Sexscape from Japan...
by: R.B.

R.B.
Mirroring Japan/ese America
Fall 2002
December 11, 2002

Sexscape from Japan: Sex and Masturbation in
Two Works by Ōe Kenzaburō

     Soon after the surrender of Japan to Allied Forces marked the end of World War II, the American occupation of Japan began. General Douglas McArthur—SCAP ‘Supreme Commander of Allied Forces’—and his occupation troops—also called “SCAP” by the Japanese—entered Japan with the best intentions of imparting on the Japanese democratic wisdom from the vast repository of knowledge that the Americans believed they possessed. In order to garner support for this cause, the occupation forces used Emperor Hirohito to quell Japan’s fears: not only was Japan occupied by American forces, Japan was preoccupied with the fear of famine as well. Hirohito addressed the Japanese via a radio broadcast, telling them that now that SCAP was there, Japan would soon be en route to recovery. However, the Japanese were very skeptical of this assessment; the massive unemployment and the lack of food throughout the country made it extremely difficult to remain optimistic.
     In one of the first steps made to democratize Japan, the governing body appointed by SCAP broke up the large industrial complexes known as zaibatsu in order to empower workers and promote capitalism. The occupation government then endowed workers with certain rights, giving birth to a strong, union-powered labor movement in Japan. In one example of the strength of the union movement during this time, rail workers in and around Tōkyō seized control of the entire railway system, giving passengers free rides in a demonstration directed at their bosses, demanding fairer pay. This and other large strikes ensued as workers took control of their factories, calling for an increase in wages and better working conditions.
     This incendiary environment saturated with the gasoline of workers’ discontent was the perfect breeding ground for Communism; the occupation, which brought with it its good intentions and its democracy, also unwittingly sparked the fires of Communism. Back home in Washington DC, United States officials were unhappy with this turn of events. As a result, a division formed within SCAP headquarters in Tōkyō between those who wanted to focus on spreading capitalism and those who wanted to focus on suppressing the Red Surge. As the word got out to the Japanese people that there was a schism within SCAP, the Conservatives were swept into the power, gaining control of the Japanese parliamentary government (which they continue to hold to this day). The Conservatives were anti-union, and as a result, many unions were destroyed. While this indeed curbed the insurgence of Communist ideals in Japan, the once-empowered workforce lost much of their power, as their collective bargaining chips were taken away by the Conservative cardsharp parliamentary government.
     Furthermore, in 1945, in order to bring value back to the rapidly depreciating yen, Detroit banker Joseph Dodge arrived in Tōkyō and balanced the Japanese budget. This did indeed curb inflation, and eventually brought value back to the yen, but his budget balancing-act also cut funding to many government subsidies in the industrial sector, which enraged many workers throughout the nation. With the advent of the Korean War, cash was transfused into the Japanese economy like blood, giving it new life. The already-present American troops gave the Japanese industries a large market. This economic boom spurred by the Korean War also gave birth to the idea that—as one retired Japanese worker put it while reflecting back on this time in history—“if it makes money, it’s good.”
     In September 1951, Japan was offered its independence in exchange for the right for United States military bases to be on Japanese soil as a part of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Despite the concern of the Japanese populous that the continued American military presence in Japan would drag Japan into wars, the elected Japanese officials signed the treaty. The accord that was signed, however, served as confirmation to many Japanese citizens that all along, the occupation and subsequent democratization of Japan was done solely in the United States’ interest. Surely enough, by the early 50s and continuing into the 60s, Japanese development was linked heavily to American prosperity in Japan.
