If, at this moment, any place in the Far East can be said to have inherited Shanghai’s old reputation as the “City of Sin,” it is Tokyo, where crime, corruption, and vice proliferate under a blaze of neon lights rivaling Times Square, and gangsters are well organized and brazen enough to rob people on the Ginza, Tokyo’s Fifth Avenue, in broad daylight, without the bystanders even daring to call for help.
Tokyo’s police force is too understaffed to do much about all this. Gangsters are rounded up periodically, only to be bailed out and set free to resume their activities with hardly any interruption. The newest weapon of the police is a light meter with which they try to enforce a minimum of illumination in the night clubs that seem to compete with each other as to which can keep their premises darker; their customers are almost exclusively male, and are served by girls clad usually in bathing suits. At other bars the unsuspecting newcomer is intimidated into running up a high check. Almost every day there are newspaper stories of teen-agers—usually from respectable backgrounds—caught in sex orgies.
Spokesman and symbol of this violent “emancipation of youth” is a good-looking young writer and movie actor named Shintaro Ishihara. From his first novel, Season of the Sun, published in 1947, the Japanese teen-agers take their identity and their name—“Generation of the Sun.” (The Japanese word for it, taiyozko, is employed with the same frequency and point as our “Lost Generation” was after World War I.) Ishihara’s book, which is not without its merits, was given a coveted literary prize, and subsequently made into a sensationally successful motion picture. Since then movie companies have been competing with each other for his services, and his first film, and the two following it, have encouraged a score of imitations. The streets of Tokyo are placarded with movie ads showing boys feeding girls sleeping pills and then, with contorted faces, ripping the clothes off their somnolent bodies.
The hero of Ishihara’s Season of the Sun is a high school student from a rich family. He is without scruples or inhibitions—a good boxer, he enjoys pounding his opponents in the school gymnasium to the screams of admiring school-girls. Among these is the heroine. She too belongs to the jeunesse dorée. They meet in dark bars, dance, fall in love. Or rather, they don’t fall in love-love is too old-fashioned: they go in for unadorned sex instead. In praising the book, many critics pointed to its climactic love scene as being particularly original: it contains not a word of endearment. The affair continues to the accompaniment of violent barroom brawls. But when the girl finds herself in love with the hero and admits it, he “sells” her for 5,000 yen ($14) to his timid elder brother. In the meantime she has become pregnant, and she dies after an abortion. Both book and movie end with her funeral: the hero steps up to her coffin at which relatives and Buddhist priests are praying, seizes a bronze ceremonial vessel and smashes it down on the girl’s picture, which, according to custom, is attached to her coffin. “How stupid of you to die!” he cries, and rushes out. No remorse, no sorrow, no humanity.
Older Japanese indignantly repudiate this picture of their younger generation. They see Season of the Sun and its many imitations as calculated attempts to exploit sensationalism. Women’s clubs urge the local authorities to ban these films, and teachers picket them to try to keep young people away. Thus Shintaro Ishihara has become the focal figure of a bitter struggle between the younger generation in Japan and the one that was brought up before the war-before surrender and democratization. This older generation, despite its own more relaxed behavior (by pre-war standards), has remained essentially moral and innocent.
In the years separating these two generations changes have taken place in Japan of so marked a kind as to be obvious even to the uninstructed eye. In the past Westerners used to praise Japanese women for their accommodating grace and their butterfly playfulness, for a charm carefully developed through centuries of male domination; but her physical attributes—short, bandy legs and waddling gait—were another matter. Today it is difficult to recognize in the young women of Japan the sisters of Madame Butterfly, so complete has been their metamorphosis. Their bodies are tall and slim (every year now the average height of the Japanese woman increases by over an inch), and their legs, no longer bowed by squatting on tatami straw mats, have become attractively straight.
And they have put off the kimono, which was created in the first place to hide the defects of the Japanese female form, for Western dresses. In one of modern Tokyo’s most modern buildings, a ten-story circular tower in Shinjuku, 20,000 dressmakers are trained in the latest Western fashions. The Daimaru department store sells gowns designed by Dior. Recently an American brassiere manufacturer visited Japan to inspect what he considered a vast new market for his product—for, to the regret of the teen-agers, the Japanese bosom is still discreetly muffled. But even as Westerners applaud the beauty of the new Japanese woman, they must deplore, as do many Japanese men, her increasingly brazen forth-rightness, her loss of appealing modesty.
