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CRISIS IN IDENTITY

In his intriguing prize-winning essay, "Patterns of Alienation in Contemporary Japan," Munesuke Mita probes the sources of modern Japanese anxiety as they surface in the personal advice column of one of Japan's largest newspapers, the Yomiuri Shimbun.¹ His purpose, Mita says, "is to (a) describe the processes by which self-alienation determines the everyday existence of ordinary people and (b) draw a composite picture of the numerous factors which impinge on the life situation of contemporary man."² Mita's effort, in short, is an examination of the postwar Japanese quest for identity. In a country profoundly influenced by the doctrine of "non-recognition of the ego," whose citizens are inclined to identify with or even dissolve into the group, the quest is striking.

Taking as material 304 cases printed in the Yomiuri during 1962, Mita analyzes the causes and backgrounds of a representative sampling. In one case, a nineteen-year-old high school graduate finds himself frustrated and depressed by his situation. He has failed to pass the entrance examination of the college he desires and so must pass an additional year as a ronin) or "floating student," studying in hopes of succeeding in the exams the following year. But the father's income is limited and the family budget frequently runs into the red. The result is friction between father and son; guilt, tension, and anxiety for the entire family; and what the young man describes as "dark days" for himself.³ Another case involves a twenty-eight-year-old white-collar worker who feels he has been "permanently shunted off the escalator to success" in the firm where he works. Somewhat passive in nature, he wonders if he can resolve his doubts by having a brother-in-law arrange a good marriage match for him. He feels miserable and gloomy.⁴ In still another example, a thirty-two-year-old housewife finds life has "no meaning at all" because her irritable husband, after achieving a stable life and considerable status as a government employee, spends more and more time with other women, leaving the wife to grieve at home.⁵

What Mita everywhere implies and occasionally suggests, but leaves primarily for the reader to ponder, is far more significant than the analysis itself, for the appeals to the life-counseling column represent an urgent and often poignant reexamination of the current Japanese value structure. Each case is the search of an individual for ways to satisfactorily identify himself as to his role in life, his relation to others, and his obligations to society. And behind the private questions of private persons lie larger questions about the assumptions and criteria of social behavior, though the depressed writers of the dark letters are often themselves victims of stereotyped notions about happiness and success. Behind the high school graduate's distress is the assumption of an entire system, namely, that graduation from a name university—the more prestigious in the hierarchy the better—is the indispensable ticket to a well-paying job and, presumably, happiness. Implicit in the white-collar worker's fear is the idea that success is an escalator process with the spatially nebulous "up" as its goal. The machine metaphor appropriately suggests the non-human character of the assumption. In the housewife's lament is a fairly direct challenge to notions that financial security and job prestige can begin to guarantee happiness.

One of the more colorful and dramatic challenges to what Mita calls "values unessential to one's humanity" comes not from the newspaper advice column but the current vogue of communal living.⁶ One can, of course, assume an attitude of amused disdain and say, "It's a passing thing." And indeed it may well be. Historically, many communes have been established and have collapsed, for any number of reasons. But such experiments are striking illustrations of their adherents' questioning of a value structure they regard as inadequate, non-essential, or even absurd. And what, one wonders, would result from a friendly pow-wow between a group of commune dwellers and a cross section of their more conventional city cousins where they vied to establish who was the "happiest"? Might not such a confrontation prove, in more ways than one, to be semantically embarrassing? The "free man of tomorrow," Mita says, "must participate in creating and practicing universal primary values."⁷ And so he must. But what are these values? What is success? What is happiness? The Japanese too are asking.

And behind such questions is the still larger one, for the current Japanese quest is but part of the never-ending attempt of man to define himself. "What is man?" asks the Psalmist in one of the oldest Western cultural sources. And the complementary admonition, "Know thyself," has from olden times teased men of both East and West, whether in Buddhist reflection or Greek humanism.. "Knowing" may mean rejecting the concept of self or, as in Shakespeare's testament, recognizing the awesome extent of ego-possibility. "What a piece of work is man," he has his tragic hero marvel, and in a brilliant literary embodiment spells out the conditions under which a man may soar to angelic heights or descend to demonic depths. But for the twentieth century the concern with identity is almost an obsession. A book of American short stories currently on the academic market suggests the emphasis. Designed for either text or collateral reading, the volume is entitled Identity: Stories for This Generation. There is little or no explicit connection between the stories and identity. The authors note in passing only that one of the ways the stories may be read is "for social documentation providing insight into who we are and what we value."⁸ But their title, they know, will sell; it is "relevant." And it is relevant, pointing up, even though superficially in this case, the contemporary focus on an age-old concern.

