Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne Allison is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke University, and author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994).

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This provocative study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, lunchboxes -- or obentos -- that mothers ritualistically prepare for schoolchildren, and children's cartoons. Anne Allison brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and gender in these and other aspects of Japanese culture. Based on five years of fieldwork in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, this theoretically informed, accessible ethnographic study provides a provocative analysis of how sexuality, dominance, and desire are reproduced and enacted in late-capitalistic Japan.

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Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan

University of California Press

I begin this book with two stories. One is mine as I embarked upon a postdoctoral research project on Japanese motherhood in 1987; the other is of a Japanese professional as he embarked upon his career in 1932. I return to them throughout the book as a means of commenting on my project: to examine divergent, multiple, and sometimes inconsistent constructions of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan and to test various theoretical strategies for understanding the specific conditions for, and operations of, gendered and sexual behaviors in Japan today.

One morning as I was watching television with my children in Japan, the following scene caught my eye. Cartooned breasts, naked, rounded, and full, were rising slowly in a space resembling a sky. The context was a song about mothers, sung sweetly in the high-pitched voice of a young woman; the words about devoted mothers who tirelessly and selflessly tend to their children were printed at the bottom of the screen. As each verse of the song was sung, more realistic sketches of mothers were shown in various acts of taking care of and nurturing their children. Yet the floating breasts returned for every chorus, accompanying the refrain about motherly JPGts for which children were told to be grateful.

I was struck, of course, not by the motherhood theme itself but by the device used to represent it: breasts. And they were not depicted as they might be on a show such as Sesame Street in the United Statesby realistic photography in which a mother is seen discreetly nursing her child without revealing much, if any, breastbut rather cartooned and crafted to be explicitly naked and boldly displayed. These breasts lingered in my mind, fascinating to me in a way they

obviously were not to my Japanese friends. Most of those I asked, also mothers of nursery school children who watched Ponkiki in the mornings, had not even noticed the breasts. Those who had found them unremarkably "cute" (kawai *

). Yet as I reflected further, their unremarkable cuteness was what I found to be so strikingnaked breasts standing for motherhood on a show targeted to young children.

Such a convention of representation was different from those with which I was familiar in the country I had just left, the United States. Granted, breasts generate no less interest or attention in the United States than in Japan, but the fixation in the United States is exclusively sexual, particularly in the medium of public or mass culture. This fixation undoubtedly accounts for the discomfiture that surrounds even the inadvertent slippage of maternal breasts into public view. It was not until summer 1994 that women succeeded in getting legislation passed in the state of New York to stem the discrimination they constantly face when nursing in public. Exposing their breasts was said to be inappropriate and unseemly, and women were told to vacate the places they were patronizingstores, boutiques, restaurants, even alternative bookstores. One doubts that any of these women would be similarly challenged were their breasts revealed through sexy dressing.

In maternal representations across such U.S. media as television, cinema, magazines, and advertisements, mothers are invariably clothed. Their bodies are coveredand much noted when not, as when the pregnant Demi Moore posed nude on the cover of Vanity Fair and their motherhood is largely conveyed through such depictions as hugging, reading a book to, or making breakfast for a child. Would the gaiety and fleshiness of the bouncing breasts on Ponkiki be regarded in the United States as offensive or just strange? Would such a depiction amount to a transgression of the boundaries by which motherhood is marked and womanhood differentiated? Turning from such thoughts on that morning, I focused my attention again on the screen. The breasts were uniformly shapedbeautifully round, filled full like balloons, with nipples erectand each was moving with the gracefulness of a cloud gently percolating in the pastel, skylike background. What were these figures signifying of motherhood to the children parked in front of their screens? As objects, their qualities were mixed: firm yet light, full yet soft, steadfast yet playful. So too was the image projected of mothers: tender and sweet yet confident, commanding, and tough.

Significant as well was the fact that each breast was separate but indistinguishable from the others. This was a pattern of social organization I had noted at my son's nursery school, where crayons, for example, were not communally shared; each student was required to purchase crayons, and they had to be the same kind as every other student's. All the floating breasts in the mother-song cartoon were exactly the same; none was smaller or bigger than any other and each moved at

exactly the same speed. Was the message one of uniformity of motherhood or uniformity of the mother-child relationship or uniformity of children's behavior as they enter the institution of school (or all or none of the above)? Or perhaps these repeated and duplicated images reflected the never-ending presence of a mother in her child's life.

The breasts were designed to both stand apart from and stand for the realism of motherhood. Crafted as self-propelled and disembodied automatons, they were larger than life as well as reductivedistilling mothers to their breasts but making these breasts-mothers into the very essence of life itself. Imaginary, these mounds were meant not only to represent mothers, as they unambiguously did in my mind, but also to elicit the response by my neighborhood friends that they were charmingly "cute." And then, of course, they were naked and drawn not with a staidness that muted or veiled the flesh but rather with a joyousness that celebrated and highlighted it. These were breasts that resembled applesfresh, rounded, and firm. Wholesome but sensuous, they were a somewhat different evocation of motherhood than that triggered by the imagery of apple pie.

In 1932 Kosawa Heisaku1 traveled to Austria to deliver a paper to Sigmund Freud. Kosawa, the founder of psychoanalysis in Japan, was meeting Freud for the first time and presenting to him a theory he imagined the master would receive with great interest. Labeled the Ajase complex, his concept was built on the Freudian premise that children become adults by assuming their place within a social order whose rules and norms are internalized to shape the psychological desires and motivations of the self. Although Kosawa agreed with the assertion that a process of this kind is universal, he disagreed with the notion that it necessarily takes the shape of what Freud termed the Oedipus complex. The latter assumes a familial scenario in which the father's role is central: By threatening castration, he compels the child to individuate from the mother and form an identity and love object apart from the family (Freud 1964a; 1964b; 1975). By contrast, Kosawa argued, socialization in Japan proceeds according to a different set of family dynamics. Dyadic rather than triangular, the family centers almost entirely on the relationship between mother and child, and there is a gradual development of this bond rather than an abrupt disrupture at the time of adolescence. In a process that barely involves the father, maturation is marked by the child's ability to not break from the mother but remain bonded to her while recognizing her as a person rather than an omnipotent ideal and while overcoming the feelings of resentment this recognition initially engenders (Okonogi 1978, 1979).

Kosawa developed his theory of the Ajase complex to explain facts of Japanese social life different, he believed, from those implicit in Freudian concepts such as the Oedipus complex. He argued that these differences principally lay in three areas: dominant social values, family structure, and construction of self. Further, these areas intertwined, in Japan's case, in a complex of psychosocial behavior regulated by a maternal principle rather than a paternal principle, assumed to be universal by Freud. In this context Kosawa presented the tale of Ajasethe Japanese version of the Indian prince Ajatasatru, a contemporary of the Buddha whose legend appears in Buddhist scripturesas paradigmatic of the process of identity formation in Japan. The story, briefly told, is of Queen Idaike, who desires a child as a means of keeping her husband as she ages and loses her beauty. Consulting a seer, she is told that a sage living in the forest nearby will die within three years and be reincarnated as her son. Unable to wait, however, Idaike kills the seer and bears a son shortly thereafter. But the queen's happiness is short lived, and fearful of being cursed by the dead sage, she tries twice to kill her desired child. Unsuccessful, Idaike accepts her fate and becomes a loving and dutiful mother.

Happy as a child, Ajase learns the history of his birth (and near death) at the time of adolescence. Disillusioned with the mother he has idealized, Ajase attempts to kill her. Failing, he is wracked with a guilt that brings on a disease so offensive that no one will approach him. His mother, however, stays by his side and attends to him with such love and devotion that Ajase loses his resentment of her. Idaike, too, forgives him, and the two reunite in a bond of mutual forgiveness.