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How account for the striking change in the character of Japan’s youth? One answer is supplied by Ruth Benedict’s perceptive study of Japanese society, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, published ten years ago. Traditional Japanese education, she explains, is diametrically opposed to that of the West.
The Western child is subjected early to elementary restraints, and with increasing maturity he is taught to assume responsibility for his own freedom. But the Japanese child enjoys unlimited freedom, is permitted and forgiven everything: he can even strike his mother without fear of retaliation. Only when he reaches fourteen do (or rather did) a boy’s parents begin to rein him in, and then, all of a sudden, he is clamped into an inhumanly tight system of morality and convention. But after his early years of anarchic freedom, he is not able to “internalize” these new values sufficiently, which is why his observance of them is so rigid and complete. And when something happens to rip this straitjacket open, he becomes utterly demoralized, as American troops discovered to their embarrassment during World War II, when Japanese who let themselves be captured instead of fighting to the death, as their code prescribed, unashamedly betrayed their former comrades.
Something similar has been happening to the “Generation of the Sun.” These teenagers enjoyed the anarchy of a normal Japanese childhood, but at the moment when in former years they would have been laced into the straitjacket of the Samurai, they entered instead into a freedom they did not understand, “made in U.S.A.” In other words, because traditional norms are no longer valid, and because he has not been prepared for the new democratic standards that have largely been imposed on him by an occupying power, today’s young Japanese grows up without any moral values at all.
This does not mean that Japan is turning overnight into a country of juvenile delinquents. The social tone is on the whole still reserved, even somewhat inhibited. The days when it was a punishable offense to link arms with a woman in the street arc recent enough so that couples walking arm in arm in the new American fashion—the Japanese call it “avec”—still seem to be watching out for police. Even a goodbye kiss in a railroad station is frowned on as indecent. And despite the unprecedented new liberty granted the postwar generation, many marriages are still arranged in the traditional way by relatives and friends—as a sober business transaction—between young people who have seen each other only at a distance in a coffee house or movie theater. This is true even in academic circles, though it might be thought that the lecture hall offered sufficient opportunities for striking up friendships. (Japanese men prefer uneducated brides—they think them easier to manage. As a result, young women, frustrated in their search for husbands, are beginning to leave the universities in droves.)
The Japanese defend their arranged marriages by the observation: “In the West love comes before marriage, in Japan after.” But often it does not come at all. For the husband a loveless union is not particularly tragic: the moral code permits him his geisha, or should his means be insufficient, a teahouse girl; but his wife can find fulfillment only in her children. The un-romantic sexuality of the “Generation of the Sun” becomes more understandable in the light of these traditional Japanese attitudes.
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That Japanese women have suffered cruelly under this system is indicated by the statistics on suicide recently published by the World Health Organization. Though Japan stands fourth in the world—after Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland—with 20.5 suicides per 100,000 deaths, she has an unusually large proportion of female suicides. In Germany the total of female suicides is less than half the male, in Switzerland less than one-third, and in the gynarchic United States less than a quarter. But in Japan there are 16.5 female suicides per 100,000 deaths as against 24.5 male. It is the tragic protest of the Japanese woman against a society that turns the housewife into a child-bearing machine and the geisha hetaera into a stylized caricature of charming helplessness.
Obviously, the new surge for freedom that created the “Generation of the Sun” has its justification and redeeming side. The brazen behavior of the “Sun girls” is the reverse side of the demand made by her more sober sisters to be taken seriously as human beings. But Japanese women do not fight as hard for their rights as do other Asian women, and at the moment they would appear to be following an international vogue rather than acting out of genuine rebelliousness. Under the American occupation, when for the fir9t time they were given the right to vote and hold public office, thirty-nine women were elected to both houses of Parliament; but with successive elections their number has shrunk to twenty-two. Yet even if Japanese women have developed no real, abiding interest in politics, it is encouraging that they should have gained a voice in public life at all.
