Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
Republished with permission from Shizai Gouzi. Follow the author on Zhihu under the same name, 实在狗子.
In answer to “What is wrong with Japan?”:
Whenever we discuss any aspect of (modern) Japanese culture, the first thing we should think of is Japanese corporations, not anything else.
Harootunian describes modern Japanese culture as a so-called “all-encompassing corporate culture,” a concept that will prove very useful in understanding this article. Within Japanese corporations, relations between superiors and subordinates are dissolved: everyone lives parasitically within a rational structure. Harootunian suggests that, to some extent, this postwar behavior in Japan was an attempt to resolve the problem of “alienation”—one might even call it a “utopian” attempt. But, as with so many utopias, what this utopian undertaking produces is a dystopia. Individual alienation is eliminated, but so, at the same time, is the very concept of the “individual.” This is a structure of perversion: everyone wants to please the larger structure that governs their fate and dissolve into it.
Japan is good at importing institutions from other countries. Once imported, they are immediately accepted (and treated as though they had no flaws, or almost none; as we will see, this is a way of passing the buck). But notice that when another system is imported, a larger system is already at work, first excluding those elements within it that might threaten the system Japan is about to import. Japan carefully sidesteps most things that have anything to do with transformation. Moreover, in many cases Japan introduces a new system only when the existing one faces an absolute crisis: after the Battle of Baekgang, after the arrival of the Black Ships. Even in that era, Yoshida Shōin held that Mencius was all very well, but dynastic change was not suited to Japan: the emperor had to be preserved as a sign. The hollow emperor, in the guise of pure **, sutures Japan’s secret of learning without learning.1
Author’s note: Harootunian argues that modern Japanese rationalism brought about a lack of personal relationships in the family, the local community, and the workplace, producing the problem of “alienation.”
One point in this article is particularly easy to misread: whether I am a Kantian. That is, have I imposed a fixed framework on Japan and then examined it? But the Japanese fixation on institutions is something I discovered through examining Japan (and it is itself fundamentally a product of contingency, however long that contingency has lasted2), not the other way around. Nor, of course, am I saying that there are no people in Japan who oppose the system (or that Japan has had no moments of opposition to it, though these failed and were covered over by a grand narrative). Rather, such people are excluded through a form of inclusion. For example, if someone is discovered to have joined certain organizations that society’s common sense does not recognize as acceptable, they lose their standing as a member of society. They are excluded, but they are also made examples of, serving as a warning to everyone else. Japan’s unbroken imperial line is something profoundly contingent. Could the United States not have abolished it? Did all those Japanese generals who knew about China’s changes of ruling house really have no ambitions of their own? Yet the fact is that the emperor has always been there. This is, of course, contingent—we need only open a history book to find several moments when the imperial line was in danger—and also a consequence of Japan’s geographical isolation as an island country. This tradition has continued as a contingency, unlike the many major reshufflings experienced by the great powers of Europe and America. For now, I can only hypothesize that, alongside the tradition, a traditional way of thinking has also persisted. It has changed clothes many times, yet its core (which is itself, of course, an ontological lack) has miraculously remained intact. This can also serve as a metaphor for the emperor, who is himself a metaphor for tradition: he has put on a Western suit and been stripped of all outward power, yet simply by being there he possesses a miraculous power. (Strictly speaking, from the perspectives of both Hegel and Japanese law, although he is only a pure form, he still embodies the country as a protruding phallus. And once a child shouts that the king has no clothes, everything might change.)
The original text follows
1
Rather than start with Japanese people’s obvious faults, let us first discuss what is “bad” about their apparent virtues. I will begin with something most people probably think could not possibly be bad: kindness.
Many of you who watch Japanese television dramas, anime, and films know how much Japan values a “kind” disposition. Kindness is always a must in a prospective partner. But the Japanese word yasashii, “kind,” cannot simply be equated with the Chinese wenrou, “gentle” or “tender.” Japanese “kindness” implies the minimum required to be a “person with common sense.” So rather than saying that one likes someone because they are kind, it would be more accurate to say that kindness is a prerequisite for liking them. Kindness is a platform supporting all sorts of other specific attributes: height, education, salary. But for this platform to appear at all, kindness is a prerequisite. Let us look at the Japanese dictionary definition. One sense reads: “他人に対して思いやりがあり、情がこまやかである” (“considerate toward others and sensitive to their feelings”—being considerate of, or looking after, other people) = (the minimum requirement for maintaining contact with society: anyone who does not show consideration or care for others does not qualify as a member of society). The line “Everyone is kind,” so common in Japanese dramas, can be translated directly as “Everyone has common sense,” or “Everyone is a person.” “I like kind people” is an empty statement. Because people who are not kind are not people. I am sure you have all heard lines like these in Japanese dramas: “He seems cold, but he’s kind”; “Don’t be put off by how he looks—he’s actually kind.” These lines do more than praise the other person as a flesh-and-blood human being. On another, implicit level, they praise a system without flesh or blood. We should translate them like this: “Even someone like him is included in the system. What a reassuring system.”