For postwar Japan, the problem of identity is critical. The loss of the emperor as a divine symbol and unifying force is but one of the countless alterations which have transformed the Japanese psychic identity. Nineteen seventy marked not only the year of Expo and the renewal of the controversial security treaty, but the twenty-fifth year since the beginning of the American occupation and the host of westernizing changes it effected. Defeated in war, its major cities devastated by fire bombs, Japan is the only nation to have suffered the atomic bomb. And the Japanese are conscious of the need to redefine themselves, to establish an acceptable self-image for themselves as individuals, as a nation, and as an emerging power in the world community. In many ways they are new, different, westernized, modernized; in many ways they are old, traditional, oriental. "This 'I,' what was it?" asks the protagonist of Haruo Umezaki's short story "Sakurajima." "For thirty whole years since my birth, I had been attempting, you might say, to discover what this 'I' was."⁹ The Japanese are asking the question, at times showing an almost painful self-awareness.

What then is a Japanese? A particular Tokyo tour guide regularly advises sightseers to look at the man-in-the-street. "See him smiling," he says. "Look at his happy face. Times are good. The Japanese are prosperous. They are happy." Or so they seem. And times are good, so good in fact that the Japanese, displaying that penchant which people the world over sometimes have for creating a sow's ear out of a silk purse, for turning their own assets into liabilities, now castigate themselves with the label "economic animal," as if to condemn the very prosperity which brings them smiles.¹⁰ But an animal, if not quite human, at least has life and vitality. Even more alarming is the threat of dehumanization or "thingification" which results from the bigness which creates the prosperity. "When an individual has been cut off from the means of production and made a fixed part in a gigantic system of specialization," explains Mita in his essay, "he inevitably loses any sense of identification with society."¹¹ Thus even their spectacular rise to the status of a world leader in commerce has caused the Japanese to search with concern, for they now share with the other industrial giants all the identity-shaking features of bigness and complexity. In an article, "Running with a Purpose," newspaper columnist Masaru Ogawa criticizes his nation for lack of direction. "There is no doubt that Japan today is running like mad—at least in the pursuit of economic gains. It has increased its gross national product at a tremendous pace. But where are we heading? What are the goals? 'Ask my feet' would probably be the most honest Japanese answer," he says.¹²

The economic concern is directly related to the matter of Japan's world image. "The Ugly Japanese," laments political commentator Kazushige Hirasawa, is a worse epithet than "economic animal." He points out that Southeast Asian peoples (with whom some resentment over Japan's World War II militarism still lingers) often refer to Japanese as selfish, greedy, and arrogant. Distrust of the Japanese is growing, he claims, and cites as one of the reasons what he sees as a contradiction between Japanese criticism of the Viet Nam conflict and her willingness to profit from it financially. There is a "gap between Japan as seen by the world and the Japanese view of Japan," he says¹³ The image gap idea is sustained by numerous tourist-directed books which claim to disclose the real Japan. While many of them merely capitalize on the old stereotype of the "mysterious Orient," Ichiro Kawasaki's Japan Unmasked is a different matter. The former ambassador to Argentina (who lost his job over his outspokenness) charges his countrymen with numerous weaknesses, including immaturity and feudalistic thinking.¹⁴ Such severe self-criticism may or may not be justified, but the fact that it exists and that many take it seriously shows the question of identity to be a matter of international consequence. Japan now expects herself, and is in turn expected, to be a world leader and helper, particularly to her sister nations in Southeast Asia. This guidance and aid must be cultural, economic, and political, not military, her present leaders insist.¹⁵ Both Japanese and foreign spokesmen sound warnings about the danger of recurrent militarism, and intense political discussion presently focuses on such issues as the role of Japan's Self-Defense Force and the security treaty with the United States.¹⁶

