14 Aug 2012 23:44:54
Sex is not sinful in Japanese culture, Buruma writes, but female desire is perceived as a destructive force. Japan's relentlessly sexist culture is epitomised by the artificial beauty of the doll-woman, the geisha. However, Buruma also discovers an intense mother love among Japanese men, who visit rukojos in red-light districts to be babied. And oddly for such a patriarchal society, the father is popularly mocked as dame oyaji (stupid dad) – the ideal father, it seems, is dead. First published in the early 1980s, this excellent cultural study resembles Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler, using cinema to probe a nation's psyche; but Buruma also has TV series, manga comics and grainy porn films to help him with his diagnosis. Porn has since migrated to the internet (as Buruma wistfully observes in a new preface), but that doesn't diminish his attempt to understand why the meek Japanese salaryman has such violent sexual fantasies. The result is not a definitive portrait of a people, but a fascinating snapshot.