     According to Susan J. Napier, associate professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin, Nobel Prize-winning Japanese author Ōe Kenzaburō believed that post-war “Japan [was], if not evil, at least disappointing” to many Japanese living in the late 50s and 60s. Indeed, the state of Japan at this time left much to be desired in the Japanese youth alive at this time.¹ The doubt was implanted into their minds that the American occupation of Japan—the occupation that changed their government, their educational system, their economy, their lives—was not purely altruistic in nature. The freedom they believed they were granted came at the great price of both allowing the United States to establish a military presence in Asia by building bases on Japan’s freshly-war-ravaged soil and tying the economic development of Japan inextricably to American activity in Japan. The Japanese youth in the late 50s and 60s, unlike their elders who hailed the American occupation of Japan as liberating, had no experience with hardship like the generations before them had which allowed their fathers and grandfathers to appreciate the change over to an American system. Instead, the youth saw the flaws inherent in the system, and were thus dissatisfied with the faux freedom they were granted. Their world, their experience of modern Japan was bleak and undesirable; they were unable to live in freedom-that-is-not-really-freedom. The contradiction was just too much to bear, pressing the need for escape in their minds. Escape became an urgent call within their souls, becoming a consuming passion, a favorite pastime.
     A member of this disillusioned generation, Ōe Kenzaburō presents this struggle for an escape from reality in his works. Frequently, we see a main character who attempts to find a portal leading from the ruined world of Japan into a better world, a world where the freedom is real and complete, where control is wrested from outside forces and reinvested internally. As Napier puts it, Ōe “consistently [presents] vivid alternate worlds that do not simply criticize what [he sees] as the wasteland of modern Japan but also [offers] venues of escape from that wasteland.”² This wasteland is not so much a wasteland in the literal sense (although the nation was still rebuilding at this time, resurrecting itself from the rubble of war), but rather, it is a land of wasted freedom and autonomy—a land where the autonomy they believed they were securing from the San Francisco Peace Treaty actually inextricably bound them to America’s progress, a strong and concrete dependence disguised as independence.
     If the main characters of Ōe’s works attempt to find an escape to some alternative to this wasteland, what and where is this alternate reality that his main characters seek? And how does one find these portals, the aforementioned “venues of escape,” that lead there? By examining two of Ōe’s works—his novella “Seventeen” (“Sebunchiin”) and his novel J (Seiteki Ningen—more appropriately translated as Sexual Humans)—I will explore how and why Ōe uses sex (often, more specifically, sexual “deviance”) as the main means of escape from the post-war, post-occupation Japanese world. These two novels have main characters that represent the whole of “youth”—from the awkward teenager on the cusp of adulthood to the man whose youth is coming to a close as he approaches 30—and are therefore appropriate for examining the want for escape in disillusioned youth.
     “Seventeen” tells the story of a newly-turned seventeen-year-old Japanese youth who is, at such an early age, already disillusioned with Japan’s state of affairs. He goes “to the most progressive high school in Tokyo” where they “even have demonstrations” against the American involvement in Japanese matters, and as a result, he thinks he wants “to be in the left wing,” because “when it comes to feelings, [he fits] right in with the Left.”³ He does not like American intervention in Japan, but he feels powerless to do anything about it. He merely believes he wants to be a member of the Left, but he is not entirely sure. In the beginning of the novella, he and his sister get into a heated argument about the SDF ‘Self-Defense Forces’ (the Japanese equivalent of the United States’ National Guard) and the American forces (stationed in Japan as part of the San Francisco Peace Treaty) being parasites of the Japanese people and of the Japanese state. She asks him:

