The Yasukuni shrine is an often controversial symbol of the Japanese government’s attempt to reestablish a sense of national identity. The shrine itself contains 14 class-A war criminals and arguably reveres the dead of not only the Pacific War but also Japan’s past imperial exploits in Korea and China. There has understandably been backlash over the visit of leading government figures visiting the shrine, with the most recent being the Deputy Prime Minster Tara Aso (McCurry, 2013). The attempt to reestablish or propagate nationalistic sympathies however distorts the complicated tensions existing within the country, especially since the US occupation after the Pacific War. One film that portrays the tensions of national (and gender) identity is Takashi Miike’s Ôdishon (1999) which will be the subject of analysis within this essay.
The film is itself centralised on the main protagonist Aoyama, a petit-bourgeois single-parent widower and his search for the perfect Japanese wife. The film’s narrative starts off within the style of a fairly cliché middle-class romantic comedy. He is pushed by his son to remarry seven years after the death of his wife because he is “worn out”. Even one of his employees suggests that “everyone in Japan is lonely” associating it to a contemporary sense of dissolution with national identity. His friend Yoshikawa, a film producer, even suggests “that Japan is finished” whilst they discuss in a bar how the current economic recession is affecting their business exploits. This statement is also made after Yoshikawa comments on some off-screen women that he describes as “awful girls, common and full of themselves and stupid all of them”. Indeed this can show male anxieties and reaction over contemporary Japanese women using traditional male spaces such as a bar. The women are contrasted with Yoshikawa’s suggestion of setting up an audition for a movie so Aoyama can take his pick from the rejected candidates. Yoshikawa asserts that through this process Aoyama could find a prospective wife that is “clever, well-mannered, good-natured…and accomplished in the traditional arts”. The “traditional arts” suggested here could be a symbol of the traditional role of the subservient wife within a Japanese marriage and “well-mannered”. Indeed Aoyama agrees to Yoshikawa’s suggestion and there is a montage of the two auditioning prospective candidates. The montage is attached to a humorous soundtrack, even though it portrays the humiliation of women having to literally perform various acts for the approval of the two male auditioners in an attempt to achieve an acting career. Aoyama eventually falls for Asami, an ex-ballet dancer with a troubled and mysterious past. Indeed upon Asami’s entrance into the film, the narrative takes a somewhat darker direction. The film seems to have used an initial cliché liberal humanist portrayal of loneliness and love in order to draw Aoyama and the spectator into a false sense of security. Aoyama is eventually brutally punished for his actions and his inability to give his entire self to Asami. In Japanese Horror Under Western Eyes: Social Class and Global Culture in Miike Takashi’s Audition, Steffan Hantke suggests that “if we see Asami as a figure in the Japanese tradition of the female avenger, her capacity for violence and destruction is directed against Aoyama as a proponent of a reactionary ideology of the family” (Hantke, 2005, p60). This means that even though Aoyama’s actions are not vilified (at least initially) his assumptions of achieving a loving and submissive Japanese wife are proved drastically wrong.
The film’s release had seen the continuation of a popular story and character archetype that is often used within Japanese horror cinema. Indeed films such as Ringu (1998) and the later Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) portrays a female character with long black hair that curses those who cross her path. In Japanese Horror Cinema, Jay McRoy discusses the popular archetype of the kaidan or the ‘avenging spirit’ and states that:
Depicted as ‘both a source of danger to the norm and the very means of perpetuating that norm’, such texts frequently position women as ‘both symbolically dangerous…as well as the source of all that is Japanese’; through their vengeance, they simultaneously balance the scales of a perceived sense of justice, evoke fears of social change or return of a ‘monstrous past’ (2005, p4).
In Ôdishon Asami seems to inhabit the archetype of the kaidan or ‘avenging spirit’ as it seems that Aoyama is cursed from choosing this traditional image of Japanese female beauty. Indeed the normality of Aoyama’s bourgeois lifestyle and the diegetic narrative becomes progressively more destabilised and the milieu becomes more and more focused on the actions of Asami. The first indication of the change from the romantic narrative into the horror is when Aoyama calls Asami back after their first date. Aoyama fails to heed the warnings of Yoshikawa that Asami seems too perfect to “fall bang into [their] little scheme”. There is one shot of Asami sitting and waiting near the phone, with her back arched and black hair covering most of her face. The dark and unsettling mise en scѐne contrasts that of the comfortable bourgeois home of Aoyama’s. Once the phone rings, a sadistic smile forms on Asami’s face as the contents of a mysterious bag moves within the background. This depicts the extent to which Aoyama’s idealistic notions of love and adherence to traditional Japanese gender roles have sealed his fate with Asami’s retribution.
