cajones drawers tiroirs jade

[D]ifferences are mainly imposed from outside; they are distinctions of rank, sta- tus and property. Men as individuals are always conscious of those distinctions; they weigh heavily on them and keep them firmly apart from one another. A man stands by himself on a secure and well defined spot, his every gesture asserting his right to keep others at a distance. He stands there, like a windmill on an enormous plain moving expressively; and there is nothing between him and the next mill. All life, so far as he knows it, is laid out in distance—the house in which he shuts himself and its property, the positions he holds, the rank he de- sires—all these serve to create distances, to confirm and extend them.

—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

Again, I am in a train at its full speed. Every little gap between the parts in the car and between the junctures in the rail makes vibrant noises, which are then absorbed in the vast ex- panse between stations. The car is sparse with only a couple of elderly females with hats and a young businessperson smilingly checking his cellphone. The early March’s cold yet relaxed sun- shine adds a nimbus of pale euphoria. With its abundant space and flat monotony, the landscape outside the window makes one’s eyelids heavy. Mass-produced houses, a brand new city hall, and supermarkets around the station; and then, as soon as we pass the center of the town, we see the parallel highway again, along which are aligned neat factories in green lawns or under tall, rhododendron shadows. It is the existence of these factories that seem to differentiate one’s im- pression of the area from that of purely residential Musashino, Tokyo, for instance. The station of “South Toda,” Yokohama, is in the middle of this hauntingly new, industrial land, ten minutes train-ride to the south from bustling Yokohama Station and ten minutes to the north from “Mi- nobe,” the hub that connects this formerly state-owned Japan Railway line with several others. On weekday afternoons like today (2007), the train arrives at South Toda only once every thirty minutes, startlingly differently from more populated and hectic, coastal Yokohama.

Making a good contrast to the dark empty platform, the sun is abundant in the South Toda concourse, warming people through the glass ceiling and making the dust visibly shiny, like quietly falling snow. Under the silver dust, outside the automatic wickets that talk (“beep, beep, beep, there is not enough money on your ticket. Please proceed to the manned wicket”), there is a buzzing crowd that is hastily passing one another. None of them comes through the wicket to take the train. They are apparently just passing from right to left, left to right, leaving a colorful whirl with their casual, daytime clothing. As it will turn out, there is a shopping complex, “Rainbow Garden” to the left (east), adjacent to the station. To the right (west), there is a bus terminal. The west of the railroad is all over dotted with multiple “project” buildings, inhabited by factory workers and others. Featuring the only department store in the area, the Rainbow Gar- den seems to attract customers from much further away than the project district. This part of Yokohama is far more accessible by motor vehicles than the walkable coast.

Being the only person who is standing by the wickets, “Mutsumi Machida” is easily distinguishable. About 5’1’’, in her 50s, she wears a tad overgrown hair and a wrinkled gingham shirt of yellow, red, and pink. One end of the worn collar sticks out of the soft, quality-looking, black leather jacket, while the other is pushed somewhere inside. With no makeup and an obso- lete vinyl bag, Machida, nonetheless, is adorned with an odd class-consciousness that sparkles in a big ruby ring in her left hand.

An “ordinary matron” (futsū no obasan), this retired banker’s wife likes to call herself, as I have noticed in our preliminary phone interviews. There is a derogatory connotation in the word, obasan (matron), in the capitalist culture in which a woman’s age, her role of reproduction, and the social definition of sexual attraction are intimately connected together.1 Machida is not

1 _{Obasan is otherwise called babah, which is even more disparaging than obasan. In one of the most}

the first woman who has let me glimpse at a certain, inverted violence inside her, with which she denigrates herself with the self-appellation of obasan. My observation is that “housewives” (shu-

fu) like Machida tend to show this type of violence, which indiscriminately reduces each of these

women’s unique life-histories, sexualities, hopes and despairs into the assigned role and image of an “ordinary” middle-aged woman. The self-reducing violence then seems to sink into the pleas- ure of the bourgeois life—conformist moderation, far-from-moderate consumption to create con- forming self-images, and the sense of security gained in exchange for conforming self-images. Yet, as a ruby glittering on the bourgeois finger carries wild memories of geological time, the seemingly tamed life in the suburb still holds violence, the violence of reducing and “equalizing.” At least the suburb that I studied was replete with hints and traces of such violence.