‘Why are the Self-Defense Forces parasites? If there wasn’t any SDF, and if the American army wasn’t in Japan, what would Japan do for security? And what about the second and third sons from the farming villages who work for the SDF? If there wasn’t any SDF, where could they find work?’⁴

And in response to this line of questioning, the main character realizes that, despite his schooling at the most progressive high school in Tōkyō, and, despite the fact that he has “to say something to knock down [his] sister’s argument,” he is “stuck”—he does not know what to say.⁵
     Thus, the main character is powerless, lacking control over the situation he finds himself in, much like Japan lacked control over its own destiny even after it was granted its “independence.” The seventeen-year-old narrator knows there is something wrong with Japan—as many of his classmates do—but he is incapable of doing anything about it when his values are confronted. He is frustrated, but he lacks the words to express exactly what is wrong with the situation. His impotence in this sense leads to a feeling of despair. The disillusionment he feels—stemming from his lack of faith in Japan’s leadership and military—in addition to his self-created despair causes in him a psychological need for escape. As one scholar notes in his essay, “[m]any of Ōe’s…stories and novels deal with characters who are frustrated in their expectations, embittered by the utter futility of their attempts, or imprisoned within a limited space without hope of escape,”⁶ and the main character in “Seventeen” is no different. He becomes so frustrated, so embittered that, after losing the debate to his sister, “[t]ears [were] running down his face,” leaving him feeling “like an ignorant fool” who “[didn’t] know what to do about it.”⁷
     In J, the title character, though twelve years older than his seventeen-year-old counterpart, feels the disillusionment and futility as well. Before he sought his escape from the reality of modern Japan—a time period merely implied by the novel to take place before the events in the novel—J led an “old conformist life…his real life.”⁸ At the end of the novel, when J returns to his father after his wife leaves him, his father offers him a position in the Japanese corporate world—the ultimate symbol of conformity and uniformity, the ultimate symbol of the lack of power over one’s life in the 1950s and 60s in post-war Japan. The robotic capitalistic drive in the modern workforce—the reduction of humanity to mere automation, an army of precision machines geared toward making money whose mantra was “If it makes money, it’s good!”—plays a large part in the disillusionment of the Japanese youth. No longer is happiness and individuality a paramount ideal; the monotonic pursuit of capital becomes the Prime Mover in the modern Japanese universe, further spurred on by the American military’s needs at the outbreak of the Korean War which created a huge, tailor-made market for the Japanese industries. However, this monotonous life as a factory worker or a corporate slave is simply not satisfying for many of the youth in this time period.
     This hopeless, conformist capitalist system is the reality in which J exists, and it is from the confines of this system that he attempts to escape. When J is offered a secretarial position by his father, J feels as though by accepting this position, it is “like resignation,” as though “his new life as a self-deceiving conformist would begin anew.”⁹ But to be a conformist—a faceless, nameless Nobody anonymously wandering the packed streets of Tōkyō, riding the crowded chikatetsu ‘subway’ to and from his place of employment day in and day out like every other person—that would be tantamount to death, a mockery of human existence, a mockery of pleasure-seeking and hedonism: the things that make living life to its fullest extent worthwhile. J would be trapped in this world, a rat in a cage, running the rat-race daily for his corporation with no sense of personal satisfaction—and herein lies the source of his discontent, the source of his disillusionment with post-war post-occupation Japan.
     The dire situations these characters face spark the flame that is the all-consuming driving force fueling their need, their desire to escape. This desire is everywhere, and this desire’s presence is a tyranny over the senses—the sensual, and the sexual. And so, these characters frantically search for an alternative to the grim reality in which they exist; they search for and cling to this notion of escape—of sexscape—and they do not let go until sexscape is found. Napier says of sex that it “serves as a path out of the wasteland” of modern Japan.¹⁰ Furthermore, “the very extremity of the [sexual] process often conveys a form of freedom to the participants,”¹¹ which in the case of these two works are J and the seventeen-year-old first-person narrator of “Seventeen.”
     A sexscape is, in addition to being the method by which to escape the wasteland of Japan, a completely new landscape into which the sexscapist retreats. In this new and completely different world, power is internalized, transferred from the circumstances of reality to the sexscapist himself, giving him control. Sexscape, then, is a land of freedom—and not a simulacrum of freedom, either, i.e. what was given to Japan via the San Francisco Peace Treaty. And this freedom, laced with power over the sexscape created by the sexscapist, is like the sweet taste of ambrosia to a hungry man and the pleasure of a million lasting orgasms to a person who is a sex-deprived teenager.
In order to effect an aforementioned sexscape from his angst-ridden teenage insecurities, the protagonist of “Seventeen” engages in masturbation at the very beginning of the novella. He fantasizes:

By next summer my body will be solid, developed everywhere it ought to be. It’ll catch the eyes of the girls at the beach, and plant fervent roots of respect in the hearts of the boys in my class. The salt taste of the sea breeze, the hot sand, the itching powder dusted over sunburned skin, the smell of me and my friends, and amid the cries of the naked crowd of swimmers, an abyss of blissful dizziness into which I suddenly plunge, in silence and solitude. I cry out and close my eyes. The hard hot sex in my grip stiffens for an instant, and in that instant I feel the sperm that erupts from inside me flowing out to fill my hand. All the while, I know that the lucky crowd of naked bathers is peacefully swimming, sunken into silence in the clear summer afternoon sea within me.¹²

His fantasy world that he creates as he masturbates merges in the same paragraph with the reality he currently inhabits. His fantasy has no base in reality because he admits that he is “all alone in this world” with “no friends, no buddies,”¹³ so it is as though this dreamworld he masturbates to is a truly alternative reality where all of his dreams—to be well-built, well-liked, and well-endowed—can come true.
     Only by masturbating can he escape the manic stress, banality, and sense of hopelessness prevalent in modern Japan. The night before the highly competitive university entrance exams and physical education trials, the narrator muses that “tomorrow fills [him] with an indefinable dread, but masturbation is the only escape, however brief, from a night of fear.”¹⁴ Masturbation, for the narrator, is the key to sexscape from the “wasteland of modern Japan.” Moreover, masturbation is completely within one’s sphere of control, and is thus empowering, in a way. As opposed to the real world, where the teenage narrator feels he has no power, when he masturbates, he is able to maintain complete control over his thoughts, his actions, his fantastic sexscape towards which he drifts as his mind lingers; he can start when he wants to start, stop when he wants to stop, take it fast, take it slow, do it roughly or gently or hanging upside-down and blindfolded—any way he wants—and all “[w]hen [his] fingers take hold of [his] sex, [forcing] it into an erection.”¹⁵ No longer is he impotent; in this state of being, he is omnipotent. As he masturbates, he is transformed into a god, creator and ruler of his own world, a Prime Mover in his own right, moving himself to that moment of prime orgasmic bliss, of sexscape.
     However, this sexscape degenerates back into reality once his orgasm is complete; he loses control over his world and falls victim once more to the rules of the wasteland, and his power folds to the authority of the status quo. He comes out of his orgasmic haze, and is immediately stricken with feelings of guilt, shame, inadequacy, and self-consciousness—the effects of living within a society like post-war Japan. At school during the physical education trials, for example, the narrator is attacked by his own self-conscious thoughts about what “The Others” think of him as he runs:

The Others are neat, dry, and gallantly composed. I am a disgrace. I’m dizzy and mawkish, awkwardly frightened, puffy fat, and reeking of sweat like I’m rotting away even as I run this miserable race. The others slobber on themselves like dogs, they puff out their bellies as they watch me, but I know that what they really see is the naked me, the me that’s red-faced and trembling with fear, me addicted to obscene fantasies, me masturbating, me anxious, the me who’s a cowards and liar. As the Others look at me and laugh, they scream out, “We know all about you. You’re done in by the poison of self-consciousness, done in by your budding sexual desires. You’re rotting away from the inside. We can see all the way through to your indecent fetid crotch! You’re nothing but a lonely gorilla, masturbating in front of our very eyes!”¹⁶