This gives us a new way to look at “rehabilitating” a villain’s image. Such rehabilitation does not lift the burden from the villain; it lifts the burden from the system the villain threatens. The kind villain ensures the consistency of kindness as an absolute universality: even in a villain who seems furthest removed from it, who opposes the system, kindness can manifest itself. Kindness of this sort is not a personal trait but a system. As I said earlier, it is a platform—what Laclau calls the empty place of universality, where heroes and villains stand together.
When Japanese women say, as they generally do, that they like “kind men,” this is not a decision they make as subjects (obviously, Japanese women find it very difficult to make any decisions at all). It is a manifestation of interpassivity:3 I imagine myself being watched, and I identify with this gaze. More precisely, I identify with myself as seen by this gaze. I identify with the kind man who embodies the system solely because I myself have been shaped by that system.
From here, it is not difficult to turn to Japanese people’s favorable assessments of Tōjō Hideki (see Niconico’s “Dark History” series on historical figures). In Japanese eyes, Tōjō Hideki was kind because he looked after the emperor, and he looked after the emperor because the system required him to. Kindness is the system itself. There are no kind people, only a kind system. Kindness is this system.
We can go on to Maruyama Masao’s “system of irresponsibility.” At the military tribunal, not a single Japanese person could take responsibility for the war—the Greater East Asia War—a situation entirely different from Germany’s. The Japanese war criminals’ defense was, of course: “We were only fulfilling our duties.” Everyone really is kind.
Japanese people are very fond of saying, “That’s so irresponsible of you!” or “Please take responsibility.” These are two sides of the same coin: both serve to evade genuine responsibility. Genuine responsibility is the possibility of redefining responsibility. You must not only act according to your responsibilities; you must also decide what those responsibilities are. In Japan, this is not an option: it has been ruled out from the start.
2
Once, on the subway, I saw a mother repeatedly making “quiet” gestures at her baby in a stroller. The baby was crying, of course. What could a baby understand? Yet as the mother tirelessly repeated the gesture, the baby gradually quieted down.
Whether this was good or bad is not what I want to discuss. My point is that Japanese people are already surrounded by a mass of rituals—rules—from the moment they are born. The angle of a bow, the correct way to nod, complicated emails, the intricacies of gift-giving, the unwritten rules of group activities. These elaborate details show us that it is no accident that cosplay has flourished so much in Japan. Rather, it turns latent rules into overt enjoyment—domesticates them into enjoyment. (And through the act of “renunciation,” these latent rules are themselves already a form of surplus-enjoyment.)
A Japanese person’s life is one vast play: at different times and in different places, they must perform fixed roles strictly according to fixed rules. Otherwise, what awaits is very likely “exclusion”—in other words, “disqualification.”
Only from the standpoint of being human can we understand what it means to “lose the qualification to be human.” Strictly speaking, then, “losing the qualification to be human” demonstrates precisely the impossibility of “not being human.” The real horror is not that you cannot be human, but that you must be human.
Japan’s “nonhumans,” as enemies, define the bounds of “being human.” As “losers,” they demonstrate what happens when one violates “common sense”—an extraordinarily powerful term in Japan. No Longer Human needs to be read on another level: what has been lost is not the qualification to be human, but the human world itself.4 In a sense, Japan has no people, only the system. This system is perfect and omnipresent, manifesting itself through people’s elaborate ritual observances. (Hegel held that ancient imperial China had only one free subject, the emperor. In this sense, Japan does not have even one.)
Žižek accepts Mladen Dolar’s new interpretation of Althusser. He argues that, for psychoanalysis, the subject emerges where ideology fails, far from arising as a result of interpellation … Not only does the subject fail to recognize itself fully in the call of interpellation: resistance to interpellation is the subject itself. In other words, a subject (a human being) is a subject (a human being) precisely because the system fails. The identities the big Other bestows on us—teacher, mother, prostitute—always provoke doubt: are we really what you say we are?5 This hystericized subject is the true subject, the subject that ultimately emerges in psychoanalysis. A human being is human because they ask: why am I what you say I am?
This question is lacking in Japan. Japanese people prefer solving problems to asking questions. But they always solve problems within a fixed framework, rather than treating the framework itself as a problem. Japan does change frameworks: accepting the “law of nations,” for instance. Yet once a framework is accepted, it is treated as flawless—or as having only a few tiny problems that do not really count as problems. As a result, no matter how many times Japan changes frameworks, it has in fact changed nothing. Its way of accepting a framework is always the same, and today this framework goes by the name of “common sense.” These different frameworks are always presupposed by a sameness given symbolic form: the same attitude toward frameworks.
So it is not wrong to say that Japanese people know how to learn, but the statement holds only in this context: they keep learning in order to learn nothing. They change frameworks again and again in order to preserve this same attitude toward every framework. (As if: our system is perfect = our attitude toward the system does not need to change.)