The violence at issue is that of fascism—as I have argued in the previous chapters, the minimal definition of fascism is reduction of singularities into a single form. In the exceed- ingly labor-divided society of suburban Japan, everyday fascism seems to be incessantly arising from the relation between genders, capitalist production and consumption, and the all-leveling pressure to be ordinary. In this chapter, I will ethnographically describe how male and female residents in a suburb like “Toda Town” express everyday frustration, anxieties, and desires to be mechanical copies of each other.

harmful thing that civilizations had ever created was babah”; and also that “I also heard that it was worthless and sinful that those women who lost their reproductive abilities [due to their age] were still living” (Ishihara supposedly “heard” these opinions from an astronomical physicist and emeritus professor at Tokyo University, Takafumi Matsui ⎯Matsui denies this allegation). Deficiency of the country’s criminal law is such that gender-related hate-crimes are not legally punishable. Apparently Japan’s civil law does not recognize Ishihara’s offence as an offence

either⎯both the District and Appellate Courts of Tokyo dismissed 131 female plaintiffs’ suit against Ishihara in 1995. Insofar as this current chapter is concerned, it is important to note that Ishihara’s remarks were published as “Dokusen Gekihaku: Ishihara Shintarō To-Chiji Hoeru!” (Exclusive Interview with Ishihara Shintarō: the [Tokyo] Metropolitan Governor Roars!) in Shūkan Josei, 11/6/2001. Shūkan Josei literally means Weekly Women. “Why did the weekly targeting mostly middle-aged and elderly women publish Ishihara’s sexist remarks in uncritical ways?” is one of the questions that this chapter addresses.

While proceeding along this theme, the second and third sections of this chapter will introduce the institutions and ideologies of corporatism, as they seek to organize the Toda every- day. Briefly, corporatism aspires to be the device that “organically” separates, categorizes, and hierarchizes people, who might otherwise be inclined to be a mutually equalized mass. In post- war Japan, corporatism has developed as the recycled prewar ideology and practices of the “body of the nation-state” (kokutai). In the second section of this chapter, I will examine how the pre- war kokutai was imagined to be gendered and hierarchized according to the concepts of the pub- lic/private dichotomy and of the patriarchal nation. The third section will explore the postwar advancement of these concepts into the new kokutai, the body of the hierarchical nation. Among various corporatist institutions, I will focus on the so-called “neighborhood association” (chōnai

kai or chōkai). I will examine the process through which this transwar apparatus of the neighbor-

hood association in its postwar phase sublimates the mass desires for fascist equivalence into the discourses of the “religious” hierarchy. The sacred association in these discourses is the nexus between its representation of the neighborhood women and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)’s representation of the neighborhood. As in the prewar, the gender relation is the key to understand the ideological configuration of the postwar kokutai, perhaps to the degree that the excess of massification is supposedly embodied by women⎯their historically assigned roles of

the consumer and reproducer. I will locate the women’s position in the prewar and postwar koku-

tai in an attempt to understand the way in which the bourgeois desires for hierarchy and order

intervene in everyday fascism.

Mutsumi Machida, the main informant of this chapter, hints at the violent desires for everyday fascism not just in her self-appellation of obasan. She has also sued her own town in an effort to ensure the principle of church-state separation regarding the half-state institution, the

neighborhood association. Put in the context of the overall commodification of the suburban eve- ryday, her suit has the aspect of critically fortifying the corporatist order of the town by opposing it or of unintentionally substantiating such a supposedly sacred order by even acknowledging its existence. Conformism thus seems to be the last instance of the bourgeois mentality. And it is this conformism that bears the violent, fascist moment in the everyday. This chapter intends to differentiate the moments of violent conformism and fascism-as-conformism, for a better under- standing of the everyday genesis of fascism.

