorexic and a self-cutter in junior school, then dropped out of class
altogether at 11 because, she says, "I had more important ways to use the
time." This caused what would seem an enduring conflict with her mother, whose
comment on her novel, she says, was to say there was too much sex. "Everyone
who is young in the current Japan has a degree of despair," says Kanehara. "I
have felt at a mental level that there was no hope. But I don't see myself
speaking for my generation. I'm just writing what I feel."
Her aim is to write about how it feels to be a young, urban woman of her
generation. The point about her characters, she says, is that they make choices
for themselves, as she does, deciding how they want to live, rather than
conforming. "Writing about sex graphically and disturbingly was an essential
part of that."
But why are young women feeling the need to rebel in a way that is so
thoroughly antithetical to the way Japanese women are perceived? Forty-year-old
Mayka, a Tokyo-born woman who left Japan when she was 19 to come and live in
England, has thought about this a good deal as she has two teenage daughters
herself.
"I left Japan because I saw that a creative freedom of choice was not possible
in my country, because my parents had very traditional expectations for me. But
I think what is happening now is more extreme. It's a profound questioning of
the way Japanese society sees and treats women. They are absolutely expected to
be answerable to what men want, to marry, have children, and accept the fact
that a lot of men will have an intimate life outside the home."
But this generation is living after the economic boom, explains Mayka. During
that time of prosperity, western material flooded Japan, the very liberated and
libertine lifestyles of Europe and America influenced the young, and suddenly
they saw that there were other ways of being, but without always understanding
quite what they meant.
Japan does not have a strong religious or spiritual belief system to help guide
and shape the way the young grow up, she says. "It doesn't surprise me that
there are a lot of them who are looking for kicks, but who experience a very
frightened nihilism as well because, in a way, they are turning their backs on
what has held Japanese society together for centuries without knowing what they
want to replace it with."
In fact, in-your-face sexuality has surely been a hallmark of female expression
for decades. Japanese journalist Yo Yahata has railed against this subculture
in Sekai magazine. Neo-masochism defines the young, he says, and picks on the
"number one fashion among Japanese youth", Goth-Loli, which, as the name
suggests, is a combination of the Gothic and the Lolita look, as symbolising
"something we call the tendency towards the dark".
Youth fashion has, certainly, expressed the challenge to convention and
tradition as effectively as anything, going through several incarnations. In
the 1980s the dominant style was Kawaii, meaning cute and essentially
childlike, adorable, innocent and vulnerable. There seemed to be little
subversive about it in its early saccharine form. But, according to journalist
Sharon Kinsella, "It evolved to a more humorous, kitsch and androgynous style",
and in due course became "the more knowing Chou-Kawaii" (super-cute).
Kogal followed in the early 1990s, defined by knee-length socks, bleached hair,
distinct makeup and short school uniform skirts. This had the required effect
of appalling older Japanese with its "impertinent panache, independence,
sexuality and self-confidence".
From the Kogal fashion came subversive graffiti photos taken by and featuring
very young women, using basic little cameras. In them, the young women
caricature sexy poses and classic beauty, or they subvert femininity altogether
by pulling grotesque faces and attempting to look repulsive.
Associate professor Laura Miller, a specialist in Japanese studies at Loyola
University, Chicago, explains the motivation behind this rebellion: "Japanese
girls are constantly bombarded with messages from a beauty industry and the
media that exhort them to be feminine and sexy. They are simultaneously
admonished at home and at school to be chaste and submissive through confining
gender norms." Through fashion, comics, graffiti and language, they can show
their disdain for such contradictory messages, she says.
But it is fiction that takes the contemporary female attitudes and politics to
the widest audiences in Japan. Before Snakes and Earrings came Vibrator by Mari
Akasaka, winner of the Noma literature prize for best new writer. This novel,
which reached the UK in March, is the tale of a bulimic, alcoholic young
journalist who takes a lift with a trucker and goes on a journey of graphic
sexual intensity. The heroine, Rei,appears to be struggling with what it means
to be a woman: "If you live in a world that's controlled overwhelmingly by men,
and if you don't want people making remarks about things that are really none
of their business, you've either got to be totally indifferent to how you look
or else go around looking beautiful all the time. I attempted to look beautiful
all the time. But there are limits to how much you can do."
It is, however, Natsuo Kirino, now in her 50s and the author of 13 novels, who
is seen as one of the most important feminist voices speaking for contemporary
women. Her novel Out, the only one of hers published here, and nominated for
the Edgar Allan Poe award for best novel, was described in the New York Times
as "mingling biting feminist commentary with engrossing storytelling ... a
scathing allegory about the subjugation of women in Japanese society and the
secret lives this forces them to lead".
It is also a disturbing tale of four women working in a packed-lunch factory
who collude in the murder by one of them of her violent husband: together they
dismember and dispose of the body. It also reflects attitudes to women in
Japan, how they are used as a commodity and what happens when women attempt to
assert themselves.
Japanese women writers are clearly using popular fiction to raise questions
about their society, says Professor Rebecca L Copeland, who teaches Japanese
literature at Washington University, St Louis. She explains that Kirino "takes
readers through the dark and dangerous world of the pornography industry where
women are exploited as objects of desire". But at a deeper level, Kirino is
questioning contemporary sexuality in Japan.
Yet what is it that makes these young women choose to write about violent sex
as their way of rebellion? Could it be that after centuries of being depicted
as passively accepting how men have used and abused them sexually and they find
it empowering to write about women who seek out and enjoy violent sex because
it is their choice? This seems to be what Kanehara is saying. While Kirino,
writing about women meting out violence is more straightforwardly showing that
women can be as powerful and violent as men when they feel misused.
A new anthology of writing by Japanese women, Bad Girls of Japan, due to be
published here in November, explores the way deviant women who have defied
patriarchies have long provoked moral panic in Japan. The book examines
bad-girl photography, extreme makeup and brand consumption among contemporary
Japanese girls and women. "Bad Girls reveals much about the politics of
propriety, the boundaries of gender and the kind of delight huge audiences take
in being shocked by the misbehaviour of these young women," says its editor,
Jan Bardsley.
Yet, in the end, is there a qualitative difference in the rebellion of young
Japanese women and those in Europe and America? Perhaps the things they do to
shock are not so different, suggests Mayka, but: "Japanese women come from a
society with repressions and ritual that the west has not known in the same
way. I think it is healthy that they are finding their way of saying change is
essential for women, but it will be sad if the strong, protective side of
family life gets lost in the process."
Kanehara's second novel, Ash Baby, exploring the friendship between a young
woman and a paedophile, has already been published in Japan. She is writing her
third novel, which is about a young woman with an eating disorder. She pushes a
strand of hair that has fallen over her pouty lips behind one ear and reflects
on how the worst reactions to Snakes and Earrings have come from women "of the
slightly older generation. They assert themselves very strongly. I've had
horrible message cards from those women." But that will not stop her
challenging her country's taboos.
The Guardian
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