As analyzed by Kosawa, the Ajase myth is a morality tale revealing the path a boy must take in order to mature into a man. According to Freud, of course, the Oedipus myth tells the same story, yet as Kosawa aimed to point out, the two versions are significantly different. In the Ajase myth, morality is reached through both guilt and forgiveness. Kosawa labeled Ajase's type of guilt penitence. He argued that penitence forms the basis of Japanese morality and suggested that it differs from the kind of guilt motivated by fear of punishment as modeled in the Oedipus myth and incarnated by Freud in his doctrine of the castration threat. Boys, according to this model, obey the social law tabooing sex with their mothers (incest) because they fear being castrated by their fathers. In the Ajasean paradigm, by contrast, boys are compelled to abandon not eroticism for their mothers but hatred and resentment, and they are motivated to do this by a mother's forgiveness rather than a father's threat. Although in both cases a loss ensues, its nature is different. Losing his mother as an eroticized object, the oedipal child starts to individuate from his family and separate more definitively from his mother. For the Ajasean child, the loss is of mother as an idealized figure, and this loss enables rather than obstructs the continuation of the mother-child bond.

The Ajase myth encodes a social value of interrelatedness and mutual forgiveness that is conditioned by a family scenario in which mother is dominant and father, almost irrelevant. This social value is productive of a self that is defined and developed in terms of social relationships. The psychosocial complex crystallized by the Oedipus myth is quite different: Social law is based on a set of clear-cut, incontestable rules (incest taboo), enforced by the phallic authority of fathers in families where mothers are mere objects of desire, and constructive of a self individuated from others.

The theory Kosawa crafted with the Ajase tale was intended, in part, as an application of psychoanalytic methodology to a cultural area where it had not yet been applied. In part as well, however, it was a treatise on difference, on the patterns of psychosocial behavior in Kosawa's part of the world that did not correspond to those described by Freud as being worldwide. And in this observation of cultural difference, Kosawa implicitly launched a challenge to the universalism and objectivism claimed by Freudian science and to its ethnocentrism and biases. Yet in Kosawa's mind at least, he was not contesting at all the value of psychoanalysis, and he remained until his death in 1968 a devoted practitioner and teacher of psychoanalysis in Japan. Still, what he sought from Freud in the 1930srecognition of the validity of the Ajase complex and admission that different cultures organize the socialization and construction of the psyche differentlywas never granted by Freud himself and was also not granted, for close to forty years, by members of the international community of psychoanalysts.

I started with the stories of animated breasts and contested theories for several reasons. First, I wish to address at the outset the issue of positionality and the thorny and problematic enterprise of studying culture, particularly in terms of differences. In this age of multiple postspostmodernism, poststructuralism, postcoloniality, postcritique anthropologythere are those who no longer recognize the presence of entities bounded by history, geography, and customs that can be properly identified and differentiated from others as cultures (West 1992; Ferguson 1992). "Properly" is the key word here, for no one is blind to the fact that people everywhere identify themselves in terms of communities that share forms of language, everyday practice, and sets of meanings. The objection to the word "culture," however, is to the tendency to reify and essentialize it. That is, to see behavior conditioned by a number of factors such as history, politics, and race as being only and thus unalterably cultural. "Culture," in other words, is a simplified

and reductive descriptor; it hides complexities of realities whether intended or not.

One corrective to such myopia, of course, is to abandon using "culture" altogether. Another is to refocus attention on those ways in which cultural borders are crossed, transgressed, or made fluid: transnational globalisms, intercultural contact zones, people who have either multiple cultural identities or none (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Still other scholars, those active in the debates about multiculturalism, for example, speak directly about difference and position: Multiple cultures are gathered within boundaries of nationality or have been seized under colonialist or imperialist ones (Spivak 1988; Mitchell 1995; Bhabha 1992). Within hegemonic power structures, different cultures are assessed and treated differently, and power compels the production or obstruction of cultural identities every day (Gates 1987) and in every part of the world, as we all are keenly aware from recent events. That culture must be studied within the context of power is almost a commonplace these days. Also, attention is increasingly placed on differences within groups or categories of people such as African Americans, women, homosexuals, and the U.S. middle class (Lorde 1992; de Lauretis 1987). The positionality each of us assumes in different groups is also critical: We all are products of multiple factors, histories, and relationships that affect our experience of and treatment within (not so) shared identifiers. Thus from many different schools of thought and many kinds of political activists we hear that identities, including those recognized as somehow cultural, are shifting and unstable rather than timeless and fixed, and differentiated and power-laden rather than singular, unified, and pure.

None of the foregoing is new, of course, but I am coming to the first point I wish to make with my stories. Namely, being an anthropologist these days or one who is committed, for whatever reason, to studying the behavior of people who share some, and to some degree, common boundaries is exceedingly tricky; those of us who proceed anyway do so warily, as if there were land mines on our path ready to detonate at any minute. As I choose an image from a Japanese children's show and use it to ponder conventions of representation, meanings of the female body and nudity, and practices of motherhood in a land where I am considered by everyone around me a nonnative and outsider (gaijin , a term that means literally outside person and one that even the women I became closest to never fully abandoned), I am faced with the possibility that I am just making up a story. I see in these breasts something paradigmatic of what my later research revealed of mothers, motherhood, and mothering in the Tokyo neighborhood I studied, yet these breasts shaped a story for me in a way they did not for my Japanese friends.

I could call this story the art of anthropologyseeing and depicting human behavior in novel ways that open up understandingand yet this art is uncom-

fortably close to what Malinowski called the anthropologist's "magic" (1922): the wand we wave that clarifies the realities of others based on our training as anthropologists and our skills as ethnographers. Malinowski has been rightly criticized for the arrogance of what Clifford calls his assumption of "ethnographic authority" (1988): speaking for a group of which we are not a part and with a representation that is crafted by us and neither solicited nor necessarily approved of by them. Anthropologists have been heavily bombarded by both internal and external critiques since the early 1980s over just such issues as the position we take in studying cultures and cultural difference (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Said 1978, 1989; Alcoff 1991). As a result, many have taken a turn toward reflexivity, studying ourselves and the groups of which we are members or, when studying others, inserting ourselves clearly and visibly in the process.

Yet in such trends as turning away from other cultures and turning more toward ourselves, we run the danger, of course, of slipping back into the ethnocentrism and cultural narcissism we had intended to escape. We study ourselves so as not to impose our categories onto others, but then we produce and use theories that reflect only our own realities and retain rather than challenge the old power structures. Cultural difference, that is, stays at the periphery of theory. Feminists of color, for example, have noted that although their work is increasingly assigned in women's studies classes in universities across the country, it is included much more for the worlds they describe than the theories they present.2 These works are brought into the curriculum to overcome and correct for cultural bias, but differences (racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, sexual) are often simply reghettoized rather than integrated into theory.

Feminist anthropologists (Babcock 1993; Behar 1993, 1995; Lutz 1990, 1995) have similarly noted that the theoretical canon taught in graduate programs of anthropology rarely includes the works of women such as Ruth Benedict or Elsie Clew Parsons and even more rarely the works of such interesting minority women as Zora Neale Hurston and Ella Deloria. As Behar further elaborates, Margaret Mead, one of the most popular anthropologists, who found a way of making cultural difference interesting and relevant to the masses of nonacademics, is typically taught in introductory classes. Because she is categorized as a good ethnographer or good crafter of ethnographic stories, her work is relegated to the backwaters of theory. Such is also the fate of others similarly categorized. For example, Laura Bohannan, also known as Eleanor Bowen, adopted a style of imaginary realism in the 1950s that is thought to be quite chic today. Her ethnographic novel Return to Laughter is also a staple in introductory classes.

