'many Japanese'

[Roger Macy]

Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu.

Last week, I went to the final screening at the NFT of the BFI's season: 'Wild Japan: Sex in Japanese Cinema in the 60s and 70s', where they showed Imamura's "Erogotoshitachi" yori: Jinruigaku nyumon (The Pornographers).
I was irritated by this passage from the notes: "Incest and paedophilia would be almost universally accepted disturbing pornographic concepts, and yet Imamura turns both conventions on their head by making mother/son, father/daughter trysts at any age seem a normal, if unspoken, rite of passage for many Japanese."
The notes were all taken from one site, dvdverdict.com, and credited to Bill Gibron.
Clearly, Imamura does address incest in this film and is making a commentary on the society he sees, but to put into his mouth the observation that incest is a national activity is unjustified and, in my view, plain wrong.  What is it about much popular writing on Japanese that allows non-specialists to write generalisations about 'The Japanese' that they wouldn't dream of writing about fiction from closer to hand?  (And I think that putting the racial categorisation into the mouth of Imamura makes it worse, not better.)  Was Euripides, and his many followers, in Medea, writing that child murder was normal for many Georgians? etc. etc.  It recalls, to my mind, some of the war-time propaganda for which some of the writers at least, made amends afterwards.

I should add that most of the season's notes have been very good, as the notes' editors have relied on Jasper Sharp's new book.  In its many tens of thousands of words, although there is the material for several debates, I don't think you'll find a remark like that.   But The Pornographers is not directly reviewed there, so the editors had to cast elsewhere.  Far better sources would have been David Desser's Eros plus Massacre, where Pornographers and incest is dealt with very carefully, or in Audie Bock.

I can see that the list has looked at western takes on the Japanese before, but I hope you will indulge my getting this off my chest?

Incidentally, whilst casting around the internet for reviews, I noticed I could buy a term paper on The Pornographers for $55, so I'm guessing that at least one list-member has set such paper?
http://www.academon.com/lib/paper/103002.html
or, if 'you want your essay to have an added edge', it's still £30, 
http://cssa-shef.org.uk/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=82139&extra=page%3D2
so you might as well have the reading done as well ...

Roger
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