This insistence on Japan's non-militant role suggests something of the trauma suffered by the Japanese psyche from the militarism of the 1930s and the subsequent defeat in World War II. A good example is the strife on the university campuses throughout Japan during 1968 and 1969. Almost obsessed by the fear of returning to anything resembling a police state, school administrators refused to call police to the campuses until the situation reached chaotic proportions. Dissenting students capitalized on this reluctance. The university problem is a complex issue, revealing the search for identity in a number of ways. In part, of course, it is the rebelliousness displayed in some degree by every generation, a repudiation of the past, an expression of the desire to be mature, independent, resourceful. On a more philosophical level, it is part of a near-universal protest against the secularization of man, a voicing, consciously or unconsciously, sometimes shrill and incoherent, of the fear that the atomic age will divest life of its mystery and man of his manhood. But for the Japanese in particular it deeply involves the "face" of Japan, the entire social structure of the nation and the problems of an educational system long overdue for reevaluation and change¹⁷ It is also a special search for guidelines by a generation which shares with young people of other nations the desire to develop an acceptable self-image apart from, though with some guidance from, the past, but which unlike most others finds the past era repudiated even by its elders. The militarism of the 1930s is unthinkable; to look further to the past is to be archaic. "Should women's college girls be like mothers of the Meiji era?" one frustrated student recently wrote on the wall of a strife-tom Tokyo private college.¹⁸ This graffito has a message. The girl is asking who she is.

There is no more dramatic, nor ironic, example of a contemporary search for identity than the current problem in Israel concerning who is a Jew. The issue has complex social, political, and religious significance.¹⁹ Japan has no comparable example, but there is, in the striking growth of the so-called new religions, another indication of the contemporary search for values, a seeking for past assurances in modern dress. Two examples are the Buddhist-based Soka Gakkai and Rissho Koseikai groups, which claim followers in the millions. The former sponsors Japan's third largest political party, Komeito, while the latter offers group therapy sessions as part of its modern appeal. Both are, among other things, attempts to link past and present, to draw upon tradition and yet remain relevant and up-to-date. Though they emphasize group identity strongly, in both a modern stress on the individual operates as a subtheme. They are efforts to meet the needs of a people whose past is rich, whose present is prosperous, and whose future is promising, but who, after all, need something more substantial than room coolers and color television to insure a healthy self-image.

Examples of popular culture like comic strips and cartoons, though sometimes overlooked, also indicate the contemporary search to determine what it is to be Japanese. The ever-popular Sazae-san, which has been likened to America's Blondie, suggests, when one examines the assumptions behind the humorous incidents, something of the image Japanese currently have of the mid-twentieth century housewife and domestic scene.²⁰ Sampei Sato's cartoons provide equally illuminating insights into the frustrations of the salary man, whether it is in trying to please the boss, cope with the hazards of speeding traffic, or survive the stresses of the rush hour on the trains.²¹ In one example, the befuddled protagonist tries to kiss a girl dressed and starved in the Twiggy fashion. He closes his eyes and, to the girl's cries of "idiot," kisses a slender tree instead. Such light moments afford welcome and wholesome relief to the more serious self-probing, but even here the effort to discern and define what it means to be a modern Japanese is apparent.

To be a modern Japanese, however, is not to be altogether "modern." Most Japanese, probably like most Americans or Europeans, would be hard pressed to say just to what extent they have been molded by their past, or to what extent past values still control their decisions. Ruth Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword is helpful in understanding the Japanese mentality.²² The traditional Japanese concepts of obligation, self-sacrifice, and shame are different than those of an American, she points out, and they still affect, sometimes profoundly, the behavior of many people. The recent university strife again provides a dramatic example. Westerners were shocked to read of the suicides of a few noted Japanese professors who in taking their lives claimed responsibility for failure to resolve problems on their campuses. To most Americans, the university problem, even on a given campus, would seem so complex as to preclude any one man's taking such responsibility on himself. Quite obviously, these Japanese professors looked at it otherwise. Similarly, other psychological patterns from past tradition continue to operate among the people, particularly those of the prewar generation.