My point is that we need to find and explore new paths in integrating cultural studies (meaning here the study of culture[s] whether in anthropology, cultural studies, or other disciplines) and theory and that as cautious as we need to be, we

also need to take risks. I feel this need to be particularly pressing in my own specialty, Japanese studies. As Kosawa discovered more than half a century ago, Japan is all too often relegated to a case study from the viewpoint of western academics. Freud read Kosawa's paper on the Ajase complex not as a theory, as Kosawa had intended it, but as an account of behavior so different that it was dismissed as theoretically irrelevant. As the Japanese psychoanalyst Okonogi Keigo wrote in the late 1970s about Kosawa's theory of guilt based on penitence, "To the eyes of Western people under the sway of the paternal principle, this Japanese type of mentality naturally appears to be an emotionalistic subjectivism lacking in social ego" (1978:98). Difference gets translated as lack.

In my own discipline of anthropology the study of Japan has been positioned primarily by lack as well. Japan remains far more peculiar than mainstream, and the works of our practitioners are considered far more as contributions to the ethnography of Japan than as contributions to the theories of anthropology. There are historical reasons for the antipathy toward integrating such studies into the theories advanced in this discipline. Scholars of Japan, as of other cultural areas such as South Asia and China, have been traditionally trained in area programs emphasizing the study of the culture's language, history, and literature and deemphasizing theoretical or disciplinary training. Yet in Japan's case, there are other resistances. It lacks the scholarly prestige of cultures such as India and China for reasons not altogether clear to me, and as an economic superpower that is racially and culturally nonwest, it sits uneasily in the popular and academic imagination. It is neither third world as we have come to define it nor first world when this is categorized as the United States and Western Europe.

Thus Japan needs to be studied and complexified beyond the stereotypes imposed by popular culture and the press,3 and such studies can be used to challenge an outdated world order that lingers in the theoretical trends of the academy. As I discovered when working for my Ph.D. in a top-ranked anthropology department known to emphasize theory, work on Japan was not encouraged, and the area itself was considered almost innately or automatically uninteresting. As many of the faculty told me over the years, no anthropologist of Japan had yet made a valuable contribution to anthropological theory except for Ruth Benedict, who, due to the exigencies of war when conducting her research, never even set foot in Japan.4 One professor refined his view to state one day that anthropology should be training students to study Japan, but he specified that what was needed in this area was "village studies"that classical trope of anthropology that denotes the study of "primitives" (and one this particular anthropologist had never pursued). What a misreading of Japan today, I thought, and what an interesting commentary on anthropology.

Now, more than ever, is the time for the study of Japan to break outside the

boundaries of parochialism and area studies to become a subject that challenges old theoretical and ethnographic borders and helps produce new ones. Kosawa addressed this need in one way; I attempt to do so in others.

There are other reasons I began this book with the stories of motherly breasts and rejected theories. They raise issues about different borders: those involved in the study of sexuality and gender in a milieu that is nonwest and those concerning my multiple identitiesfeminist, anthropologist, mother, scholar of Japanese studies, Anglo academic. In this case, I lay out the terrain first and return to the stories at the end.

Within the field of Japanese studies the subjects of gender and sexuality are new, though the research on gender and feminism has progressed solidly and vibrantly over the past few years. This research includes the work of Jennifer Robertson on the all-female theater revue, the Takarazuka (1989, 1991); Miriam Silverberg on the caf waitresses and moga (modern girls) of the 1920s (1993); Sandra Buckley on Japanese feminism and gender-bending in popular culture such as karaoke and comic books (Mackie and Buckley 1985; Buckley 1991, 1993); Kathleen Uno on the ideologies of "good wife/wise mother" (1993); Margaret Lock on women's life cycles, medicalization, and menopause (1990, 1993); Vera Mackie on feminist history (Mackie and Buckley 1985; Mackie 1988); Robert Smith and Ella Wiswell on the sexualized lives of rural women in the village of Suye Mura (1982); and my own study of corporate entertainment and the staging of masculinity in hostess clubs (1994). Within some of these works and those of a few others, sexuality as the way in which people organize, imagine, and experience sensual relations has been a subject given initial recognition. As an area of research, however, it remains underdeveloped; treated by Japanese scholars almost exclusively within the framework of reproduction and physiology, sexuality has been neglected by most scholars in the United States, who see it as a peripheral, irrelevant, or suspicious scholarly subject, as I have discovered from reactions to my own work.

This disregard of sexuality is not limited, of course, to the field of Japanese studies. Even within feminism and gender research, sexuality is sometimes ignored or minimized. For example, in two recent books identified as studies in feminist anthropologyGender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era , edited by Micaela di Leonardo (1991), and Feminism and Anthropology by Henrietta Moore (1988)the subject of sexuality barely comes up (Ann Stoler's article "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Morality, and Race in Colonial Asia" in the Crossroads volume is the one

exception). In neither volume is there a heading for "sexuality," "sex," or "desire." In Moore's book the topic is subsumed under "sexual division of labor" (with references to "changes under socialism," "capitalism," "origins," "inheritance/descent systems," and "as defined by state" (245) and in di Leonardo's, under five headings: "sex differences and primatology," "sex-gender system" (a reference to Gayle Rubin's terminology and referring here to only one page), "sexism" (by far the most comprehensive heading with thirteen subheadings and multiple references), "sexual division of labor," and "sexual orientation" (two references)(418).

By contrast, in two other recent booksDirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power , edited by Pamela Church Gibson and Roman Gibson (1993), and Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate , edited by Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh (1993)both volumes of essays by feminists in various fields and disciplines,5 the focus is on pornography because, as both characterize it, this is "the feminist issue of the decade" (Clover in Gibson and Gibson:1). Here the authors write explicitly and primarily about sexuality, which they study and theorize through such arenas as identity, race, gender, fantasy, power, pleasure, censorship, sadomasochism, performance art, cinema, representation, and commodification.

As stated by Segal and McIntosh in their introduction to Sex Exposed , the aim of the authors is to question why recent feminist debates so persistently return and reduce to the topic of pornography and use feminism to obstruct rather than advance sexual research. Speaking for western (and, one might add, primarily white and middle class) feminism, they argue that the subject of gender became mired in a politics and polemics over pornography in the early 1980s following a number of significant moves by leading feminists. These centered around the issue of the imbrication of power and gender that operates in a society-politics-economy of male domination and female oppression such as is found in the United States.

The focus was originally not on pornography but on rape, which Susan Brownmiller (1975) argued was more about violence than sex in the 1970s. This position was soon modified, however, by feminists such as Andrea Dworkin (1981) and Susan Griffin (1981), who believed not only that all rape is about sex but also that all male sexuality is about violence. In the 1980s Catharine MacKinnon extended this argument further, writing that sexuality is the vehicle by which men oppress women and women become alienated from themselves: "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away" (1982:515). In her highly influential work, MacKinnon stressed that it is sexuality that shapes gender and not gender that shapes sexuality. By sexuality she meant specifically male sexuality, a construction of sexual desires where only men are subjects and women are only objects. Within this asymmetrical power relationship, women acquire their gendered identity: "This, the central but never stated

insight of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics , resolves the duality in the term 'sex' itself: what women learn in order to 'have sex,' in order to 'become women'woman as gendercomes through the experience of, and is a condition for, 'having sex'woman as sexual object for man, the use of women's sexuality by men" (531). The motto "Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice," coined in 1979 by Robin Morgan, reflected the view that pornography is the everyday practice that most visibly and concretely embodies the eroticization of male sexuality and female oppression at the core of gendered relations in U.S. society today.

Since the mid-1980s feminists have aligned themselves differently and often oppositionally on the issue of whether this assessment of pornography is an accurate one and whether, accordingly, censorship of pornography should be demanded or resisted.6 The point I wish to raise here, however, concerns less the history or politics of this debate and more the meaning it gives to sexuality. How is this term used and why is it so central to gender discourse in some schools of feminism and not in others? One difference between the orientation of the authors in the two sets of books I mention is that in Dirty Looks and Sex Exposed , the cultural context is entirely the United States and Western Europe; in Feminism and Anthropology and Crossroads it is cross-cultural with western cultures barely represented. Is the difference, at base, then one of geographical and cultural (what anthropologists would call ethnographic) site? Certainly the empirical observation that Segal and McIntosh use to introduce their volume"Pro-sex or anti-sex, Western cultures remain sex-obsessed. This is why the issue of pornography just won't go away" (1993:1)is far different than the statement of purpose advanced by Henrietta Moore: "Anthropology is in a position to provide a critique of feminism based on the deconstruction of the category 'woman.' It is also able to provide cross-cultural data which demonstrates the Western bias in much mainstream feminist theorizing" (1988:11).

