Satchi

[Lanceart]

MESSAGE REFUSED ASSHOLE
----- Original Message -----
From: Joseph Murphy <jmurphy at aall.ufl.edu>
To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Sent: Monday, July 26, 1999 6:49 PM
Subject: Re: Satchi


> This will eventually get to the question of image-media.
> Peter B. High wrote:
> >Carole and Sharon's invocations of Akutagawa's pre-war suicide as a
potential
> >context/contrast for considering the significance of Eto's suicide
reminds
> >me that we
> >can find similar  antecedants to the "Satchi affair" in that period as
well.
> >Three examples  spring immediately to mind (and off the top of my head, I
> >might
> >add--meaning that I may have some of my details muddled). All three
> >examples feature
> >prominent women who were pilloried in their era's press as sexual
> >adventuresses (or
> >ogresses) and yet, after burning for a time in journalistic perdition,
> >were then
> >redeemed by having the nature of their "crimes" transformed into
something
> >..."allegorical."
>
> Barbara Hartley's juxtaposing the press treatment of the female defendant
> in the recent "Karei jiken" to the vilification of Satchi Nomura brings to
> mind another antecedent for the way the mass-media siezes on these strong,
> transgressive women, and possibly for the wide-show format itself, namely
> the "poison woman" genre of serial fiction popular in the 1870's when
> Japan's mass journalism was just establishing itself . These stories
> weren't really fiction but fictionalized accounts of actual news events
> (jitsuroku shosetsu).  A single incident would kick off a rash of
competing
> serials in different newspapers, to be bound and sold as books afterward.
> The most popular kind featured as their heroine the "dokufu" or
> poison-woman, i.e. a woman who had committed a rash of sensational,
usually
> violent crimes.  To get an idea of the tenor, behind "Takahashi Oden yasha
> monogatari" was the true story of a woman who conned her own relatives in
a
> land scam in the mid-1870's, wandered the Kanto plain for a while with a
> man, then lured another man back to her room and killed him for his money.
> She was sentenced to death January 31st, 1879. As soon as the sentence was
> handed down at least fournewspapers rushed out competing serializations of
> the story, mixing fictionalized accounts of her exploits as well as
> transcripts of Oden's own self-defense plea, etc.  This is by no means the
> most lurid.
> It's not such a stretch to the current discussion both for the similarity
> in mass-media format and the consistent content of the fantasies being
> circulated.   The phenomenon (of the "true-account" genre) occurs during
> the initial sorting out period for Japan's mass journalism.  They were
> consumed in intallments each day like the wideshow, and competing versions
> appeared in different newspapers (channels).  Fiction is still serialized
> in Japanese newspapers today, but as newspapers gained in respectability,
> the basis in factual events and unseemly scramble to get out the quickest
> account was expunged, and by the 1890's newspaper serial were "pure"
> fiction.  Where you have to go these days to get the jitsuroku
presentation
> of the latest sensational real news event is the despised genre of the
> wideshow.  Its like within the phenomenon of mass-media, the general
format
> switched from print to visual media . Second, the hybridity and free
> combination of fact and fiction in the jitsuroku shosetsu (What I know
> about this I learned from the work of the early-Meiji scholar Kamei Hideo,
> from his book Kansei no henkaku and from talks he has given here) was
> instrumental in establishing conventions of realism, and not
coincidentally
> conventions for image-ing women that made possible the "birth" of the
> modern novel a decade later and clearly the fantasy of the woman who
"won't
> give way on her desire" still circulates meaningfully today.
> For those who haven't followed it (you couldn't help be exposed if you've
> been in Japan anytime in the last two years), the "curry incident" was a
> spectacular mass- poisoning where several people died after eating the
> curry rice from a stand at a neighborhood festival in Wakayama ken
(correct
> me on the details, please,, those who've followed it more closely).  The
> incident unraveled in a fascinating way over its first few days, beginning
> with the mysterious deaths, the pinpointing of the curry-rice as the
> source, the identification of quantities of arsenic in the curry, the
> arsenic traced circumstantially to Hayashi Masumi, a local housewife who
it
> was found in the last several years had taken out large insurance policies
> on other people who had "accidents" and whose husband showed clear
symptoms
> of long-term, low-level arsenic poisoning.  The police had no witnesses or
> hard evidence linking the suspect to the poisoning, hence they had to
> release Ms. Hayashi to her home, presumably waiting for her to crack under
> the pressure.  We know that's what the police are doing because we've all
> read Dostoyevsky and seen it a dozen times in detective novels and at the
> movies.  However, Hayashi (yogisha?) did not crack, and what elevated it
> from a good summer read to wide-show media frenzy seemed to be the
repeated
> images of her "hansei-free" comings and goings from her rather
> well-appointed suburban house.
> This brings up the question of whether the representation of these women
is
> "attractive" or not.  It seems like a presumption of the commentary that
> the Japanese media presents these women as "unattractive,"   to coincide
> with the moral case, but I wonder if that's how it works. Those sorts of
> judgements of course involve projection on the part of the beholder, but
> with the proviso that they can be organized and manipulated, insofar as
the
> production of Hayashi is going to follow this well-established "poison
> woman" schema she has to be allowed the same kind of magnetism (of the
> woman who refuses to give way on her desire, and will not back down).
> Hayashi is full-figured, with a no-nonsense contemporary hairstyle and a
> warm, open face, and shows remarkable composure in the face of the camera
> onslaught.   One of the most repeated images on the wideshows is of
Hayashi
> out washing her car and then turning her garden hose on the phalanx of
> photographers catcalling her, literally hosing one especially persistent
> cameraman off of his perch on her fence.  Its a beautiful image (sun
> shining, just a hint of a rainbow in the spray) and a truly elegant
> response to the media frenzy.  Aaron's term "violent" is probably a good
> description of the way the wideshow paparazzi pursue their subjects, its
> too invasive to be voyeuristic, and anyone who watches the wideshows
> probably experiences a sense of guilt about their complicity in these
> invasions of privacy.  Yet the US testosterone-driven celebrity response
of
> punching the camera simply reverses the violence.  This image of Hayashi
> sprinkling these intrusive photographers with a sudden shower, a gentle
> baptism that ruins their cameras allows a very easy identification on the
> part of the guilty viewer, and if one isn't careful this might then just
> slide to some fantasies about what you'd like to do to those nosy
neighbors
> of yours, or how you might like to get that aging, belching beer-drinking
> spouse of yours out of the way...
> What is ugly about the Satchi affair is that it entirely lacks the
> novelistic element of the "Wakayama Curry Incident."  It's just an ugly,
> pointless story. Hence where Hayashi is shown hosing off the scum of the
> earth on a sunny day, we are treated to daily, mean-spirited and very
> unattractive pictures of Satchi Nomura rummaging around the trash in front
> of her house, or cleaning up behind her dog on a walk.
> There were personal tragedies in the Wakayama curry incident, many of the
> victims who did not die are still suffering debilitating effects from the
> poison, but the question is of why and how the media fixes on certain
> events and not others, and the "literary" expectations the viewers bring
to
> these media events seems to really shape the spectacle.
> J. Murphy
>
>
>