Maybe not our usual fare, but well worth reading
Emmanuel Todd is a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris
Kayo Miyake is an author and literary critic
Cross-posted from Emmanuel Todd’s Substack
(Published in ‘Shukan Bunshun’)
Geopolitics is not the main focus of my life, even though civic urgency has forced me to devote a lot of time to it lately. So I am happy to take a break from it for a moment to republish on my blog this interview conducted last autumn in Tokyo with Kaho Miyake on interpersonal relationships in Japan and France. Kaho Miyake is a brilliant literary critic and essayist, originally specialising in the Man’yōshū (classical poetry anthology). She analyses modern and contemporary Japanese literature, manga and cinema from the perspective of the family, particularly relationships between parents and children or between men and women.
Here we discuss Japanese culture and society through the prism of the family.
Todd: First of all, I would like to point out that in The Defeat of the West, I distinguish between two Wests. There is the West in the strict sense, the individualistic core consisting of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, based on the nuclear family (where parent-child relationships are liberal). And then there is the West in the broader sense, including countries such as Japan and Germany, which are stem family societies (inheritance by the eldest son, authoritarian parent-child relationships, inequality between brothers); these authoritarian countries were integrated into the American system after the war.
Miyake: I have been reading your books with great interest for a long time, but one question keeps nagging at me. You often compare Japan and Germany as patrilineal countries, but I would like to ask you about the link between the patrilineal family and female writers.
Japan has an exceptionally high number of female writers on a global scale, and this was particularly the case in the Nara and Heian periods. However, with the emergence of the stem family in the Middle Ages and its entrenchment from the pre-modern to the modern era, the presence of female writers faded. That said, they are once again very active today and are gaining popularity abroad.
Compared to this, German literature has far fewer female writers. Is there a link between the structure of the family unit, the literacy rate among women, and this phenomenon?
Todd: Excellent point! The comparison between Japan and Germany is one of the big questions of my research life. Although these countries share similarities due to the extended family, there are many differences. For example, when I make a joke at a conference, the Japanese laugh, even if my joke is bad, out of politeness, and the Germans don’t laugh, even if it’s good (laughs). Germans don’t have the same sense of humour as the Japanese. This is a more significant difference than one might think, and is very indirectly related to the status of women and the presence of female writers.
The extended family, unlike the Anglo-American or French nuclear family, is a family form that shapes the individual. However, this degree of constraint is weaker in Japan than in Germany. As revealed by Akira Hayami, the father of Japanese historical demography, the stem family reached its final form in Japan during the Meiji era, so its history there is perhaps a little more recent than in Germany. But only slightly. Perhaps we should distinguish between a hard extended family (Germany) and a soft extended family (Japan).
During my more than twenty visits to Japan, I have often witnessed a dimension of freedom, that of a ‘natural man’, among the Japanese, who are otherwise so polite and disciplined. Superiors and subordinates, whose hierarchical relationship is supposed to be strict, discuss openly over a drink. A Japanese journalist once referred to ‘Japanese democracy after 5 p.m.’ (laughter). This is a scene I have not observed in Germany, a country with a hard-line family structure.
Miyake: Perhaps this is an application of what you call the principle of conservatism in peripheral areas. The nuclear family, which we believe to be new, is in fact the most primitive form (close to the state of nature). Just as ancient words survive in areas far from the centre, the family form close to the nuclear family of archaic Homo sapiens (natural man) is found on the peripheries of the Eurasian continent. Among the types of family roots, Japan is more peripheral and would therefore be closer to ‘natural man’ than Germany.
Todd: Exactly! If we consider geographical location and cultural differences in the context of East Asia, even within the same Confucian sphere (Confucianism embodying the values of the stem family), we can say that the order of proximity to the “natural man”, from the periphery, is: 1) Japan, 2) the Korean peninsula, and 3) China.
Returning to the German-Japanese comparison, I do not sense this natural man in Germans, especially in male-female relationships. The natural man aspect of the Japanese is certainly linked to the existence of female writers at the origin of Japanese civilisation. I enjoyed reading Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book (Makura no Sōshi); classical literature written by women has undoubtedly left an indelible mark on Japanese history.
On the other hand, Lutheran Protestantism, which spread throughout Germany, has a strict and violent aspect (in fact, the map of Lutheranism’s distribution almost corresponds to that of votes for the Nazi party), and Lutheranism is extremely hostile to women. The ‘Virgin Mary’, a symbol of maternal gentleness in Catholicism, has been replaced by Eve and original sin among Lutherans, transforming women into symbols of evil.
If we look at university enrolment rates today, women outnumber men in the United States and France, but this is not the case in Germany.
Miyake: In Japan, too, if we include junior colleges (short-cycle universities), the rate is higher for women. On that note, do you often read Japanese literature?