In her book and di Leonardo's Crossroads ,7 emphases are on division of labor, kinship, and the state (and, in di Leonardo's book, colonialism and colonialist histories). Gender is located within those relationships that organize who labors at what; with what respective values, authorities, and constraints; under what controls by the state; and with what patterns to descent, marriage, and family. In both books as well, weight is placed on overcoming the biases that westerners have applied in analyzing the lives of (nonwestern) others. Moore writes that the confluence of these interests has characterized feminist anthropology from the start, an anthropology that, apart from a few early pioneers (such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict), began in the early 1970s with the two groundbreaking anthologies Women, Culture and Society , edited by Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (1973), and Toward an Anthropology of Women , edited by Rayna Reiter (Rapp) (1975).8 In both these volumes, the authors aimed to write women into an

ethnographic record that, produced by a male majority and masculinist bias in anthropology, had hitherto privileged the social lives, labors, and roles of only men. This stage of what Moore labels the "anthropology of women" was critical, but it was more "remedial than radical" in her estimation, and more ethnographic than theoretical.

Given that so much feminist scholarship of all kinds has been ghettoized or disregarded in anthropology on the basis of its "ethnographic" associations with women (Behar 1993), Moore's distinction is troubling. Her point, however, that this earlier work adopted rather than challenged anthropological conventions in its study of women is correct. Yet if it added little to the theoretical development of anthropology, feminist anthropology in the 1970s was at the forefront of feminism, a status it can no longer claim. Reflecting that decade's social and feminist interests in the issues of gender and power, the so-called ethnographies of women provided cross-cultural data and social scientific, mainly materialist, analyses of what the editors of Woman, Culture and Society stated to be the "universal subordination of women." Conducting fieldwork in specific locales, these feminist anthropologists studied the roles and positions women assume in production, reproduction, ritual, education, kinship, storytelling, leadership, and decisionmaking. Based on their findings, they developed models explaining and predicting the conditions under which female oppression is most likely: when the domestic and public spheres are most segregated; when women are isolated within homes and from one another; when males don't participate in child-raising and the female assumption of this responsibility is culturally devalued; and when women lack control over the products of their labor and lack access to social arenas such as law, education, and politics.

The tendency of this earlier work to generalize or universalize relations of gender asymmetry on the basis of localized fieldwork has been heavily critiqued and largely overcome in feminist anthropology of the 1980s and 1990s. Further, scholarship has advanced in two main directions (which, being more theoretical in Moore's mind, she labels "feminist anthropology"): (1) gender has replaced women as the object of inquiry, and (2) the practice of anthropology is no longer adopted as is but remapped according to a critique and deconstruction of its various biases (ethnocentrism, sexism, heterosexism, academism) and omissions (power, gender, sexual orientation, race). Beyond this there has been diversification and difference: Some advocate the pursuit of feminist ethnography (i.e., Abu-Lughod 1990), and others question its viability (i.e., Stacey 1988). Some adopt postmodernism in their feminism (i.e., Kirby 1989, 1993; Haraway 1991), and others caution against it (Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen 1989). Some use transcultural methods and theories to study gender cross-culturally, and others argue that such usage is inevitably Eurocentric (Strathern 1987b). As with trends

elsewhere in academia and feminism, there is also the move away from collapsing and homogenizing such identities as women, men, and gender and such relationships as oppression, dominance, and power.

Not all feminist anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s has been devoid of broad-based schematizing, but it has been developed more productively in other directions, namely toward finely tuned analyses of specific historical and cultural settings where gender and power are given a careful, complicated account that in turn challenges tendencies in western feminism to essentialize, reduce to, or universalize Eurocentric categories of gender. The articles compiled in the di Leonardo collection all follow this trend or that of deconstructing anthropological paradigms for their biases (hence the comprehensive "sexism" heading). Moore takes this direction as well by emphasizing change and variation in her study of the intersection of cultural constructions of gender and relations of economics, politics, and intercultural contact in a number of societies at different historical moments. She sees trends (similar responses to similar conditions of industrialism, colonialism, and capitalism) but also particularities (differences of culture, history, race, class). In both the di Leonardo and Moore volumes the authors concentrate on the politicized relationships of production, reproduction, and kinship (the main words in Moore's chapter headings are "kinship, labor, and household," "status," "position," and "women's lives"; and in di Leonardo's, "gender" coupled to each of the following: "kinship," "reproduction," "cultural politics," "labor," "colonial history," and "anthropological discourse"). Both authors also concur with a position voiced powerfully by Michelle Barrett (a sociologist whose feminist materialism is highly anthropological) that since forms of patriarchy have both predated and outdated capitalism, sexism is a behavior that has both cultural and economic determinants and cannot be reducible to mere material conditions (1988).

Still I am left with the question, Why is the subject of sexuality so underrepresented and understudied in these works by feminist anthropologists? It is not totally absent, of course. In the genre referred to by Moore as "anthropology of women" there are several ethnographic accounts in which women's sexuality is explicitly covered. Nisa by Marjorie Shostak (1983) is memorable in part because of the openness with which it gives voice to Nisa's sexual historiesan aspect of the book not unrelated, I imagine, to its popularity in introductory classes. Margaret Mead as well, of course, wrote numerous ethnographiesSex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1963), Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)describing and analyzing the sexual trysts, maturations, and relationships of various peoples. Even in what Moore considers to be the genre of more theoretical work, that which is more deserving of the descriptor "feminist," there has been scholarship on sexuality: Esther Newton's Mother Camp (1972); Gayle Rubin's "Traffic in

Women" (1973) and "Thinking Sex" (1984); Carole Vance's edited volume Pleasure and Danger (1984) and her work on the Meese Commission and obscenity laws in this country (1990, 1992); Peggy Sanday's Fraternity Gang Rape (1990); and the various studies stemming from mainly culturalist, structuralist and interpretivist perspectives analyzing the sexual in codings of cultural meanings. These latter studies include Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (1981), edited by Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead; the prolific scholarship by Marilyn Strathern (1984a, 1984b, 1987a, 1987b, 1988); and Nature, Culture, and Gender (1980), edited by Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern.

There is also burgeoning research in the area of lesbian and gay studies in anthropology, led by such scholars as Kath Weston (1993), Elizabeth Kennedy (1995), and Gayle Rubin (1973, 1984). These works, though compelling, are few and far between (and almost totally ignored by Moore and di Leonardo in the histories they write of feminist anthropology). Why is their attention to sexuality so exceptional, and why is there this apparent chasm between feminist anthropologists who tend to exclude sexuality in their studies of gender and feminists in other fields (in the Sex Exposed and Dirty Looks volumes, contributors come from such fields as film studies, literature, English, psychology, psychoanalysis, journalism, political activism, and cultural studies) who have so eagerly taken it up? The difference cannot be due simply to the place of study. A recent anthropological volume focusing entirely on the cultural context of the United StatesUncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture (1990), edited by Faye Ginsburg and Anna Tsingfor example, includes only one out of nineteen essays that specifically deals with the matter of sexuality (significantly, it is authored by Carole Vance and concerns pornography). The rest address such topics as abortion, evangelism, amniocentesis, the workplace, and reproductive ideology; these articles include references to sexuality, but their primary foci are elsewhere.

