Satchi

[Peter B. High]

<
Joseph Murphy wrote:

> 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 .
> 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...


In our two postings, I think both Joseph and I have been groping toward the realization 
that the Japanese media tends to orchestrate its "incidents" according to certain 
dramaturgical patterns ("ur-stories" perhaps?) and that it may be possible to track these 
patterns back into earlier historical periods. I first came upon this notion when I was 
writing an essay abpout the Japanese press during the Manchurian Incident of 1931. In 
hindsight at least, reportahge during the "prelude" period leading up to full-scale 
intervention--featuring assassinations of Japanese individuals and even a massacre of 
Japanese residents in Manchuria--seemed to me to be following the classic plot development 
pattern of the *matatabi*-style jidaigeki (samurai film). First there is the the series of 
one-sided outrages carried out by a sinister enemy whose "true shape" and motives remain 
obscure. The hero (the ronin, the yakuza, or in this case, the Japanese army) stoically 
endures the provocations, holding to priniciples of decorum and morality utterly 
incomprehensible to the villain(s). Of course, the reader/viewer knows that eventually the 
hero's endurance will snap and that he will launch against the enemy a jihad of righteous 
fury (the "*nagurikomi*/i.e. full-scale military action) in which the perfidy is requited 
in a bloddbath and the villains abashed.
--Parenthetically and for what its worth, the "co-star" in the Satchi drama, Asaka 
Mitsuyo, is known to the Japanese public for her stage work in old-time *Onnna 
Kengeki*--samurai dramas enacted by all-women troups. On stage, she presumably played the 
righteous samurai doing to death all sorts of villains preying upon the hapless public. 

Now, returning to the 1930s--> For the subsequent Shanghai Incident of spring 1932, which 
developed into military conflict too quickly for the press to emplot it in the above 
manner, the incident was given "transcendent" significance by digging out extraordinary 
examples of self-sacrificial valor displayed by individuals or small groups of military 
men  involved in the fighting there.The narrative category for such exemplary incidents is 
as ancient as the medieval era *senki-mono*, such military histories as the *Taiheiki* 
etc. This was the BIDAN (lit. "beautiful tale"). Before coming upon the single ideal bidan 
for the Incident, we find the press almost daily putting forward various candidates in the 
form of little front page accounts of "brave deaths" on the battlefields to the north and 
west of the city. The one they finally settled involved three youing men who died while 
trying to blow up enemy barbed wire defenses. Tokyo Nichinichi immediately dubbed them 
"Our Three Human Bomb Patriots" (Bakudan Sanyushi), while ASsahi used the term "Three 
Flesh-bullet Patriots" (Nikudan Sanyushi); it is usually under the latter name that they 
are referred to in the history books. Within weeks, the Flesh-bullet Three became the 
subject of radio plays, "quickie" (kiwamono) movies, rakugo routines and even full-scale 
stage plays.