But the changes have been great. The most important ideological change in postwar Japan was negative, say the authors of America's standard textbook on East Asia. It was "the destruction of the sociopolitical identity that had functioned as the basis of orthodoxy until 1945."²³ In its place is something new. "The new education, the consumer society, new economic patterns, the rise in the status of women, the slow advance of the conjugal family ideal, unionization, the pursuit of happiness, the new religious freedom, all can be seen as quantitative change along lines begun in prewar Japan. Yet the changes are not simply linear. Rather, the total effect is a new social configuration, a new way of life."²⁴

One of the indicators of the complexity of the new way is the very term "identity." For better or worse, one can no longer define oneself simply in elemental terms like "male" or "female," "adult" or "child." One is expected to draw and quarter and then further subdivide oneself into innumerable bits of allegiance which, metaphysically glued together, make up one's "identity." A Japanese now may be not only husband, father, uncle, or grandfather, but Liberal Democrat, Socialist, or member of Komeito. More than eldest son, head of household, or go-between for a friend's daughter's marriage, he may be inner-directed, other-directed, old-fashioned, or new-fashioned. In short, he may identify himself in terms of various combinations of factors—geographical, political, economic, social, religious, psychological, family, home, or other. And one might, if he is Japanese, be specially tempted to associate himself with the institution where he is employed, as the custom of identifying on the telephone implies. "Hello, this is Mitsubishi's Mr. Tanaka speaking," one says, or, "Hello, this is Tokyo University's Mr. Suzuki." It's all part of one's "identity."

The word "identity," admittedly, is ambiguous and slippery, but it may well be a keyword of the times. Perhaps by its ambiguity it may suggest, as such ambiguous keywords often do, something distinctive about the age. Perhaps the passion for identifying, classifying, clarifying, and showing relationships is in part a measure of twentieth-century man's failures in the area of simply being. At any rate, the problem of identity is prominent in the minds of Japan's contemporary artists, and the postwar Japanese novel stresses the quest and sometimes hints at the goals.

In attempting to trace out such a theme, the Western critic should acknowledge the difficulties of the subject and the limitations of his approach. There is, first of all, the perennial problem of translations. Already a miniature battle of the books concerning the difficulties of translation into Japanese is available to readers of English in the form of journal articles.²⁵ Shoichi Saeki, commenting on the translations into English of Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters, Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, Osamu Dazai's The Setting Sun, Shohei Ooka's Fires on the Plain, and Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, says, "My experience, from the very first moment that I began to read the English versions, was a kind of shock."²⁶ This need not discourage, but it should caution the reader or critic to mind his characters.

He must also mind the fact that he operates with a set of critical assumptions and approaches which may be quite unlike those of the authors he sets out to study. Westerners often insist on a form or structural consistency which a Japanese novel may not exhibit. Edward Seidensticker comments about such "unshapen" examples, suggesting that a new literary category might be necessary to properly account for them. "One wonders whether a more embracing genre might not be established, without reference to the degree to which a particular work is fictional and perhaps given some such name as 'discursive lyric.' If so, it would embrace a great deal of what is most pleasing in Japanese literature, even if the best of that literature might have to be excluded. The genre would be characterized by the want of concern with over-all form and dramatic conflict and by a compensating emphasis upon a succession of lyrical moments."²⁷ One thinks of certain of Kawabata's works as partly within such a tradition. And one should note that the "I-novel" (watakushi shosetsu), or autobiographical fiction, has a long history in Japan and, though somewhat in disrepute in the West, it is one of the major motifs (some say the mainstream) of Japanese fiction. Further, there is a difference between the Western autobiographical novel and the Japanese "I-novel." "In the Western autobiographical novel," says Jun Eto, "the life of the protagonist is usually presented against a wide social background because the confrontation of the protagonist's self with his social and cultural environment is the fundamental problem for the author. On the other hand, the Japanese watakushi shosetsu is a genre in which the assertion of the protagonist's (and therefore the author's) sensibility or passion is the main point."²⁸ An awareness of such a difference could of course profoundly affect one's reading of a given work.