The actual justification for the extent of Asami’s own vengeance on Aoyama is ambivalent. There are references to childhood abuse and particularly to her stepfather, but this is however unclear as the diegetic narrative is disconnected from Aoyama. Indeed there is a sequence of obscure flashbacks or possible fantasies when Aoyama is drugged by Asami. One which reveals the contents of the mysterious bag to contain a man (possibly the music producer who went missing) whose tongue is missing, as well as his feet, ears and fingers. Asami then feeds the man her own vomit, displaying an extreme version of a role reversal, whereby the male is subjected to becoming the silent “well-mannered” and domesticated pet, who literally relies on her for means of subsistence. Indeed when Asami cuts off Aoyama’s foot it seems that he will be subjected to the same domesticated and restricted role. Hantke argues that it is “striking that Asami’s revenge, which is directed in all its premodern excess against the body of Aoyama, makes visible the social areas, such as the domestic incarceration of women, over which [Japanese] modernisation seems to have passed without leaving a trace” (Hantke, 2005, p61). Indeed it seems that in Aoyama’s fantasy of a perfect traditional subservient Japanese wife is due to his fear (and Yoshikawa’s) of the social position of women changing. He often ignores the views and conversation of other women such as his secretary and his housemaid. It is indeed his own ignorance to the plight of these contemporary women and his idealistic love of the traditional Japanese woman which culminates with him being subjected to pre-modern violence from the “monstrous past”.
This is not to say that the Japan’s move towards modernity was without violence as even the Meiji Restoration had seen the overthrow of the old Tokugawa shogunate and the formation of new ideology attached to the imperial family. In ‘The Break-up of the National Body: Cosmetic Multi-cultralism and the Films of Miike Takashi’, Mika Ko discusses the ideology of Kokutai which “was invented to unite Japan as a modern nation-state under the emperor in the late nineteenth century. It claims that Japan is a racially homogeneous organic unity and that all Japanese are linked by blood to a single imperial family” (2006, p134). This ideology was technically dismantled after the Pacific War and when the Americans had occupied Japan. The emperor Hirohito was made to renounce his divinity, however “the Americans, convinced of his importance to secure compliance and ward off radicalism, managed to spare him the indignity of the Tokyo tribunal” (Jansen, 2000, p761). This was a highly questionable judgement after the emperor had such as direct link to Japan’s nationalist propaganda. Moreover, the occupation of Japan by America had its own questionable effects, especially when concerning the Cold War. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers General Douglas MacArthur even instigated a ‘Red Purge’ which saw the removal of 13’000 “undesirables” from politics and business as well as the banning of large strike action in 1947 (Goto-Jones, 2009, p97). This undeniably undermined the ‘democratic’ principles which the Americans had outlined within the new constitution that they had drafted for Japan and meant that nationalistic forces were able to preserve some political hegemony after the Pacific War.
In their ability to hold political hegemony and the emperor Hirohito, nationalist forces were also able to still partially reclaim kokutai ideology as a way of asserting national identity. Ko argues that “by the repeated use of metaphors emphasising a lack of bodily integrity, the breakdown of bodily boundaries and the fragmentation of the body, Miike’s films seem to allegorise the break-up of the mythical national body of Japan as a racially homogenous organic unit” (2006, p134). She does however refer to this when analysing his more multicultural films such as Dead or Alive: Hanzaisha (1999). In Ôdishon however the film predominantly concentrates on Japanese characters and specifically the break-up of the Japanese male body. This could suggest an overall difficulty with any form of unified identification, as indeed Asami suggests to Aoyama that “only pain and suffering will make you realise who you are” prior to cutting off one of his feet. In Questions of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall argues that “identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions” (1996, p4). The break-up of Aoyama’s body can be seen as punishment for accepting essentialist national and gender identities. This also shows the way in which Asami can alter his body to fit a new subservient role, highlighting the oppressive nature of a forced identity. This can in some ways seem particularly regressive as this could indicate anxiety over the forced change of gender roles and the dissolution of the Japanese national identity. The rather sympathetic portrayal of Aoyama and the destructive character of Asami could be an indication of this reading. The narrative is however much more complex than such a reading would suggest and I would argue, rather, that the sympathetic portrayal of Aoyama seems to draw the spectator into a false sense of security in order to make them complicit with Aoyama’s assumption of unified identities. Indeed when Aoyama is finally punished by Asami, one shot in particular shows how the spectator is subjected to a similar process. When he is tortured with needles, the camera cuts to a first person perspective through Aoyama as Asami pushes a needle into his eye. This means that the film is using affective means to subject the spectator to a form of torture due to their complicity with Aoyama’s actions.