This worship of the system—ideology—can manifest itself in statements like “I’m so glad I was born in Japan.” It can just as easily manifest itself in statements like “How unfortunate to have been born in Japan.” What matters is not what people think but what they do: ideology is a practice. Most Japanese people who complain about Japan do so only in ways Japan permits. Criticism of the system is contained within the system. The apparent possibility of attacking the system—this illusion—makes it all the more secure.
3
“Don’t cause trouble for others” and “Please take responsibility” correspond to perversion and obsessional neurosis, respectively. The subtext of “Don’t cause trouble for others” is “You may approach others only when you bring them some benefit.” Does this not recall the definition of sexual perversion as “being an instrument of the big Other’s enjoyment”? The other person here is, strictly speaking, an other situated in the field of the “big Other.” Another meaning of “Don’t cause trouble for others” is: do not question the system; you may approach it only when you satisfy its demands. “Please take responsibility,” meanwhile, tells you to act strictly according to the system. As long as you follow the system, it does not matter even if you do something wrong. Here we encounter the “system of irresponsibility” once again. Since the system is perfect, if I follow it—strictly reducing every object to an object within the system—nothing can go wrong. And if something does go wrong, it cannot be my fault. In the present Japanese context, these two injunctions offer two ways of avoiding any approach to the big Other’s missing signifier—the hole in it—or two manifestations of the big Other’s perfection.
“Japan has plenty of bad points, but …” is another familiar formula. It perfectly reflects how the fantasy produced by ideology sutures the big Other’s missing signifier, the hole in it. To some extent, Japanese people’s excessive fondness for “but” also reflects their constant anxiety about the big Other’s collapse. They always have to give the big Other a face-saving way out. There is always a “but.”
The trap here is our fondness for comparing two countries. Naturally, Japanese people also like comparing Japan with other countries. But the real problem is internal. Simply placing oneself on the same plane of comparison as other countries is already a basic ideological operation that allows one to ignore the fractures within. The right formulation is not “Japan has plenty of bad points, but …” It is “Japan has plenty of good points, but …”
In answer to “Why does Japanese culture have so much influence around the world?”:
Japanese culture does have considerable influence around the world. But judging from the many books I have read so far by professors based in Japan who specialize in Japanese culture, this influence is greatly overstated. There is also this possibility: the global circulation of Japanese culture may have relatively little to do with Japan’s cultural products themselves—their so-called quality.
To explain why the spread of Japanese culture around the world has relatively little to do with Japan’s own efforts to promote it, I would like to take an example from China’s past. During the Qing dynasty, in Germany alone, such enormously influential figures as Leibniz, Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche championed Chinese culture like brain-dead fans. (There were haters too, of course—Hegel, for one.) The admiration French Enlightenment thinkers had for Chinese thought is in the textbooks; everyone knows about it. Kafka called himself Chinese.6 But here is the question: did the Qing state do anything to spread its culture?
Of course, it did not shut the country off completely, and so, in practice, it allowed others to learn about Chinese culture. But can we find evidence that the Qing state did much to promote its culture? Why was Chinese culture so popular in Europe at the time?
Said’s Orientalism can, of course, explain this. It was not that the Orient transmitted something to the West, but that others happened to need an “Orient” through which to establish their own identity. In the process, the culture of the “other” would be stereotyped to serve and strengthen Western power.
Of course, we cannot simply equate Japan today with Qing China. Today Japan makes enormous efforts to spread its culture. But have those efforts really produced the desired results? In his book Why Is “Cool Japan” So Criticised?, Ryotaro Mihara describes attending an anime convention in the United States. Inside the convention there was indeed a strong atmosphere of “love for Japan,” steeped in anime fandom.7 But the moment he left the venue, that atmosphere vanished completely. Out on the streets, there was not a trace of this so-called anime-fandom world. He encountered much the same atmosphere at conventions around the world. In other words, the Japanese culture welcomed by a small group of fans inside the convention had not permeated the everyday lives of the much larger number of people outside it—the vast majority. His conclusion was that reports claiming Japanese anime and manga had influenced the vast majority of Americans were complete bullshit.
In the next subsection, Mihara examines the position of Japanese anime and manga within American culture. He finds that although many people place Japanese animated films by Miyazaki Hayao and others in the category of “high culture,” few researchers classify Japanese anime and manga as “mass culture.” Mihara defines Japanese culture’s position in the United States as “niche.” Its fans may be far from few in number, but compared with mainstream American culture, it remains decidedly a niche culture.
According to Ōtsuka Eiji, Japanese anime and manga are themselves “a subspecies of Disney.” In the United States, Japanese anime and manga culture is a “colonial culture”: it can exist only as a supplement to the dominant Disney culture, and most people do not even need that supplement.
To take this further, Japanese culture clearly has more influence in China than it does in Europe and America. But notice how many things have influence in China. Don’t Korean dramas have influence? Doesn’t the NBA? Don’t American television shows? Doesn’t Hollywood? I will not go into this further in this answer. Many people think Japanese culture has enormous influence around the world because, in their eyes, China = the world (the few foreigners they know = the world). And, to some extent, their own little circle = China. In Minima Moralia, Adorno points to something intolerable: saying “we” when what one really means is “I.”