The Classed Space, Gendered Time: The Everyday Genesis of Suburban Fascism

The women with hats and male businessperson that I saw in the train make a snapshot of the suburban time that is gendered. Perhaps on the way home from Kamakura, a favorite day- trip destination among mature women, these seeming girlfriends might be representatives of women having a lot of free time in daytime. Meanwhile, the businessman in a suit and tie could be a sales representative for the daytime female customers at home or could have visited some local offices near railroad stations around here. In either case, these women’s and men’s attires represent the gendered division of labor between bourgeois production and reproduction. This division directly translates into the dual configuration of the contemporary Japanese space, espe- cially in its bourgeois segment, viz. the office areas where mainly male workers operate and the residential areas where mainly females stay to consume and reproduce.

The suburban town of Toda in daytime is accordingly the female sphere. By tracing the tour of the town that Machida gave me on my first day there, I will be able to show the way in which the women’s space-time is so structured by the corporate needs to reach women as the consumers and the women’s attraction to the commodities that corporations promote. The corpo-

rations also cast the classed net over daytime Toda. For one thing, not all the class-groups can afford to keep solely consumerist females.2 For another, the corporations interpellate the women as bourgeois consumers. Even if one economically falls short of the class’s standard, she is ex- pected to consume as a bourgeois member; or rather, she comes to look to be bourgeois through her bourgeois-like consumption.3

Let us go back to the South Toda wickets to see the classed and gendered chronotope of Toda. A couple of steps to the left (east) and you will already be in the Rainbow Garden, a commercial-residential complex. Comprised of several sky-scraping residential buildings, a de- partment store, and a supermarket, the complex is etched with the leftover “bubble” sensibility of the developer. Constructed in the 1980s, the luxurious apartments in the “Rainbow Towers” were called “million-dollar mansions” (oku shon). Their catch phrase was that “from every window you can see Mt. Fuji.” According to Mutsumi Machida, “only elites, such as Asahi Newspaper journalists,” live there. These apartment buildings stand in the middle of the corridors that con- nect the station with the department store. The idea is probably that both the commuters and con- sumers in the buildings need only a couple of seconds to reach either the station or the store. The tacit assumption behind the idea would be that the westward route to the station and the eastward route to the store are almost exclusively used by males and females respectively.

The department store physically maps out the gendered frequency with which the res- idents seem to be expected to use the store. Men’s clothing and others are compactly put together

2 _{According to an ethnographic survey done by Glenda S. Roberts in 1983, local blue-color women have to}

learn how to “value their jobs highly, marshaling their considerable energies toward their careers as regular employees while simultaneously being wives and mothers.” See her “Careers and Commitment: Azumi’s Blue- Collar Women,” ed. and with an intro. by Anne E. Imamura, Re-Imagining Japanese Women (Berkeley and Los Angels: University of California Press, 1996), pp.221-243; p.241.

3 _{About the relation between class, appearance, and “race,” see James T. Siegel, “Fetishizing Appearance, Or}

Is ‘I’ a Criminal?” in his Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp.54-93; Jean and John L. Comaroff, “Fashioning the Colonial Subject: The Empire’s Old Clothes,” Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. II: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp.218-73.

on the fifth floor, where one has to change the escalator a couple of times in order to reach. Other floors are apparently occupied by women’s casual wear, formal wear, office clothing, in addition to the labyrinthine arrangements of accessory- and cosmetic showcases. These showcases on the

first floor are still an island in the middle of even more women’s paraphernalia⎯shoes, hand-

bags, hats, and perfume. On top of that, girls have a relatively big section of their own on the fourth floor.

