M & N are for Enigma and Interview with a Translator, Part II

CULTURE

Question: Western romances are filled with (unlikely) stories of commoners marrying into European royal families. In comparison I have encountered, to date, zero manga and light novels with this plot. Is the royal family in Japan too small to consider entering? Or are Japanese commoners wise enough to know that wanting to live like a royal is like wanting to submit to a form of slow torture? (I personally feel like this about European royalty too.) Or is the circumstance simply unimaginable?

Having been whittled down to the basics after the war, the Japanese Imperial Family is too small to make such stories plausible. In fact, that smallness has caused the biggest controversy involving the Imperial Family, too few male heirs. If you go back to the pre-war era, though, there's the story of Byakuren Yanagihara, the illegitimate first cousin of the emperor.

During the "Taisho Democracy," both the Imperial Family and the press were a lot less disciplined.

The modern heroine in a princess story is going to hail from a politically or economically powerful family, such as Kaguya in Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War, for example. In Fox & Wolf, Yuki is a direct descendant of the Matsudaira clan. That alone wouldn't make her noteworthy unless she did something interesting. Of course, Yuki does do something interesting, so then the press would say, "Hey! Look at who she's related to!"

Nobunari Oda is a direct descendant of the great 16th century warlord. That fact was only worth mentioning after he became famous as a skater.

Question: Hills makes the point that in many ways Japanese gender roles are still fairly conservative. Masako went from being a Harvard graduate who spoke several languages and played sports to being a "demure" Japanese wife. Some feminists would declare this an outrage. Do Japanese feminists view it the same way? Does Western feminism even translate into Japanese life? Manga heroines are plenty spunky enough. They also don't seem to view being a CEO as anything to get excited about. Since I don't either, what version of pro-women is at work here? 

Japan is a thriving implementation of Chesterton's famous metaphor. Most Japanese most of the time are content to leave that fence right where it is. You could take all of Asia as an ongoing experiment to prove that progress doesn't require progressives.

If you look in Japan for analogues to social institutions and political philosophies prominent in the cultural west, you will find them. And they will echo all the things you expect to hear. But that doesn't mean they hold the same importance or have anywhere near the same influence. Or are even interpreted the same by most of the population. The label on the box doesn't dictate what's in the box.

Take vegetarianism. Or call it the Lost in Translation syndrome. Me thinks Hills wants to have his orientalist cake and eat it too.

Question: Despite Hills' desire to create a soap opera out of his subject's life, Masako married a truly good guy, an intelligent gentleman who tries to treat people well. Naruhito seems rather like his father but miles away from his grandfather. In fact, Naruhito is repeatedly described by nearly everybody interviewed by Hills as "nice." While Hills doesn't seem to know what to do with that adjective, I read it as a sincere compliment. I recently finished the latest volume of a manga series that is best described as "Lord of the Flies in a Japanese high school." Even in that series, the school trip is presented as an opportunity for people to form friendships, get along, and show kindness to each other. (Not exactly Carrie.) What's the Japanese cultural impact or importance of "niceness"? 

Perhaps the most important social value in Japan is "getting along." When you've got 120 million people living in a country the size of California, and only 10 percent of the land actually habitable, getting along counts for a lot. What makes yakuza so scary to the average Japanese is they violate your personal space and purposely make a point of not getting along, except with each other. Your gang defines the nature of personal relationships and the social rulebook.

The running joke in The Way of the Househusband is that, having quit the yakuza business, stay-at-home dad Tatsu hews to the middle-class social rules just like the rest of the housewives in his neighborhood, only with the zeal of the yakuza boss. The people who only knew the old Tatsu interpret everything he does as if he were still a yakuza, while the people who know him now accept him as one of them.

Question: Hills argues, based on credible evidence (and Wikipedia agrees), that Masako suffered a nervous breakdown after the birth of her child, Aiko, and likely suffers from clinical depression. Although he attempts to create a single cause-and-effect explanation (the Japanese royal bureaucrats kunaicho forced depression on her by stamping out her personality and pressuring her to have a boy), clinical depression is not only multifaceted, in many cases, it has a connection to shifts in hormones. Hills does criticize the uncomfortable--and silent--reaction in Japan to mental illness. Hills doesn't help matters by behaving as though clinical depression is the most horrific event that could ever occur to Masako and solely the result of her not being allowed to be the free-spirited, working woman he wants her to be.

Does mental illness get discussed in Japanese manga/literature/film? Does it get turned into a raison d'etre as it does in Hills’ book and in much Western literature (shades of The Three Faces of Eve)? Is it looked at more holistically in Japan? Or is it largely ignored?

Hills is right that mental illness remains largely a taboo in "proper" Japanese society. Even when maladies like hikikomori become impossible to ignore, the admission that these people are wrong in the head becomes yet another wall between "normal" people and "abnormal" people, "normal" people being the ones who don't have these problems.

In Hanako to Anne, NHK's fictionalized biography of Anne of Green Gables’ translator Hanako Muraoka, the arranged marriage between coal tycoon Denemon Itou and Byakuren Yanagihara ("Renko" in the series) is depicted in a surprisingly even-handed manner.

While Renko's half-brother is a caricature of a villain who lacks only a mustache to twirl as he runs around being dastardly, Renko is depicted as being unwilling or unable to find common ground with the rags-to-riches Itou, a coarse man who cared not one whit for "high culture." In this war of the social classes, they're both sympathetic characters.

But Renko/ Byakuren had no choice in the matter and little idea of what she was getting forced into. Hills' version of Masako makes me scratch my head. How could somebody that smart be that clueless about the infamously imperious nature of the Imperial Household Agency going all the way back to the Meiji era?

Japan's imperial system was so thoroughly dismantled after the war that the Imperial Household Agency was left clinging tenaciously to whatever ground it had left. They fit to a T, William F. Buckley's definition of a conservative as "someone who stands athwart history yelling Stop." Still, there was surely room to negotiate. This isn't the Taisho era.

So I return to my Ozzie and Harriet explanation. Or perhaps the way Carlos Ghosn figured out too late that he wasn't the big boss of a big corporation he brought back from the brink, like Steve Jobs and Apple. Rather, he was a temporarily useful appendage in a Japanese institution and that Japanese institution would absolutely have the last word.

The Tom Selleck character in Mr. Baseball is a good example of somebody figuring that out before it was too late.