Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society (review)

Abstract

Sonia Ryang, Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 192 pp. Sonia Ryang's Love in Modern Japan is a provocative and timely addition not only to literature on Japanese culture and society but also to discussion of problematic relationship between modern nationstate and its population. Love-Ryang eschews a rigid definition or classification of love-is not a mere matter of individual preference or uncontrollable passion but a set of complex social functions contingent upon cultural logics of different historical timing in which modern nation-state plays a pivotal role (2-3). Examining discursive representations and practices of love, author inquires into a process whereby the national state makes its population into 'loving' national subjects (1). Ryang demonstrates connection between birth and maturity of modern Japanese nation-state-a nation for which ideology and legitimacy rest on restoration of ancient sovereign order, i.e. imperial reign-and rapid transformation of ways Japanese people express and practice/ idealize love. She offers an intriguing genealogy, tracing origins of alienation of love from sex and self (soul) in contemporary Japan, and critically examining a wide range of ethnological and popular cultural material. Her study sheds light on complimentary and contradictory relationship between modern, reflexive self-which monitors, disciplines and controls one's own behavior-and nation-state as a biopower for which love is most efficient and omnipresent state apparatus for reproduction of its ideology and population. Building on Michel Foucault's concepts of governmentality and biopower as well as Giorgio Agamben's distinction between zoe (a bare life) and bios (a socially and politically meaningful life), she asserts state intervenes through overt and covert maneuvering in ways people love (live and die)-by implementing regulations of marriage, kinship, and reproductive health and by instilling and disseminating values through (or lack of education) and mass culture. This regulation relies on state technologies of love: family registry (koseki) in which state controls kinship and marriage practices (32, 107), prostitution (51-52), school system which disciplines national subjects' mind and body (44, 67, 90, 109), national eugenics laws (1940, 1949-1998) (56-57, 60) and their ideological twin education during immediate post-war period. The omission of history and sex correlated with a legacy of purity during reconstruction phase of post-war Japanese collective identity (71, 93, 109). Ryang suggests truly efficient and chilling effect of love as a state apparatus was more powerful during post-war period than during war-time state of emergency, even though under guise of democracy its intervention was subtle and benign (124-125, 129). Ryang establishes a logical connection between a range of discourses about love: eighth century Manyo poems; festivals of sacred nonconjugal sexuality (kagai and yobai, latter survived sporadically in rural areas up to early post-war period) (Ch. 1); an accused individual crime of passion and extreme sexual violence during state of national emergency-justified and excused because violence was committed by Imperial institutions of militarism (the Rape of Nanjing of 1937 and comfort stations during first half of 1940s) (Ch. 2); a story of pure love from early 1960s based on best-selling correspondence of college students that ended tragically with young woman's death (Ch. 3); and more contemporary cases of high school student prostitutes (enjoko sai, or aid-date); a sexual fantasy novel of fatal adulterers; and South Korean soap opera fad of early 2000s (Ch. 4). Her analytic interpretation ranges from ancient to post-modern, presenting a diachronic view of how modern Japanese nation-state has changed forms of love. …