Perhaps, as the literary theorist Eve Sedgwick puts it (1990), the study of sexuality is simply not coextensive with that of gender. Although sex and gender are related, she notes, they are not the same thing; and whereas in some ways they are intertwined, not all aspects of sexuality reflect back on gender (some aspects are determined more, for example, by race or class).9 Gayle Rubin has made the same point. After advocating for the linkage of the study of sex(uality) and gender in her 1973 article "Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," she reversed this position in 1984 (in "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality"). Here she writes that a radical theory of sex is inhibited by certain cultural assumptions about sex that are common among westerners, namely that both conventional genital intercourse between heterosexuals and nonconventional sensual behavior between same-gendered individuals are gendered acts. Yet sex, Rubin argues, involves other factors that have little or nothing

to do with gender, such as erotic tastes in position, mood, and activity. She therefore concludes that whereas feminism is aimed at the study and eradication of gender oppressions, it is less attuned to the presence of sexual oppressions and, moreover, adheres to a gender politics that actively militates for a sexual correctness experienced as oppressive by some feminists including herself. As Sedgwick also states, feminism may not be the best site for studying sexuality.

If sexuality is not the shared feminist issue that gender is, then those who study it are motivated by something besides mere feminism per se: political activism, for example, or disciplinary orientation. It is the latter I am interested in here. Is there something about not only feminist anthropology but anthropology more broadly that inhibits research on sexuality these days? Anthropology has certainly not always been so reserved on the subject. In the late 1800s and early 1900s it was widely included in the grand typologies that sought to document as many behaviors of as many people worldwide as possible and to categorize them according to evolutionary stages or cultural types (e.g., Frazer's Golden Bough [1959] and the Human Area Research Files10 ). In the smaller-scale ethnographies of localized groups begun at the turn of the century as well, sexuality was routinely included in the shopping list of social facts to be described about a particular people. And in certain cases the ethnographic lens was turned entirely on sexual behavior, as in Bronislaw Malinowski's memorably entitled The Sexual Lives of Savages in North-western Melanesia (1929). Yet recently, apart from those studies already mentioned and work in the singular paradigm of psychological or psychoanalytic anthropology (the research of Gananath Obeyesekere and Gilbert Herdt is notable here11 ), sexuality as a subject of inquiry noteworthy for the ethnographic research it yields and cutting-edge theory it provokes is practically dormant in anthropology.12

What accounts for this lack and why is the situation so different in fields such as cultural studies, film studies, English, and literature, where the work of scholars like Eve Sedgwick, Kaja Silverman, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek*

, and Linda Williams richly proliferates around the subjects of desire, fantasy, sexuality, and sexual identities?13 I suggest that there are two major reasons: ethnographic (geographical and cultural locale), as already discussed, and theoretical (an aversion on the part of anthropologists to psychoanalytic theory, which is the primary paradigm for the study of sexuality by western scholars today). Simon Watney, for example, cites psychoanalysis as the framework guiding his analysis of the mass mediazation of AIDS (Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media [1989]). As he

puts it, psychoanalysis is attentive to the unconscious and the disjunctures between what we speak literally and the symbolic meanings of our speech (10). Watney, a lecturer in the history and theory of photography at the School of Communication, Polytechnic of Central London, and an AIDS activist, also writes in this context that the relation between anthropology and psychoanalysis should not be a "boundary dispute." He argues, following Paul Hirst, that the issue should not be determining "where 'the psychic' ends and 'the social' begins" because "social institutions and cultural formations by no means exhaust the sphere of the social. . . . There are socio-cultural forms which are a part of the psychic domain and parallel and intersect with other social relations" (Hirst cited in Watney:xi).

As stated here, Watney's position would not seem radical or even objectionable to most anthropologists. Any graduate student who has been schooled in the canon of mile Durkheim, Max Weber, Marx, and Freud, after all, has been taught the significance and nonliteralness of symbolic behaviors as a commonplace. The resistance to psychoanalysis lies elsewhere, occurring less because of its recognition of the psychic domain and more because of its construction of this psyche in terms of a western self. More accurate perhaps, the two become conflated and the theory as a whole gets rejected because of its Eurocentric orientation. To use psychoanalysis on a nonwestern culture is deemed a form of anthropological colonization, as seeing others in terms of a concept of self that is (only) western. And as Foucault has importantly pointed out (1980), the belief that sexuality forms the core of our identities as individuals is the result of a particular chain of developments in western history. And as unique to the west as this history is, so is the cultural formulation of sexualitywhat Foucault branded "scientia sexualis." Sexuality becomes the object of multiple scrutiniesmedical, administrative, moral, scientific, personalthat encourage an autodiscursiveness about sex that not only situates the "truth" of the self but also hegemonizes a social politics that people internalize through the body talk we westerners (mis)recognize as speech from and about ourselves. Psychoanalysis has been a part of this history and continues to support this ideology: roles, Foucault notes, which are naturalized under the rubric of western scientism. The suspicion with which he treats psychoanalysis is widely shared by many in the social sciences, including anthropology.

I sense that in my field anything to do with psychoanalytic theory is widely regarded as politically incorrect and narcissistically irrelevant. It is regarded not only as Eurocentric but as too "self" centered, too individualistic, too interpretive, too speculative, and, to be redundant, too psychological. As if psychoanalysis is the epitome of touchy-feeliness, endless graduate students have disclaimed to me any interest in psychoanalytic theory, refuse to consider its utility, and even question how the category of the unconscious could have any place in anthropological

research. Those who study itonce a vibrant subdiscipline and still pursued by a small but active contingency within the discipline, including scholars such as Mel Spiro and Obeyesekere, who have attained disciplinary prominenceare marked by its peripheral status in anthropology, and those who do not take measures to distance themselves from its very language, as did one keynote speaker recently in a national anthropology conference. She used the concept of fantasy in her talk but borrowed its definition from the Random House Dictionary . The judgment is that using a psychological-psychoanalytic framework precludes analyses that are political, materialist, and historical. For example, the scholars versed in psychoanalytic theory in fields such as cultural studies, media studies, and film theory are often criticized by anthropologists for their analyses of popular or mass culture (movies, comics, books, television shows) and are said to be inattentive to such materialist and political questions as: Who produces these texts and for whom and with what agenda(s)? Who are the various consumers and under what varied conditions do they consume? What are the political and social milieus of a text's appearance and circulation? and How do the representations in a text resemble or deviate from the lives, experiences, and identities of the viewers away from their viewing of the text?

Yet does the adoption of a psychoanalytic perspective necessarily block the tracking of these other concerns? Further, why does the study of sexuality need to be dominated by or collapsed into the paradigm of psychoanalysis, making anthropologists so phobic of both? Also, why can't sexual research, both inside and outside a western context, learn from nonwestern scholars, utilize a mixture of paradigms, and adjust psychoanalytic theory to correct for its Eurocentrisms and limitations?

These, of course, are the challenges I face in developing my own work on gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan. And once again, the path feels treacherous. On the one hand, I share the concerns of anthropology, particularly as they have motivated research on genderthe material and political relations of reproduction, production, and kinship. I am interested in who labors at what in Japan, who reproduces whom, and how the institutions and conditions of the state, economy, and localized environment (including those of race, class, and ethnicity) interact with cultural practices and meanings to affect the ways people live their lives, relate with others, and identify themselves. I pursue these issues in terms of gender; I do so as well in terms of sexuality, but here, on the other hand, the directions taken by anthropology serve me less well.

Movements in other fields have been far more useful, namely those that have studied desire, fantasy, images, and representations as vehicles that form and inform the channels by which persons interact with each other and assume identities and

activities they recognize as sexual. Much of this work analyzes, as I do, a society situated in what Jameson has called late capitalism. In such a society, the currency of economic exchange is increasingly that of commodities and images that, as W. F. Haug has pointed out (1986), borrow on and produce sensual illusions and pleasures. Accordingly, as Baudrillard has also noted about such societies widely categorized as "postmodern" (1981), there is the propensity toward "simulacra": We invest (socially, economically, and psychically) more in the fantasies with which we represent, imagine, and escape our realities than in the realities themselves. This is the Disney World syndromea made-up world that becomes more compelling and believable than the so-called real world that exists outside its gate. And this simulacrum signifies not only a disjuncture between the materiality of the relations by which we live, labor, and reproduce and the images by which these are represented but also a tendency for the latter to take on a life of their own, becoming a crucial determinant of who and what we are.