And throughout Japan, women are now beginning to inquire seriously into their own problems. In recent years an Osaka paper, Sankei Jiji, has managed to equal the circulation of the “Big Three” papers in Tokyo—Asahi, Mainichi and Yominuri—by running a woman’s page (edited, of course, by a man). Women’s organizations and clubs are active even in the smaller villages; in some of these, peasant women gather together at night, after working in the fields, to play accordions, flutes, and drums in a primitive orchestra—in order, so I was told, to create deeper mutual understanding. When I asked at one of these meetings what the women present considered their most urgent problem, they answered: improvement of the relations between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.
Like her counterpart in pre-revolutionary China, the Japanese mother-in-law is encouraged by tradition to rule her son’s wife with almost sadistic overbearingness. As a result, the eldest sons, who inherit the farms, now find it hard to get brides: if only in order to escape mothers-in-law, girls prefer younger sons together with city life, as insecure economically as it may be.
The women of Japan—and especially the peasant women—regard prostitution as their second most important problem, and the ban on prostitution which, after many delays, was passed by Parliament last May is their most signal political triumph to date. It is a moderate and reasonable law, directed less against prostitutes themselves than against their procurers and managers, who long before the present period of postwar immorality had made prostitution an efficiently organized industry in Japan. The brothels of the red-light district of Yoshiwara were the first new buildings to rise from Tokyo’s ashes after the surrender in 1945, and until recently the vice lobby was very powerful in Parliament.
Japanese tolerance of commercialized sex is due less to moral laxity than to overpopulation, unemployment, and poverty. Tokyo’s Ueno station used to be the terminus of an unending stream of recruits for the whorehouses who came from the miserable peasant farms of the North; there, when the family was starving, when something essential had to be bought, the daughter was the first to go. The peasant, in return for the small loan he got from a procurer, consigned his daughter to bondage until the loan was paid off—which a cunning system of mounting charges and interest postponed indefinitely.
The American military government had tried to abolish prostitution, but its reforms remained mostly on paper, and the first attempts in that direction by the newly elected women members of Parliament, led by a Socialist, Kato Shizui, nearly met with the same fate. The vice lobby had strong connections in the ruling Liberal-Democratic party, and the prostitutes themselves joined that party en masse in order to forestall the proposed ban. The bill would probably have been tabled once again if the pressure of public opinion on the eve of new elections to the Upper House had not forced a debate on it. Public opinion in this case was motivated less by prudery than by the profounder feeling that prostitution entailed an exploitation of the individual that was incompatible with human dignity. It is encouraging that a people until now renowned for its tractable, ant-like qualities should abolish a centuries-old institution for the sake of human dignity, and do so, moreover, by bringing an informed public opinion to bear.
Unfortunately, under the terms of the new law, vice lords have been given one to two years in which to reform before the government cracks down on them—time enough for them to camouflage their establishments by turning their houses into “hotels” and their girls into “maids.” Besides, the geishas, those nobler priestesses of love, do not fall under the ban—all business in Japan would come to a standstill if they were not permitted to hover over the negotiations of sober businessmen—and it is easy enough to train teahouse girls to play the samisen and to dance, and thus transform them into geishas.
Obviously it is going to be difficult to abolish prostitution until the poverty that spawns it has been alleviated and its victims offered better work—and that day is still far off. Meanwhile the postwar mood enables vice to flourish in more hidden and possibly more dangerous forms.
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In the midst of this moral crisis, Japan’s overpopulation, the cause of many of her economic ills, shows signs—even dangerous ones—of yielding to treatment. In 1947 the birth rate was still over thirty-four per thousand, but by 1955 it had dropped to nineteen per thousand—and in large cities like Osaka to fifteen. This is far below the present American or West European birth rate. In the years immediately after World War II it appeared likely that Japan’s population would reach 125 million by the year 2000 because of the sudden postwar upswing in the birth rate and the drop in the death rate due to better nutrition and medical care. But recent forecasts see the population becoming stable in thirty to forty years at around 110 million.