In the same brain that conceived a perfect dream world as he masturbated, he created a consciousness of himself that he projected onto other people, believing that this is what they think of him. This may or may not be true, but these images, these feelings of shame must come from somewhere; they must be based on established societal values and viewpoints. Within the context of society, it feels as though there are eyes watching your every move, waiting for you to trip up and fall. It is an oppressive feeling, and is rather discomforting. It motivates people to attempt to prevent themselves from fully and permanently escaping this world for an alternate reality, and it further adds to this catch-22 of a desire to leave without the possible embarrassment or scrutiny that may come with doing so. However, even with this self-impeding self-check process in place, the narrator continues to masturbate, to bring himself to that rush, that euphoric bliss, that sexscape velocity that finally allows him to break free of the gravity of this world and propel himself elsewhere.
     Just as the protagonist of “Seventeen” uses the “dirty” practice of masturbation to fuel his sexscape, J decides to become a full-fledged chikan—a subway pervert who ejaculates on women in crowded subway cars—in order to sexscape a life of “self-deceiving” conformism. After his father offers him a chance to be one of the millions of corporate lackeys in Tōkyō, J briefly considers joining the anonymous ranks of office workers before boarding the subway, “[closing] his eyes tightly” while “[rubbing] his naked penis repeatedly in the warm intimacy of [a] girl’s buttocks,” finally “[seeing] himself as someone who was taking a step forward with no possibility of retreat,” a person leading a “new life with no deception.”¹⁷ Says Napier, regarding the concept of making J a chikan: “The [chikan] is a brilliant encapsulation of the anomie of modern Japanese life. It is a perversion that could not exist without modern technology and an industrial system that crowds workers onto the trains at rush hours.”¹⁸
     The image of J as a chikan stands in stark contrast to the previous image of him being an ordinary wage-a-day office worker living a self-deceiving life as a restitution of sorts for “his sense of responsibility and guilt for his first wife’s suicide and his second wife’s adultery and betrayal.”¹⁹ It is important to note that here, too, as in he case of the protagonist of “Seventeen,” J feels guilt and shame for something modern Japanese society tells him he should feel guilt and shame over and feels a strange sense of obligation to make amends somehow, even at the expense of his identity—even if he has to live a lie of a life. Nonetheless, he opts for control, for power over his own life and his own choices and his own subsequent consequences—much like his street friend, the rescued eighteen-year-old poet. But in doing so, in electing to become a full-fledged chikan, J faces the unavoidable scrutiny of the “ten million strangers of Tokyo [glaring] at [him] with hostile eyes.”²⁰ In his final metamorphosis into a chikan on those last few pages of J, J feels “[f]ear [struggling] against bliss in a wave that rose up interminably,”²¹ engulfing him like the all-consuming flame of desire to escape. Until this point in the novel—until the very end, which is, after all, the very beginning of his whole new life—J is unfulfilled with his normal sexual activities. However, with the interminable wave of orgasm that came with sexually accosting this young woman in the subway, J is finally fulfilled in the sense that he has escaped the rat-race of corporate living, and has at long last found his sexscape from the wasteland of modern Japan.
     Shoji Goto notes in his essay, “Huck Finn and America in Kenzaburō Ōe,” that “Ōe observed that to be free is an awful experience which can lead to banishment.”²² This is certainly true in “Seventeen” and J, as the main characters of each experience negative repercussions as a result of their sexual acts. And while these negative thoughts come from within themselves, it is the overbearing pressure exerted by modern Japanese society that leads them to consider if their sexual acts are socially acceptable or not, and to imagine what people would say do, or think about them if said acts were observed. However, if being free is such an awful experience, bringing banishment, why continue to try to sexscape? I believe that J and the narrator of “Seventeen” forge forward on their quest to sexscape because it is a win-win situation: both avenues—sexscape and “sexile” from society—grant freedom and autonomy. Society tends to turn a blind eye towards deviants, who are given free reign to do whatever they want as long as it harms nobody. (A case in point, the “insane” are allowed to exist in their own distorted view of the world as long as their insanity does not cause harm anybody, including themselves.)
     We constantly fear what other people think of us; we hold their regard for us in high regard, as silly as that may sound. J and the boy in “Seventeen” are able to at least partially eschew this notion of caring about what others think. Ōe writes in one of his essays collected in Genshuku na Tsunawatari ‘The Solemn Tightrope Walker’:

...the sexual human being neither confronts nor struggles against others. He does not hold a cold, hardened relation with others. Moreover, as far as he is concerned, from the beginning others simply do not exist. He himself cannot be an other in relation to any other existence.²³