Given such material conditions, the study of fantasy and imagery becomes socially critical rather than whimsically playful. The best work along these lines, as far as I'm concerned, explores the issues of representation, identity, and desire in terms of historically and socially specific contexts. This work is, in other words, as attentive to relations of power and materiality as to symbolic imaging. These works include bell hooks's Black Looks (1992), on the ways that race, desire, power, and culture intersect in the racialized setting of the United States today; Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993), on anorexia and body imageries in the contemporary United States; and Simon Watney's book that I have mentioned already, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (1989). Unlike all three of these works, however, mine is situated in a culture that is nonwestern and that, although sharing forms of political economy and the prominence of fetishized commoditization with countries like the United States, has had cultural traditions and social histories that are very different. The question here is, Can any usage of such terminology as "fantasy," "desire," "imaginary," or "identification"developed as it has been within western theorizing as particularly if not exclusively psychoanalyticbe applicable to a cultural setting other than that for which it was originally conceived? That is, despite the empirical fact that "sex" (variously named in Japanese as sei , which is an all-encompassing word including the meanings of both gender and sexual activity; seiyoku , which means sexual desire; yokubo *

, which means desire; and sekusu , which comes from the English word and is a more direct word for sexual acts) is publically discussed, imagistically evoked, and widely commodified in a presence that often feels ubiquitous in Japan, how can one even call this "sexuality" let alone ruminate on its constructedness in a language that assumes a construction of sexuality and self that is western? With these questions, I at last return to my stories.

Ponkiki was not the only children's show I watched while living in Japan. Years earlier I viewed a cartoon series called Machiko-sensei , which was targeted to an audience of young teenagers and featured a junior high school teacher named Machiko-sensei. An attractive unmarried woman, Machiko-sensei is a conscientious teacher whose devotions congeal around a group of male students who endlessly and variously require her help. During one show she disguises herself as a professional wrestler in order to save one of her students who has decided to quit school and enter the ranks of wrestling. By the end of the program she has accomplished her mission, yet in the course of events her shirt gets removed three times, showing her exposed breasts to the eyes of all. Machiko-sensei is embarrassed each time this occurs and looks down. By contrast, those who see her, including spectators to the wrestling, some of her colleagues, and her group of favored male students, all gaze at her breasts greedily. Instantaneously, Machiko-sensei covers herself, removing from sight a part of her body that ought, as her gestures tell us, not to have been seen.

This combination of showing but not showing female flesh, or revealing it but only through a display or look that is constructed to be socially illegitimate, is one that I saw repeatedly in a variety of media in Japanese popular culture aimed at both children and adults. For children, this display was featured in television shows and in manga (comic books). In, for example, the program Doraemon , aimed at children as young as three, a robotic cat (Doraemon) lives with a well-meaning but socially awkward boy, Nobita-kun. In one show Nobita uses a special telescopic machine given him by Doraemon that he can use to see far distances and through walls. Its viewfinder focuses inadvertently on Sakura-chan, the only girl in his gang of friends, who is standing naked before she enters her bath. Nobita gasps and sweats profusely before Doraemon sensibly turns the viewfinder away. The show's viewers have been given a peek at Sakura-chan's naked body, but the look is constructed to be surreptitiousnot Nobita's right and against Sakura-chan's willmuch like that of a Peeping Tom. So too are the displays of female flesh in a number of children's comic books I examined for the chapter in this book entitled "A Male Gaze in Japanese Children's Cartoons." Bodies of females are presented provocatively, either without their clothes on or through clothing as if it were being imagined away. By strategies in both the imagery and narratives, girls are scanned up their skirts to show panties; sketched in ways that exaggerate buttocks, crotches, or breasts; and situated in stories of violation, duplicity, or force by which their clothing is removed and their nakedness seen. These girls may be attacked, but the attack comes almost invariably as the means by which to remove their

clothes; once naked, the girls are rarely attacked further or touched in any sexual manner except by sight. Once again, we are allowed to look, but the look is figured to be somehow sneaky, transgressive, illicit, or circuitous. It also stops rather than precedes further activity and is over almost as soon as it is begun.

In media aimed at older audiences as well, a similar construction persists. Naked breasts are an image that circulates widely and openly in popular culture. They peek through sheer blouses on the women drawn to sell products on public billboards and in advertisements; are revealed on the models posed in glossy photos appended at the front and back of news magazines; get pulled out of the clothing worn by actresses in the course of being raped or pursued on prime-time television shows; and are paraded in the multiple places that categorize themselves as overtly sexualthe "sex page" in sports newspapers, handbills for call girls, photographic advertisements for various sex services, articles in entertainment journalism about the sex trade, late-night "adult hour" on TV, and sexually explicit magazines. In such urban centers as Tokyo, in fact, breasts are visually inscribed almost everywhere. Yet despite this visibility, the inscription often seems qualified, as if permission to view or disrobe has not exactly been given after all: Women who strip are in a dirty place and are dirty themselves; those who show their breasts in "respectable" venues smile girlishly and sweetly as if they are not exposed at all; and females who wind up with their clothes off in movies, television shows, and particularly manga (here I am referring more to the comics read by teenage and adult males, as covered in Chapter 3) do so overwhelmingly as the victims of attack, violence, duplicity, or rape.

The contrast between these breasts and those that float so cleanly but assuredly across the frame of Ponkiki is striking. Besides unambiguously projecting goodness, the motherly breasts display their nakedness directly and invite a view that is unobstructed, permissible, and prolonged. By contrast, those shown on programs such as Machiko-sensei and Doraemon or so excessively in erotic comic books and on late-night TV are constructed as if looking at them is not quite allowed. Whatever meaning and pleasure these breasts hold is conditioned by this seeming ambiguity: A sight is both revealed and concealed in almost the same instant, and a look is split between seeing freely and being forbidden from seeing at all. Set against the fleeting or contorted visionsthe woman tied from head to foot and whose breasts stick up between two segments of ropethe breasts on Ponkiki appear accessible and whole.

There is another difference. The breasts on Ponkiki stand alone, whereas characters to view them are added in the rest of the examples. In Machiko-sensei these are the spectators; in Doraemon , the boy Nobita; in erotic comics, the various watchers, desirers, and violators of women. In Ponkiki , by contrast, the breasts appear comparatively unmediated, closing rather than opening the distance be-

tween object (of sight) and subject (who sees the object.) Drawing in a viewer, by contrast, emphasizes not only the viewer-viewed relationship but also the very act of viewing itself. Obviously, the children watching Ponkiki can only view the breast image, yet the impression of a relationship not limited to the visual is at least created. Even more important, when viewers are included in the image, they are almost always and exclusively males who look at bodies whose nakedness exposes them to be invariably female. Looking at breasts, then, has become an activity and relation that is not only situated by gender but also differentiated by it: Males look; females are looked at. Of course, even girls watching a show like Machiko-sensei can see the teacher's breasts, but to look at them with the desire and interest exhibited on the faces of the spectators in the show, they need to identify as male.14 By contrast, whereas the breasts themselves are obviously gendered on Ponkiki their viewership is not. Anyone, is the suggestion, can relate to and find pleasure in a mother's breasts.