At the end of the outdoor upper-level corridor that leads from the station, the entrance to the store is a theatrical space that gapes open for females in Toda and the vicinities. The space is a grandiose stairwell, lush with gigantic pots of monumental palm trees and weeping tropical plants. Under the high glass ceiling, an escalator theatrically climbs up through the spaciously arranged alabaster podia, on which the plants elegantly rest. The day after a spring storm, wild winds constantly blow into the open stairwell this afternoon. The air is still heavy with humidity, yet pungent with mysterious fragrance of rare jungle flowers. Dull, thick leaves of taro wave and chatter. They even play taped sounds of exotic birds and animals. The approximately one minute of escalator-riding is probably long enough to raise the customer’s class-consciousness. The bourgeois culture of laid-back comfort and playful squander is well-expressed in this mini- theater. Whether one is actually bourgeois or not, she is apparently expected to join the bour- geois expression of consumerism by spending money upstairs.

The escalator brings Machida and me to the third floor, where neatly packaged hand- kerchiefs, silk scarves, or brand-name umbrellas allure even us, who enter the store only as part of the “short-cut” to Toda Town. As we march through the commodities, I have not even noticed that we have already been in the adjacent supermarket. As big as any suburban supermarket in the United States, the “Rainbow Mart” is congested. On the second floor, to which we have de-

scended with the electrically moving slope, the buzz and movements are ceaselessly made, per- haps due to the vast array of choices of food given—yaki tori the skewered and roasted chicken pieces that are neatly piled up on trays, individually packed sandwiches, spring and summer rolls, salad, cakes, wine and sake—you name it. The fishmongers are shouting “hai ’rasshaaaaii” (c’mon, take a look customers, c’mon) in their thick husky voices. Competing with them is the taped music that repeats “fish, fish, fish, fish you eat, smart, smart, smart, smart you become” (sakana, sakana, sakana, sakana wo taberu to, atama, atama, atama, atama ga yoku-naru). As we pass the isles, a man at the counter of deep fried meat and vegetables (age mono) would say, “Hey Mrs., what about croquettes for dinner tonight?” The supermarket’s difference from the department store might be that the croquette-seller is not approaching Machida and me as mem- bers of any particular class-group but as general females of the age to be “Mrs.” (oku-san). If the department store demands its female customers be bourgeois by keeping up with the bourgeois appearance, then the supermarket’s direction seems to be that women across the class-boundary fulfill their families’ gastronomical and other domestic needs. Many working females in Japan seem to be suffering from the social and familial expectation that they perform both the produc- tive and reproductive roles.

Out of the supermarket, and we are out of the whole complex of the Rainbow Garden. We cross a bridge over busy “Route 40.” Suddenly a serene residential area starts. This is Toda Town. The whole area looks inviting with the dark green shades that old camellia trees make. Immediately I recognize the aroma of plum flowers. The “ridge road,” as Machida simply calls it, runs through spacious houses, sporadic farms of cabbages and leeks, and miniature orchards of apples and plums. Parallel to Route 40 and also to the railroad, the straight road will eventually bring us to the area where Machida lives. Through the one-lane road, we would occasionally

pass a car or scooter. The main part of the town occupies the good-sized, southeast lowland of the road, while the houses and farms on the road also belong to the town. As we walk to the south, thus diagonally away from the station and the Rainbow Garden, we command a good view of the lowland on our left hand side. In the middle of the relatively congested lowland with mass- produced houses and condos, there is a little hill, on which stand “Toda Primary and Middle Schools.” Machida’s two daughters went there.

In contrast to these purely functional condos and townhouses, the houses along the ridge road please one’s eyes. Many of them are handsomely modernist with abundant glass and rectangular motifs. They could be called sumptuous by any standard, registering unique traces of the architects’ custom-made efforts. Multiple numbers of Mercedes Benz, Audi, or Jaguar are parked in their neatly pebbled parkways; new soil is placed among aesthetically arranged rocks and stone statues, waiting for the gardening season to come. According to Machida, the residents around here were formerly “farmers” (hyakushō), who climbed up the class ladder by selling or renting out their lands to the railroad company and the Rainbow Garden-developer among others.