But when these and other apologies and allowances have been made, the novels and the identity theme, happily, remain. The identity theme in fact suggests that while the postwar Japanese novel may retain much that is Japanese, it also speaks to contemporary man, is relevant to his deepest preoccupations. Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, for some weeks America's best-selling novel in 1969, illustrates the currency of the theme. The book shows, among other things, the narrator's continuous struggle with his identity. There are other themes in the novels considered here, of course, and one could approach them in different ways. They speak of love, death, alienation, loneliness, hope, despair, tragedy, and triumph; the motifs are universal. Each of the novels could be thought of as representing a quest for affirmation, a search for a frame of reference that would confirm the worth of modern man. Thus, the troubled young high school graduate struggling to reach university might find his frustrations embodied in diminutive Bird, the hero of Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter. Perhaps the problems he outlines in his letter to the Yomiuri will even find a solution through Bird's courage in quitting the academic world and achieving satisfaction through other work in a way which carries an implicit challenge to the assumption that a university diploma is the magic ticket to job and success. For the boy's father, approaching retirement on an inadequate income, the zesty lust for life of Tanizaki's mad old man may prove heartwarming; or he may find a different kind of consolation in the fellow-suffering of Kawabata's aging protagonist, Eguchi, in House of the Sleeping Beauties. A young woman who feels trapped by obligations to her parents and fears that life is passing her by may gain a sense of liberation from Osaragi's resourceful women in Homecoming. Or again, salary men, teachers, government workers, and others caught in the routine of the organization may find a kindred spirit in the estranged hero of Abe's Woman of the Dunes. As such persons join in the fictional quest, they will find pleasure, challenge, sometimes even medicine.

More often than not, the quest will be introspective. Due in part to the theories of Freud, Jung, and their followers, twentieth-century man will more than likely turn inward for the answer to who he is. The terrain of his search will be the landscape of the mind; the quest will be into the depths of his own consciousness, as it is for Eguchi, Niki, Mizoguchi, and Bird, the heroes of Kawabata, Abe, Mishima, and Oe. Under the particular stresses and strains of his time he may feel himself a schizophrenic victim, divided against himself like the troubled speaker of Theodore Roethke's poem, "In a Dark Time," who asks, "Which I is I?"²⁹ And having tunneled within, he may have to turn outward again, looking beyond himself for any certainty or affirmation. Rituals, declares Margaret Mead, are man's ways of showing that his humanity depends on the traditional wisdom of society. But what if the traditional wisdom should fail? "When men lose this sense that they can depend upon this wisdom, either because they are thrown among those whose behaviour is to them no guarantee of the continuity of civilization or because they can no longer use the symbols of their own society, they go mad, retreating slowly, often fighting a heart-breaking rear action as they relinquish bit by bit their cultural inheritance, learned with such difficulty, never learned so that the next generation is safe."³⁰ In Shohei Ooka's Fires on the Plain, the bewildered protagonist, finding indeed "no guarantee of the continuity of civilization" in his death-ridden surroundings, goes mad. He retreats into schizophrenic isolation. Artists, in pursuing the quest, sometimes find disturbing answers.

The quest begins at the war's end, "in a dark time." From defeat comes the need for redefinition. After the bomb drops and the paralysis ends, one must try to discover in past remembrances, present facts, and future unknowns some purpose for rebuilding. Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain directs one to elemental needs, suggesting that hope may be in the form of the everyday. For the self-preoccupied expatriate of Homecoming, however, such comforts are inadequate. He fails to find himself. The trapped man of Abe's Woman in the Dunes finds his existence a prison, but reduced to elemental considerations is able to reconcile himself to his fate. Kawabata's old man is not so fortunate; his attempt at symbolic escape ends in frustration. Mishima's alienated young acolyte in Temple of the Golden Pavilion reveals an artist's sensibility; his quest for freedom ends in ambiguity. Oe's version ends more positively. The hero of A Personal Matter discovers within himself the courage to fight; when he decides it shall be on behalf of others, he at last realizes who he is. But if the quest ends happily for Bird, it begins on a note of terror for the victims of the great war in the Pacific. In the Philippine jungles at war's end, dying soldiers see a way of life turn to nightmare, a holy cause turn to madness and disease. The quest for identity begins with all pretenses stripped away. Ooka's Private Tamura is the incarnation of a horrifying possibility. Could contemporary man, could a Japanese, be a cannibal?