Eto-ology

shh@gol.com shh
Sat Jul 24 15:48:10 EDT 1999


While Eto's death must certainly be tragic for his friends and family,
it offers us an opportune, some may feel opportunistic, moment to
reevalutate the recent changes in Japanese society and state. The
motivations for suicide sometimes seem clearer than others (Eto's grief
vs the murky reasons for Itami's Juzo's recent suicide) but are  linked
to very personal, perhaps unknowable, issues. My surprise, however, was
not at Eto's apparent reasons for taking his life but at exactly the
difference in the media coverage of Eto's and Akutagawa's deaths. Why
did Akutagawa's suicide signal crisis while Eto's pure human grief? And
how has the notion of the public figure changed to allow the
demonization of Sachi to overshadow the death of one of Japan's most
influential literary critics? On a related note, does anybody have any
ideas about the history of demonization of public figures in the
Japanese press. My spotty memory of the  bubble  conjures only demonic
images of 'outside' enemies such as America in Ishihara Shintaro's Japan
That Can Say No.

Sharon Hayashi
University of Chicago




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