Todd: I’m not very familiar with contemporary authors, but I’ve read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata with great enthusiasm. In any case, I have always read Japanese literature for pleasure, whereas I have never read German novels for entertainment (laughs). What I appreciate in novels (and not necessarily romance novels) is the subtleties of relationships between men and women, and I don’t find that in German literature.
The way Kawabata or Tanizaki view women is normal to me. That is to say, they find them beautiful and attractive. Japanese and French literature are perhaps the two ‘great ones’ when it comes to the psychological complexity of eroticism. This Franco-Japanese commonality probably does not exist in Germany. I hope this interview will not be translated into German (laughs).
That said, I also feel there are major differences between Japan and France in terms of male-female relationships.
Miyake: What kind of differences?
Todd: The classic theme in Japanese literature is poor communication within couples. The first work by Tanizaki that I read was The Key (subtitled La Confession impudique in French). It’s the story of a couple in which each one secretly reads the other’s diary, yet writes to be read, and the book ultimately depicts something worse than non-communication. In contrast, traditional male-female relationships in France were closer to a kind of friendship or camaraderie. Incidentally, I obviously couldn’t bring myself to read Yukio Mishima.
Miyake: Critic Norihiro Katō analysed post-war Japan through the concepts of Honne (real feelings) and Tatemae (facade/displayed principle). Japanese culture favours the rules of Tatemae within the group, while allowing individuals to share their Honne during informal gatherings, such as over a drink. According to your terminology, Mr Todd, Tatemae would be on the side of the ‘family stock’ and Honne on the side of the ‘natural man’. But this duality is not limited to the post-war period.
For example, in The Dancer (Maihime) by Mori Ōgai, who studied in Germany during the Meiji era, the protagonist, a young man with a promising career, falls in love with a German woman.
The Dancer caused a stir because it put into words the conflict, the Honne, born of the division between the “self living for the state” and the “individual self loving a woman”. It was because this gentle literary language, specific to the “natural man”, existed in Japan that authors such as Tanizaki and Kawabata were able to express their Honne as men. However, as soon as Japanese men find themselves in a group, they stifle this Honne and inevitably end up becoming rigid.
Todd: This can be understood through an anthropological approach. What is the patrilineal system of the family lineage, i.e. the principle of male domination? It is the superiority of men as a group. In other words, men are strong as a collective, not as individuals. The man as an individual within the group merely obeys the established order and has a weak existence, like a child. I understood something while talking with several couples living in Paris, consisting of French men and Japanese women. While French men consider their Japanese wives to be their equals, Japanese women find their French husbands to be manly. They probably feel that ‘being able to decide for oneself’ is equivalent to being ‘manly’. Paradoxically, men are more childlike (weak) in patrilineal family societies than in nuclear family societies.
Miyake: These children are, in other words, sons and fathers, but not husbands. In my book Why I Like Reading People Who Speak Well (working title), I pointed out a commonality between Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Boy and the Heron and Haruki Murakami’s novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls. The fact that the heroine is the Mother. In other words, the desire to fall in love with one’s mother before one’s own birth and to be born by her; isn’t that the desire common to both works?
No woman playing the role of wife appears in either work. The image of the mother is stronger than that of the wife. This means that self-awareness as a son is predominant, rather than as a husband. Yet there is the perspective of the father who wonders, ‘To whom will I pass on my work?’ In short, they are sons and fathers, but not husbands.
Why is the parent-child bond stronger than the marital bond in Japan? Why is the vertical parent-child relationship depicted while the horizontal relationship of the couple is ignored? I feel that this illustrates a problem in Japanese society as a whole. Especially in Murakami’s early works, there are many scenes where the protagonist becomes silent after his wife says to him, ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking.’ Since there is no model of an egalitarian marital relationship in Japan, men are faced with a binary choice: to be a patriarchal father or a silent husband.
Todd: Listening to you, I regret even more that I can’t read your books.
Miyake: This problem is even more visible today, as it has become the norm for both spouses to work. Many women find it problematic that men their age ultimately want them to become wives who are like their mothers.
Todd: Even though cohabitation with parents is declining in Japan and nuclear households are on the rise, values based on the stem family are not disappearing so easily.
Miyake: That’s right. A characteristic of Japan’s Generation Z is not that they hate their parents, but rather that they love them, and more and more young people are not leaving the family home.
Todd: I also have a question. As in the UK, the US and Scandinavia, bisexuality is on the rise among young women in France. What about in Japan?
Miyake: There are people who have been bisexual since birth, but I don’t think there are very many of them yet. What is increasing in Japan is ‘Oshikatsu’, the act of passionately supporting and loving idols or anime characters. Young Japanese people tend to prefer virtual relationships to real ones.