Moving from Ponkiki to Machiko-sensei and Doraemon , we see a move from one type of breasts to another, from one kind of viewing to a different kind, and from an audience that is gender neutral to one that is gender marked. This change reminds me (with resonances as well as dissonances) of the story told by Freud and retold by Lacan and psychoanalytic feminists of gender formation in the west in which penises and phalluses figure centrally. Against this story and the one I have crafted with the breast images in contemporary Japanese popular culture, I wish to consider whether there is merit, and if so what kind and what degree, to Kosawa's assertion of a maternal principle at work in Japanese culture. My aim is smallscale rather than broadscale; I am attempting not to develop a major thesis as much as to give play to an idea that, in the course of getting played out, will point to one way in which a study of subjects so fractured and inhibited by the divisions I have pointed out (ethnography/theory, gender/sexuality, Japan/the west) might be better integrated.

The Freudian-Lacanian story, briefly summarized, goes as follows.15 Children are raised primarily by mothers. Children love and depend upon their mothers but also come to resent them for the independence with which they come and go and for the fact that they provide but also deny caregiving. This relationship is central to how children develop, how they imagine their bodies, conceptualize the outside world, and navigate a course between the two. Increasingly, what type of body parts a child has (most critically, whether there is a penis or vagina) will affect how the outside world and her or his choices within it are perceived. Also, relations with the mother come to depend upon and differ according to a child's anatomy, which determines what positions are assigned the child both inside the family and later outside in society. These assignations, formed and informed as they are by mother-child relationships (and the rules, losses, and taboos surrounding

them) will condition the identities children assume as gendered adults, and the constellation of desires and fantasies that shape their sexualities.

In Freud's version of the story, adopted and modified by Lacan and his followers, the most crucial part of psychosocial development comes with the chain of events he referred to as the Oedipus complex. As discussed earlier in relationship to Kosawa, these are developments that start between the ages of three and five and are precipitated by the child's desire to genitally engage and satisfy the mother and by the social prohibition, the incest taboo, that this desire triggers. Though this is not the first constraint to the satisfaction of desires the child has encountered, the incest taboo is different: It is instituted by social law (versus a mother's refusal to nurse, for example) and enforced (symbolically if not literally) by the figure within the family given social authoritythe father. The threat made "in the name of the father" and by the "paternal signifier" of the phallus is castration of the boy's penis.

Coincidental to this developmental moment is a significant look (Freud 1961) made by children in the direction of someone who is differentially gendered to themselves: Girls see fathers or brothers; boys see mothers or sisters. According to Freud, the girl understands immediately the significance and signification of the penis; she lacks it, wants it, and knows it is superior to what she has (Freud 1964a). From this point on she develops an envy of penises based on the recognition that a penis both satisfies mother (unlike what she has can) and stands for a social power females lack (as true for her as for her mother). As a result, a psychic "wound" of inferiority is formed like a "scar." In this state girls enter the phase of the Oedipus complex wherein castration, as Freud puts it, has already occurred. By contrast, a boy's awareness of gender difference comes later, cushioned as he has been by his penis, which he, like the girl, has already come to associate with the phallicism of the social order (feminists such as Jane Flax [1990] and Jane Gallop [1982, 1985] have noted the importance of this recognition and pointed out that it precedes rather than accompanies the Oedipal moment with the implications this bears for gender formation). It is only with the threat of castration that he "sees" the genitalia on a female for the first time, and he interprets what he sees less as a matter of gender difference than as the absence of a male penis. Projecting his own body onto hers, in other words, he sees "lack," a "terrifying sight," in Freud's words, that compels him to both look away and retreat from his incestual desires. He assumes a position of phallus-in-waiting, identifying with his father and biding his time until he can take an object choice outside the family whom, as feminists have pointed out, he will be able to dominate more than he could his own mother.

What is critical to this story, no matter the version or the telling of it, is the importance of the phallus even when feminists such as Jessica Benjamin (1988) and

Nancy Chodorow (1989) dispute the signification given it by Freud or Lacan. For both of the latter, the phallus, in its absence or presence, is what distinguishes and therefore constructs gender. And for both, this construction is not a pre-given but comes about at the developmental point in the child's life when she or he confronts castration: The girl realizes that she is already castrated; the boy faces the fear that he might become so at the hands of his father. Whereas Freud associates the symbolic meaning given to the phallus with the anatomical organ of a penis, Lacan disclaims such a connection: "The phallus . . . is not a fantasy. . . . Nor is it as such an object. . . . It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, which it symbolizes" (1977:79).

In Lacan's mind, the phallus is a signifier that is "intrinsically neutral" (Ragland-Sullivan 1982:10) and is not just any signifier but the signifier par excellence; it signifies signification itself and the entrance of a person into the realm of the symbolic, which conditions sociality. To become social entails a lossa "pound of flesh," Lacan calls it at one point, referring to the "realness" of any bodily need, part, or function. And from the stage of the "real" to the "imaginary," in which the child imagines a closeness to mother and a satisfaction of needs and demands that cannot be sustained, he or she enters the "symbolic," a third stage wherein the duality of mother-child is broken. In this stage, it is the phallus, operating as what Lacan calls the third term, that ruptures the imaginary and illusory identity between mother and child and comes to represent the pursuit of that which can compensate for ("petit objet ") this loss as well as loss and lack in general; that is, each child strives to be social, a condition that can never, in fact, be attained. Whereas everyone, as a member of society, is equally "lacking," people play their lack out differently on the basis of gender: Males disavow their lack and displace it onto women (being allowed to imagine that they lack "lack"), and women symbolize lack for men (imagining that their "lack" can be filled only by a male phallus). The phallus in the symbolic, then, acts as both sign of gender difference and signifier of (the object of the other's) desire (Grosz 1990).

Feminists have critiqued both the Freudian and Lacanian theories of the phallus on various grounds: They place too much importance on the oedipal and post-oedipal stages of development with an emphasis on the role of the father and too little on the preoedipal stages, where the mother's power and influence is primary; they describe as universal and socially necessary what are behaviors, relations, family structures, and sexual orientations unique to the social and historical context of western societies today and, in doing so, naturalize and endorse a model that is heterosexual, heterosexist, masculinist, and individualist; and despite Lacan's insistence to the contrary, phalluses refer far more to the penises of men than to the vaginas or clitorises of women (Flax 1990; Cixious 1980; Irigaray 1985; Benjamin 1988; Chodorow 1989). Few critics, however, have denied that

there is a descriptive accuracy to the phallocentrism theorized by Freud and Lacan. We do live in a social world where males have more political power and authority than do females; where male identity, more so than female, is configured in terms of an autonomy and individuality that demands separation from mother and a repudiation of the femininity she represents; and where males are encouraged to be active, aggressive, and dominant in sexual activity. Women are positioned to be more passive and to be objects rather than subjects in sexual relations. And penises are a symbolic marker of phallic power just as the lack of a penis denotes the respective absence of this power granted women.

Can these same characteristics describe a society such as contemporary Japan, which is often portrayed as equally, if not more, chauvinistic, patriarchal, and oppressive to women than a society such as the United States? I would say broadly that male economic and political privilege and male sexual rights apply but not the renunciation of motherhood and individuation from mothers/others.16 But whether penises are symbolic markers of power is the question that most interests me. Children in Japan are not required or even encouraged to pull away from their mothers at the stage of developing their social identity nearly to the extent that they are in western societies such as the United States. Further, such is particularly true for boys: In Japan, boys feel greater pressures to succeed academically and thus their need to rely upon mothers for assistance in the long years of their studies is greater as well. Two chapters in this book ("Producing Mothers" and "Japanese Mothers and Obentos *

") deal with the relationship between mothers and children and how an ideology of motherhood as well as institutions such as the school system materially as well as symbolically produce and monitor the identities of adult women as devoted, loving, self-sacrificing, and "good" mothers. I also question the gendered and sexual implications of an intensified mothering in the lives of specifically boys at the time of adolescence in the chapter "Transgressions of the Everyday."