And so in order to sexscape the oppressive, anonymous world we live in and are disillusioned with, we must be like “the sexual human being,” disconnected to all but himself. Hosea Hirata explains, “the sexual passageway to the outside, to the other, that Ōe speaks of must be thought of as a type of masochistic conduit to the outside.”²⁴ The sexual human being certainly is masochistic. Look at J and the boy in “Seventeen”: both of them experience angst, sadness, confusion, guilt, shame. In short, they run the gamut of negative emotion in pursuit of sexscaping from their world, of empowering themselves sexually, in a fantastic alternate sexscape—which is, any reality one chooses (whether it be completely in the mind or simply originating from attitudinal shift) that is different from the one the bulk of society chooses to acknowledge—so as not to remain impotent within the paradigm of Japanese society in the 50s and 60s.
     “What bliss it would be if my whole life were one long orgasm. If only it were always, always an orgasm!” laments the seventeen-year-old protagonist of “Seventeen.”²⁵ What bliss it would be, indeed! The world as one shining moment of pleasure, frozen in time at that point of release, at the point of sexscape. I believe the boy speaks for us all—the disillusioned, hollow masses, powerless products of (as opposed to powerful producers in) a modern world. The voice of reason in a whiny, pubescent masturbator—who would have guessed? But all that angst, all those feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness and futility and frustration—all of those raw, typically teen-aged, hormone-induced and reason-lacking, irrational and illogical feelings—make it no wonder that the spokesperson of a disillusioned generation is a youth of seventeen. This is not limited to teenagers, of course; sometimes, it takes longer for people to gather enough courage to own up to that itching inside, that burning yearning to leave. The fiery desire to escape from the parents—a microcosmic comparison to the macrocosm of the whole of modern Japanese society—runs rampant, overpowering the senses with the bitter fumes of scorched soul. And so, we, too, yearn for escape—a path out of this wasteland whose scenery is no longer interesting, no longer satisfying. And so we wish: “If only it were always, always an orgasm,” because maybe then, I would forget this place; I would finally be able to sexscape.

Endnotes

     1. Susan J. Napier, Introduction, Escape from the Wasteland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 15.
     2. Ibid., 9.
     3. Kenzaburō Ōe, trans. Luk Van Haute, Two Novels: Seventeen, J (New York: Blue Moon Books, 1996), 10.
     4. Ibid.
     5. Ibid.
     6. Shoji Goto, “Huck Finn and America in Kenzaburō Ōe,” in Postmodernity and Cross Culturalism, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), 32.
     7. Ōe, Two Novels, 13.
     8. Ibid., 192.
     9. Ibid., 193.
     10. Susan J. Napier, “The Wasteland of Sex,” in Escape from the Wasteland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 48.
     11. Susan J. Napier, “Ōe Kenzaburō and the Search for the Sublime at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Ōe and Beyond, ed. Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 16.
     12. Ōe, Two Novels, 3-4.
     13. Ibid., 26.
     14. Ibid., 27.
     15. Ibid., 26-27.
     16. Ibid., 44.
     17. Ibid., 194.
     18. Susan J. Napier, “Madame de Sade and The Sexual Human” in Escape from the Wasteland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 86.
     19. Ōe, Two Novels, 192.
     20. Ibid., 194.
     21. Ibid.
     22. Goto, “Huck Finn,” 37.
     23. Kenzaburō Ōe, quoted by Hosea Hirata, “Masturbation, the Emperor, and the Language of the Sublime in Ōe Kenzaburō,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1994), 95.
     24. Ibid., 97.
     25. Ōe, Two Novels, 27.


Works Cited

Goto, Shoji. “Huck Finn and America in Kenzaburō Ōe.” Postmodernity and Cross-Culturalism. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. London: Associated University Presses, 2002. 31-41.

Hirata, Hosea. “Masturbation, the Emperor, and the Language of the Sublime in Ōe Kenzaburō.” Circuits of Desire. Ed. Yukiko Hanawa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Spring 1994. Vol. 2, No. 1 of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. 91-112

Napier, Susan J. Escape from the Wasteland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

---. “Ōe Kenzaburō and the Search for the Sublime at the End of the Twentieth Century.” Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan. Ed. Stephen Snyder and Philip Gabriel. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999. 11-35.

Ōe, Kenzaburō. Two Novels: Seventeen, J. Trans. Luk Van Haute. New York: Blue Moon Books, 1996.