This astonishing drop in birth rate is largely the result of a 1948 government measure which not only publicized methods of birth control and made the means available to everybody, but also legalized abortions “if the birth, for physical or economic reasons, would endanger the mother’s life.” These qualifications soon became lost sight of in the epidemic of legalized abortions that followed. In 1955, according to official figures, there were 1.17 million abortions registered as against 1.5 million births. But at the Ministry of Health I was told that a truer figure would be 2.5 to 3 million abortions—or two to every birth. Obviously, this goes far beyond what the government had in mind. Furthermore, according to the Ministry of Health, one abortion out of every five hundred results in death and 40 per cent in temporary physical impairment—all this quite apart from the heavy psychological burden the operation places on some women. If we bear in mind that, according to the Ministry of Health’s estimate of 3 million abortions in 1955, every tenth woman undergoes one abortion per year, we can understand the government’s alarm.
The two population experts in the Ministry of Health, Dr. Koya and his associate Dr. Muramatsu, who are both Westernized Christians (the former also happens to be Japan’s leading authority on Goethe), regard the problem as primarily a moral one, and they link it to the licentiousness of the “Generation of the Sun.” “Japanese women,” Dr. Muramatsu told me, “obviously do not know how to make responsible use of the freedom put in their hands. We are even more worried,” he went on, “about the growing number of sterilizations than about the abortions. Of 42,000 cases of sterilization in 1955, no less than 25 per cent were below thirty years of age, which is the end of the normal maximal child-bearing period. The reason is principally the young people’s love of luxury and entertainment. They prefer to surround themselves with television sets . . . rather than with children.”
Drs. Muramatsu and Koya are trying to remedy the situation for the time being by a vigorous campaign to replace abortion with contraception. Under their direction, and with the active cooperation of health centers scattered throughout the country, the distribution of contraceptives has spread from the cities into the villages, and especially into the poor Northeast—the main source of supply for the brothels of Yoshiwara. Throughout Japan one can see midwives instructing groups of six or seven women in the use of contraceptives: many of the listeners have babies strapped to their backs. But the wide distribution of contraceptives has so far failed to diminish the number of abortions—perhaps because people are more abandoned and no longer as careful as formerly. Besides, abortion has been traditionally more popular than contraception in Japan as a method of birth control: in the Tokugawa and Meiji eras it was still quite common—as it was in the Greco-Roman world—to kill unwanted infants, so that to many Japanese, abortion seems morally less reprehensible than the use of contraceptives, which are decried as unnatural and harmful.
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In past months the debate over the new freedom in Japan and its abuses has extended from sexual morality, where Shintaro Ishihara put it, into politics. There, the main disputants are writers and professors. Many of these have been to Red China recently, and are enthusiastic about the collective discipline they found there. Tatsozo Ishikawa for one, a liberal writer and president of the Japanese Pen Club, Who in his youth rebelled against Japan’s militarism, came back from Peking a perfect apologist for Communism. In a series of articles in Asahi he censured Japan for having too much “freedom from” and too little “freedom for”—for embracing an “escapist” instead of a “constructive” freedom. But Red China does have an aim, and if she, in her passion for constructive achievement, permits only the barest minimum of liberty, the freedom-surfeited Japanese intellectuals are not alarmed. The fact that there has not been a single burglary in the city of Peking this year strikes the citizen of gangster-ridden Tokyo as something of a miracle; and so, too, does the fact that Chinese youth has had its energies harnessed not to a “nine-month” but to a five-year plan.
The Japanese are beginning to envy the Red Chinese both their faith and their strait-jacket. This new yearning for discipline, in the main still subconscious and unacknowledged, finds indirect and distorted expression in the violence of the “Generation of the Sun,” who, instead of enjoying their erotic adventures, seem to plunge into them with clenched teeth, as if sex were a sort of military obstacle course. The “Generation of the Sun” seduce and rape because they want to fulfill the modern law of freedom to the letter; and in their freedom they are as mechanically brutal as the unleashed soldiery of the Mikado were—brutal by order. They would spring to attention the moment Japan found a new authoritarian formula. If, as seems likely, Communism will not be able to conquer Japan by political or economic means, it may still find a way through Red China’s growing prestige. For precisely those aspects of the Red regime which are most repellent to Westerners are what now begin to make an appeal to Japan’s new generation in search of chains.
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