Another social fact critical to the manner in which Japanese children mature and develop their identities is that adult men, particularly in the middle class, are increasingly absent from the home. As many studies have shown (e.g., Yuzawa 1982), their social roles are deemphasized within the sphere of domestic life, where mothers, by contrast, assume the position of authority. Thus women are the primary caregivers not only in a physical sense but also in a social and psychological one and not only when their children are little but also as they grow into adults. Of course, as numerous western feminists such as Chodorow (1989) and Dinnerstein (1976) have pointed out, such a division of labor that assigns women to the primary role of caregiver is often connected to the devaluation of women and femininity in a society. Whether or to what extent this is true in Japan has been debated extensively both by feminists studying Japan, such as Vera Mackie

and Sandra Buckley (Mackie and Buckley 1985; Buckley 1993), and by Japanese feminists such as Ueno Chizuko (1987), Mizuta Noriko (1995), Aoki*

Yayoi (1986), and Tanazawa Naoko, Horiba Kiyoko, and Takayoshi Rumiko (1988). Yet it must also be pointed out that mothering is given much recognition and value in Japan, far more so than in the United States, for example. Coupled to this is the relative absence, both physical and symbolic, of fathers. Relatively absent as well, then, is the phallus bearer so essential to the psychoanalytically inspired theories of western identity formation and male dominance, particularly in comparison to the intensiveness and extensiveness of the mother's role in Japan. There, the mother's presence is compelled not only by cultural values and social traditions but by the school and exam systems.

Does this mean that Kosawa was right when he wrote, over fifty years ago and long before the competition surrounding the educational structure and the demands this places on mothers had escalated to the degree they have today, that Japan is a culture based on a maternal rather than paternal principle? In his scenario of the symbolic and the child's passage into it, it will be recalled, there is no mention of phalluses, the disrupture of the mother-child bond, an incest taboo enforced by father through punitive threats (castration), or females psychically wounded because they lack a penis. Rather, the one social rule the child must learn is how to accept the mother as a human being with desires and behaviors that exclude or decenter the child. Thus the child must abandon narcissism: There must be a readjustment of the idealization of mother as omnipotent and totally self-sacrificing and a willingness to remain bonded to her anyway. This stage of development, as Kosawa also stressed, is triggered by acts performed by the mother, who exhibits devotion and forgiveness toward her child, rather than by the father, who threatens punishment in his role as social and phallic authority. And as a result of successfully resolving what started as a rage against mother for her fractured mothering, the child emerges as a socially appropriate adult: one not individuated into an autonomous individual but rather a person who identifies and acts on the basis of social interrelatedness.

Rather than try to deal profoundly or in any sense absolutely with Kosawa's thesis and how relevant it is to describing social and political realities operating in Japan today, I merely question whether western-based psychoanalytic theory with its articulations of concepts such as the phallus can be meaningfully applied to a cultural context such as Japan. And to ask this I consider only breasts and the persistence with which they are fetishized in the mass culture of 1980s and 1990s Japan. What do they mean in terms of gender and sexuality? In particular, I am interested in the partial, fractured, and obstructed display of this common fetish. Always somehow veiled (even when naked), these breasts are popularized as an ambiguity; they are disclosed, yet the disclosure is qualified or immediately

revoked. Breasts may be no more than implied or momentarily glimpsed before hiding again behind a shirt. Or if they are fully seen, the look is somehow halted or blocked or, just as likely, presented as a voyeuristic transgression that follows some form of accident, violence, violation, or deceit. In this configuration, not seeing is as crucial as seeing, and hiding the flesh is as critical as exposing it.

Interestingly, ambiguous is also how Lacan describes the role the phallus plays as the signifier supreme (1982:7485): It symbolizes both loss (the "pound of flesh" one loses upon entry into the symbolic) and the substitute for what is lost (a simulacrum that is bigger and better than any "real" penis could be). Freud speaks similarly of what he calls the fetish (1961): what is used by a boy to turn his glance away from the mother on whose body the lacking penis has just been noticed. The fetish, like the Lacanian phallus, is a "compromise": It is an artificial substitute for what was never real in the first place. And as Freud stresses, the fetishist both knows and disavows its artifice. Yet even in this ambiguitythe substitute both is and is not what it stands forthe fetish acts as a "safeguard" against the threat of castration, compelling the subject into the symbolic and forever leaving its mark as the condition for being (westernly) social.

What is the parallel mark left on the Japanese subject as the condition of sociality? Is it that which compels the proliferation of breasts that now you see and now you don't and that differ from the visually consistent breasts shown on Ponkiki ? If the latter are configured in some sense as imaginary, having an imagistic appeal that is immediate and direct, as if there is little separating the viewer from the breast, the former are marked by an intrusionthe sign of being ordered and monitored by a set of rules. What is this grammar and where is it coming from? I suggest that it derives from a pair of related prohibitions: not the taboo against sexually copulating with one's mother that is installed by the threat of castration but (1) that against expecting maternal indulgence and omnipotence beyond the age of narcissism and (2) that against the aggressive impulse, triggered by the first prohibition, to hurt or turn away from the mother/other. The latter, of course, is what Kosawa argued is the penultimate challenge facing a child as she or he acquires identity as a Japanese adult. And the reality in contemporary Japan, where the pressures to perform in an increasingly competitive school system are not only intense for children but intensify around mothers, whose role in supporting educational imperatives is so highly prescribed by the state, is that not all children succeed. Acts of violence by children against parents, typically the mother, are far more common in Japan than the reverse, and incidents of mother-beating intensify around the time of exam-taking, when the attentiveness of mothers is aimed at extracting a performance from the child. Other forms of child-perpetrated violence have become even more disturbingly commonplace, most notably, bullying (ijime ): A group of kids targets, usually, one child who is younger or different (in

ethnicity, background, physique, economic status, intellectual ability). The aggression leads, on occasion, to injury, murder, or suicide.

Rage and violence are often scripted into the scenes of fetishized breasts. Overwhelmingly (if not exclusively), the female is the victim and the sketched-in (male) viewer, the perpetrator. This violence, in its phantasmic transgression, represents one of the prohibited behaviors mentioned earlier.

The desire, however, to be completely and narcissistically indulged by the object of one's desire, is realized only with ambiguity. This desire is given form as the fantasy of seeing female breasts, but it is the incompletion of this wish that is so regularly and compulsively repeated; the female is distracted or disinterested, her breasts are shown but then covered, she is exposed but never possessed. Of course, the impression of indulgence is given: The imagery of even momentarily exposed breats is so pervasive that the sight of naked breasts is a commonplace. Still, figured into the exposure is the persistent obstruction: the giving yet taking away that makes this image less a given than a compromise, and the look it engenders, one that is marked by forbidden desires.17

"Desire," as theorized by Freud and Lacan (and by Marx as commodity fetishism), is characterized by such impossibility. It cannot be realized as long as one remains within the parameters of sociality (the "symbolic" in Lacanian terminology, capitalism in Marxian). Yet the grammar of desire that emergesconditioned as it is by the materiality of everyday life and the cultural and familial nexuses that inform what paths what people take to make what kinds of livesdoes not prevent the production of pleasure as much as pattern it in terms that reflect rather than inhibit social taboos.

Such a statement is as true for people living in Japan as anywhere else, so the answer to my question about whether psychoanalytic theory (as well as other western-based theories) has applicability to a milieu such as contemporary Japan is yes. But the application is tricky. "Desire," "fantasy," "gender identification," "sexual aim," are the types of concepts that do not or should not free float over borders where differing sets of cultural categories and material conditions exist. Neither, however, should these concepts remain grounded and exclusive to one place, particularly if that place is the west.18

So rather than hesitate and fixate too long over the endless problems that adhere to a project such as mine, I choose to go forward. My main agenda of examining gendered and sexual behavior in contemporary Japan orients all the work in this book. In the following chapters I have tried a number of tactics, both theoretical and ethnographic, to accomplish this goal. In the process, I have also sought to tease and test the categories and techniques used by those of us who study these issues and, more important, to discover how they can be used most effectively.

Excerpted from Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan by Anne Allison Copyright 2000 by Anne Allison. Excerpted by permission.
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