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PARTISAN REVIEW
century Japanese history. It's obvious that the Japanese are, in one
sense, engaged in denial, deliberately ignoring the scandal of World
War .Two and Japan's recent militant past: schoolbooks are revised
so that the invasion of Korea becomes an "excursion"; movies or
television shows about the military aspects of the war are rare, and ,
when they do appear , say more about present-day Japan than the
fervent militarism of the war and the years just before it . Kon
Ichikawa's recent film
The Harp of Burma,
for example, seems to por–
tray a bunch of
sarareemen
(white-collar workers) who have somehow
wandered into a World War Two movie. Yet at the same time,
samurai
dramas continue to appear on television and in movies,
although with decreasing frequency , and the use of
samurai
in adver–
tising and in the
manga
or adult comic books attests to the staying
power of these feudal figures. This contradictory attempt at forget–
ting and remembering explains the paradoxical acknowledgement
and banishment of a figure like Yukio Mishima (witness the recent
exclusion of Paul Schrader's film on Mishima from the first Tokyo
International Film Festival).
All of these remnants , the
kimono
and Mishima , along with the
Japanese preservation of
Kabuki
and
Noh ,
of the arts of the
shamisen
and
ikebana,
are fragments brought forth from a feudal past. The
nostalgic cost of these remnants encourages the Japanese, with their
democratic surface culture and heavily middle-class society, to iden–
tify themselves with the aristocracy of the past . This identification is
particularly strong since the feudal code of manners and aesthetics
permeated almost all of society here to a much greater sense than in
Europe. And certainly the feudal legacy offers a huge barrier to any
true restructuring of power in this country- the Japanese are notor–
iously apolitical and tend to take a peasant's view of their politics: it
is something for the leaders to take care of (we do our jobs and those
above us do theirs) . While they seem to be better informed than
Americans about other countries, the Japanese I've talked to display
little interest in politics and will rarely discuss in casual conversation
such topics as Japan's relationship to South Africa or Nakasone's at–
tempt to increase the fairly minimal military spending. I have a feel–
ing that the American use of political chat as a social binder, as a
more interesting topic of communion than the weather, would seem
both rude and uninteresting to most Japanese.
A curious contradiction , then, is set up: economically , theJap–
anese are and view themselves as mainly middle-class; politically ,
they have a peasant mentality, and culturally, they identify with the