Todd: I see. In any case, we are talking about countries that are no longer seeking to have children. If children disappear and the population only declines, society has no choice but to disappear. This is a cultural crisis common to developed countries. I study it from the perspective of family systems and political-economic structures, but this crisis is also experienced at the individual level in a society that has lost its collective values.
Miyake: This is the problem of the zero state of religion and nihilism that you point out in The Defeat of the West. However, don’t the popularity of ‘Oshikatsu’ in Japan and the rise of evangelicals in the United States constitute a kind of return to religion to replace the old beliefs?
Todd: I absolutely do not think so. It has nothing to do with the religions of the past. What used to be called religion had a belief system that encompassed the individual, established moral standards and made collective action possible. In contrast, today’s American evangelicals have a completely crazy interpretation of the Bible, claiming that God distributes money or that the rich are great. If I dared to use religious vocabulary, I would say that they obey the Antichrist or practise a cult of Satan.
Miyake: I understand. But how can we understand this zero state of religion and nihilism in Japan, which is not a monotheistic country?
Todd: The zero state of religion has different implications depending on the culture.
The area most affected is the Protestant sphere, where the zero state engenders a particular feeling of emptiness and despair. This is because it is originally a religion that strictly forbids images and ignores beauty. God and the individual are connected directly, without an intermediary, and the earthly world, which is by nature an intermediary, with its beauty and joys of life, is rejected. In the active state of religion, this strict faith has greatly contributed to raising the level of education and economic development. As Weber pointed out, the prosperity of the West was mainly brought about by this dynamism of Protestantism.
However, if we lose God, who was the only important entity in relation to the individual, we lose everything. With secularisation and the advent of the zero state, we can paradoxically fall into extreme nihilism.
On the other hand, in Catholic spheres such as France and Italy, the zero state of religion does not have such serious consequences. In these cultures, where the Protestant struggle against images and the beauty of the world failed, the arts flourished, the beauty of the earthly world and the joys of life were reaffirmed, which today allows us to avoid sinking into nihilism.
As Ruth Benedict analysed in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Japanese culture, which judges things by the aesthetics of beauty and ugliness rather than by transcendent ethical criteria of good and evil, is close to Catholicism and can be considered resistant to nihilism.
Miyake: You always say that Japan’s problem is its declining birth rate. You point to the increase in the number of young people who are shunning romantic relationships themselves as the reason for this, but what about France?
Todd: In a typical American film, if a man and a woman start arguing, it means the beginning of a love story. The relationship between men and women is fundamentally antagonistic. In France, on the other hand, as I said, the traditional relationship is closer to friendship or camaraderie, and is not as antagonistic.
However, the #MeToo movement, which originated in the Anglo-American world and perceives men and women as antagonists, has spread to France. This may be the beginning of a partial destruction of French culture. The fact that men and women no longer love each other as friends would be extremely worrying.
As for the declining birth rate, this is a phenomenon common to developed countries, but East Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are in an extreme situation. In South Korea, the fertility rate is 0.75. This is the influence of Confucian culture: not only are male-female relationships tenuous, but too much time is spent caring for parents. It is ironic: respecting the family too much is killing the family (by causing a declining birth rate).
Miyake: My book How Can My Daughter Kill Her Mother? (working title) analyses mother-daughter relationships through various works. In Japan, fathers are often absent from the home and it is the mother who takes care of the children. A certain distance naturally develops with sons, who are of the opposite sex, but with daughters, who are of the same sex, mothers tacitly impose their own ideas. Many daughters suffer from this. It is a characteristic of the Japanese family: the parent-child relationship, and in particular the mother-daughter relationship, is overburdened, especially as the marital relationship is tenuous.
Todd: I understand. That said, even in French families, the principle is that the mother plays a predominant role in the upbringing of children. I agree with Erich Fromm’s thesis that Freud’s mistake was to place the father-son relationship at the centre of family problems. My own problem as well was not with my father but with my mother.
Miyake: Was she strict?
Todd: The problem was more that she didn’t pay much attention to me, which certainly gave me great spiritual freedom, but she was strict intellectually. When I was young, if I made a language mistake, my mother, who was bilingual, would say to me in English, ‘Category mistake’ (a term from logic, like saying ‘the number is blue’) (laughs).
She was an exceptional woman, smiling and beautiful. Her laughter was pure light. She was an intense mixture of joy and sadness, generosity and avarice, modesty and arrogance. As the daughter of Paul Nizan, she was very confident and confided in me that she was more intelligent than my father (Olivier Todd), a famous journalist. And it was true!
Miyake: Thank you very much for this fascinating discussion.
Todd: I would very much like to read your books in French. I am sure they will find an audience.
(Interpreter: Shigeki Hori)
I really enjoyed this article. I hope you publish more like this from time to time, by similarly interesting people. The subject is engrossing in itself – one I’ve never really considered, and it’s good to have an occasional break from politics and current events.