One of the remarkable aspects of the above incidents was the manner in which  the national 
press would throw up one real-life "candidate" after another (in the form of 
"provocations" and then of valorous deaths in action) in an open attempt to find just the 
right material to fit a pre-determined narrative model. This, naturally, would lead to the 
impression on on the part of the public spectator  of similar incidents "clustering"--in 
other words, the instinctive perception of "crisis". It seems to me that we continue to be 
exposed to this sort of serialized reportage today--the North Korea-related stuff, the 
scandals in the economic world, etc. etc. Interestingly enough, once the sense of "crisis" 
has been set a-brewing in the..."MEGA-sphere," can I say?--the arenas of politics, high 
finance, government and similar areas of High Historico-social Import--the media then sets 
to work creating  minor key counterpoints, public or personal scandals clearly unrelated 
in their details to the "crisis" of the  MEGA-sphere  and yet, on some virtually 
subliminal level, vibrating to the same rythm. This of course is today the dimension 
worked by the Wideshow  and the shukanshi.
 For example, returning to our early thirties parallel, we find the great Lovers' Suicide 
Rage of 1932-34. On May 10, 1932, the newspapers reported  the suicide of Chosho Goro, a 
Keio University student, and his sweetheart Yaeko. The two had met at a Christian 
fellowship meeting and fallen in love, but because of class differences, marriage had been 
forbidden by both sets of parents. The means of death they chose was both romantic and 
striking. They jumped into the Sakatayama volcano above the beach at Oiso. The day after 
the initial news report, all of the national papers published their suicide note, in which 
they told (the entire nation, as it turned out) that they had died "pure in body and 
spirit." At Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, the copy editor had the inspiration to play up the 
Christian connection, publishing the note  under the headline "A Love That Reached 
Heaven". It was the headline's brilliant balance of spirituality and barely suppressed 
eros, more than the actual event, which created the greatest sensation and set off the 
subsequent chain of events. Within days, the suicide was being re-enacted as a play by 
various small stage troupes using the headline as their title. Radio too picked up the 
story, first in editorial commentary and then as a radio drama. Record producers released 
a number of sentimental ballads extolling the pure love of Goro and Yaeko, and Shochiku 
film company announced it would produce *A love That Reached Heaven*, with Gosho Heinosuke 
as director.By this time, the surge of copy-cat suicides (i.e. the "clustering effect") 
had begun . From mid-May, several couples a day were climbing the slopes of Sakatayama to 
throw themselves into the volcano . Now, with the movie, their numbers doubled. At the 
movie theaters, usherettes had to patrol the aisles as young couples had taken to drinking 
poison during the showing. By the end of the year, there had been hundreds of 
suicides.After a brief lull, the Lover`s Suicide Rage flared anew. On January 9 (1933), a 
pair of school girls climbed Miharayama volcano on Oshima Island, a short ferry trip from 
Tokyo, and, holding hands, jumped in. The first copy-cat suicides began three days later. 
As before, the press reacted with sensationalist irresponsibility. Pictures of young 
lovers creeping up the slope arm-in-arm were published with syrupy thanatopic 
captions.When the rage finally subsided for good in March, a total of 944 young people had 
perished in the Miharayama crater ( Kato Hidetoshi's count).

Certainly, on the surface, the two levels of "incidents"--those of the mega-sphere and the 
counter-pointing minor-key Lovers' Suicide incident--had nothing to do with one another. 
Yet, clearly, they were all sagas of death, and were therefore thematically linked. To 
recognize this, we need only realize that the issue of Fascism ("fassho") was just then 
dominating public discourse. The connection , I think, was made most apparent in a comment  
by German director Karl Ritter a few years later, about the intention of his own 
fascist/Nazi films: "I want to impress upon our youth the transcendent value of apparently 
meaningless death."
For those  who feel it inappropriate to suddenly drag in evidence from a foreign source, 
one could re-explain the issue within a purely "native" context.  The Lovers' Suicide Rage 
became  a successful minor key counterpoint incident by being "sublimed" (in both the 
alchemical and the literal sense) into a parable of surpassing "beauty." And, to continue 
the alchemical metaphor, the Philosopher's Stone was the early-on Nichinichi Shimbun 
headline: "The Love that Reached Heaven"...and that patriotism was seen as another form of 
that same vaulting love.

This brings us to Aaron's repeated query in reference to the Satchi affair--what is its 
significance in the context of major events in the mega-sphere (centering on the Diet 
resolutions and debate about defense/the flag and the national anthem)? By implication at 
least, he is asking whether we can perceive an aspect of direct manipulation or 
re-direction of public consciousness away from the truly important to the trivial. 
Certainly this appears to be the effect. Personally--and, as with the example I developed 
in my previous posting about the  Abe Sada affair and its virtual concurrence with the 
February 26 Incident of 1938--I find it difficult to locate the subjective (i.e. the 
"willing") element which does the "re-diriecting" of public consciousness. That is also 
why I have trouble with Noam Chomsky's fascinating studies on  American politics and the 
press. Observations couched in this sort of "anthropomorphizing" mode of expression may 
work well as a kind of short-hand, in other words as a means of cutting to direct 
observations of the phenomena, but there is a clear tendency for the 
anthropomorphized/short-hand unit (the Press, the Government, the Power Elite, Them) to 
stand up and begin to walk around by itself. 
What I would like to posit here is possibility that there is no subjective or "willing" 
element to be found, rather that at some refined meta-level "real" events and their 
representation in the media interact according to certain naturally-arising patterns and 
that they produce "products" (incidents, scandals etc) which send out ripples through both 
dimensions:
Query #1: Cannot these patterns be considered either as a.) universals (i.e. part of the 
phenomenon of our present day planet-girdling media news coverage and/or, more distantly, 
arising from the ancient structures of human story-telling ) and also as b.) determined by 
the narrative modes peculiar to a specific culture, with its roots thrust deep into that 
culture's own sentimental, historical and story-telling traditions? In reference to a.), 
we could hypothesize that the CNN format may be a hybrid spawn of the Hollywood narrative 
tradition which, since Griffith at leasst, developed techniques for universal transparency 
and "reader friendliness." (So what do we make of CNN'schief rival, BBC?--is it so 
substantiallyy different?) Queries about b.) will be covered below.