The dissolution of the national and gender identity in Japan has however received reactions from those in power trying to re-establish nationalistic tendencies. In ‘Why Does the Emperor Need the Yakuza’, Bertell Ollman discusses the distribution of power within Japan, asserting that the capitalist/bourgeois class is tied in within Japan’s bureaucratic ministries. Indeed he states that after the Pacific War “Japan’s bureaucratic rulers worked hard to re-establish the authority of the emperor in whatever ways they could, given the relation of class forces at the time. The main aim was to bring people to think of the emperor once again as head of state” (Ollman, 2001, p91). This shows the way in which both the insistence on the authority of the emperor and the governmental visits to the Yasukuni shrine are an attempt to re-establish national identity in order to legitimise the power of the ruling bureaucratic class. Indeed the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan have recently drafted a new constitution which not only reasserts the emperor as head of state but also suggests that the “family shall be respected as a basic unit of a society and that family members should help one other” (2012). This shows the extent to which traditional gender roles within the family is part of a national identity which the bureaucratic elite wish to reassert. This distorts the underlying tensions within Japan that Ôdishon makes explicit, as even Aoyama’s attempt to re-establish the traditional Japanese family culminates in the break-up of his own essentialist being.
The film overall dismantles mythic and idealistic notions of love, which Aoyama propagates. In doing so it reveals the oppressive nature of these romantic notions which perpetuate dominate traditional gender roles within the Japanese family. This is done through contrasting Aoyama’s romantic narrative with the ‘avenging spirit’ of Asami. The recent events in Japan show, by contrast an attempt to distort the oppressive nature of traditional gender roles and the extent of its imperialistic past. The attempt to re-establish a national identity is a means to legitimate the power of the bureaucratic capitalist class within Japan. This legitimation could however have drastic implications with racial and gender tensions if it is not met with an explicit attempt to reveal national identity as a strategy of preserving their economic and political hegemony.
Bibliography
Goto-Jones, C. (2009) Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: University Press.
Hall, S. (1996) ‘Who Needs Identity’. In: Hall, S. and Du Gay, P. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage Publications, pp1-17
Jansen, M. B. (2000) The Making of Modern Japan. Harvard: University Press.
Ko, M. (2006) ‘The Break-up of the National Body: Cosmetic Multi-cultralism and the Films of Miike Takashi’. In: Vitali, V. and Willeman, P. Theorising National Cinema. London: BFI, pp129-137.
Hantke, S. (2005) ‘Japanese Horror Under Western Eyes: Social Class and Global Culture in Miike Takashi’s Audition’. In: McRoy, J. Japanese Horror Cinema. Edinburgh: University Press, pp54-63.
Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (2012) LDP announces a new draft Constitution for Japan. Available at: http://www.jimin.jp/english/news/117099.html (Accessed 09/05/13).
McCurry, J (2013) Japan Shrine Visit Angers South Korea. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/22/japan-shrine-visit-angers-south-korea (Accessed: 08/05/13).
McRoy, J. (2005) ‘Introduction’. In: McRoy, J. Japanese Horror Cinema. Edinburgh: University Press, pp1-11.
Ollman, B. (2001) ‘Why Does the Emperor Need the Yakuza’. New Left Review, No. 8, pp73-98.
Filmography
Dead or Alive: Hanzaisha (1999) Directed by Takashi Miike. Daiei
Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) Directed by Takashi Shimizu. Lionsgate Entertainment
Ôdishon (1999) Directed by Takashi Miike. Tartan Video
Ringu (1998) Directed by Hideo Nakata. Toho Company Ltd
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