Standing in the way, I think, is the comparatively recent history of modern media 
themselves and the manner in which they tend to compound, interact, and mutually 
reinforce--via music, sound (effects), the oral word, written word, the visual image, 
etc--to create  the illusion of "crises" et al--in Japan, I of course locate its inception 
in the early thirties. In the past  hundred years, the very sense of a publicly-shared Now 
has undergone tremendous change--starting with "recently"/in the past several days or 
weeks (via newspapers) to the Now we experience  today--"just now"/ a few hours ago/ a few 
minutes ago/ "developing on your screen RIGHT NOW!" Another problem is that new dimensions 
keep being added to the mass media. For example, I can't think of a single 1930s example 
comparable, in immediacy at least, to the image Joseph Murphy talks about so 
eloquently--Hayashi Masumi hosing down the press. Also, I remember a personal conversation 
with Markus (Nornes) in which we tried to list up some of the "iconic photo images" which 
have encapsulated our impression of impportant moments of the twentieth century--the 
explosion of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, the burned Vietnamese village girl...But even 
these have a different, far more limited range of sensibility than that green Bagdad sky 
we all saw on CNN the moment the Gulf War began. More striking than its composition and 
direect visual impact was the eerie you-are-there/yet-aren't-there, vicarious immediacy 
provided by satellite tv. Its a visual icon of a quite different sort. Photographs are 
always "then."

Query #2: Returning to hypothesis b.)--about media coverage being determined by the native 
narrative patterns of a particular culture, I wonder if other readers would agree that the 
historical antecedant line opened by Joseph and myself has merit. The idea, as I see it 
anyway, is that the culture has, ready-to-hand, a complex set of (what I call) ur-stories 
and thayt modern mass media constantly fishes down among these stories, not only to find 
an appropriate "shape" for casting an already-unfolding story, but on a more instinctive 
level, for types of new stories to pursue (or, maybe, invent?). And, that the 
story-tellers--tv, the papers, shukanshi,etc. etc.--are not consciously in conmtrol of 
this rummaging.
Sub-query a.) What would these stories be and how could we identifyu them?
In the Japanese context, Japanese historians seem to make the task easy by plotting out 
their historical accounts  popular culture cultural history along a time line of 
consecutively occurring incidents and fads. These latter form the dots of the line. The 
spaces between, representing various mini-eras in the life of Japanese mass society, are 
given substance by invoking the buzz words, slogans (inspired by the government or 
advertising), popular songs and memorable visual images of the period. All of my examples 
from the 30s figure large in most such accounts.
Sub-query b.) Okay, this might possibly be true for Japan, but can we say if its equally 
true for other cultures? And what of such "international" media as CNN? Should we only 
look into American lore for its ur-stories?
Sub-query C.) What, if anything, does this tell us about the Satchi affair? Can we place 
it as a projection of one or another of these ur-stories?

Although I feel I have lots more to say  about the matter, I think I'll stop here to see 
if there is any reaction. Thqat's the great thing about lists like this. Its not necessary 
to develop a notion in complete isolation.
To quote Sitemaster Aaron, "Any comments?"

Peter B. High
Nagoya University



 





   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
> 
> 
> 
>