Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex, and Society

by Sonia Ryang

This compelling and controversial book places the concept of love in both a social and historical context. Taking an approach in which state formation and vicissitude of power are explicitly taken into account in the discussion of intimacy and love, the author demonstrates that love as idealization and love as sexuality must be kept analytically separate. Chapters include discussions on sexualized rituals and fertility festivals, the murder case of Abe Sada, pure love in Miko and Mako’s tragedy and the 1990s phenomenon of ‘enjokosai’ or aid-date. Combining ethnographic, theoretical and archival research, this text will appeal to scholars of Japanese anthropology, feminist anthropology and gender studies alike.

Genres: Japan, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Asia

188 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2006

Reviews

[Lara Danielle]

This is such a great read. There is so much to love about this book; I don't even know where to begin gushing about it. For one, I loved how Sonia Ryang discussed love not merely in terms of the usual agape, eros, philia, storge, and the likes; rather, she has reconfigured love conceptually and historically in the Japanese context by sequestering the discussions into four categories of love: Sacred Sex, Sovereign Love (in which love was used a political technology by the state), Pure Love, and Body and Soul.

Despite its title, this book also tells us so much about the concept of love (mostly about the tangle of love and sex, romance and lust, and mind and body) and the different marriage and sexual practices in premodern Japan, and how they have been reconfigured and, if I may, hybridized during the Meiji Restoration/Westernization/Modernization period. We also see here how some of the practices have survived in the modern period, but are not even mentioned in Western literatures as Ryang also mentioned. One of the reasons is that Japan rendered some of their practices as taboo because they wanted to be seen as a civilized country that is equal with the Western countries.

There are so much more in here. And yep, I'd recommend this to fellow Japan scholars.

[Edwin Pietersma]

This is a book that you can say and feel a lot about, almost more than the whole book itself. I believe her argument, in principle, is quite strong: that the estrangement between sex and love as found in Japan prior to the development of nation-states, has gone through various stages in the last few hundred years: being employed as a weapon of political technology or bio-power (in the sense of Foucault) and that this is one of the reasoning behind the phenomena that is love today and in history: institutionalized as part of the political body - although not used in her work, it reminded me of the notion of kokutai - where love for the emperor was essentialized, leading to comfort woman and the Rape of Nanking, and after the war completely sanitized from the sexual connotations.
However, there are some major issues with this work. First of all, it is constantly wandering from one thing to another, often not making much sense. Second, it relies sometimes too much on Western theory without discussing them critically or helping to understand how it interrelates with Japan. Third, given her background, there is quite the emphasis on Korea, which is fascinating, yet is strange given it is the only example used of foreigners in Japan, disregarding how the cases of Taiwanese or others could complicate the issue. Fourth, the last part relies very heavily on the agency of people and how this is diverting and denationalizing love, but the notion of agency is completely lacking before 1945. This is rather odd and sad, because that could complicate or help to understand the situation much better.

[Yeast]

A soft-psychoanalytical, Foucault & Agamben inflected cultural studies of heterosexual love in Japan focusing on three moments: the mythic premodern, the violent empire-building (and dismantling), and postwar repression. The overreliance on text - and sometimes conflating text as media and the people receiving & acting on the message - and a fast & loose theorization of difficult (often traumatic) themes are both the lure and the limitation of the book (at least the book offers cultural architype to majority of romance/porn cliche one can find).

While the analysis of love for other/state/god/emperor is interesting in most of the book, the author's narrative falls flat in last chapter on the 1980s (or "postmodern" Japan), when evidently the love for things begins to compete with love for other humans. These things include consumerist objects, fictional characters (the discussion on Winter Sonata touches on this), pet & plants, or the environment. There are many other ways people reconnect to the realm of flesh and spirits, regardless how the state disciplines love.

Nevertheless still a satisfying and refreshing book with a consistent argument.

[alex]

There's a lot going on in here, though it is primarily an application of Foucault's governmentality and biopower to sex and love in Japan, as it has evolved historically. Essentially, she holds that the state, via its post-war sexual purity education, eugenics programs, comfort stations, and war-time exceptionalism, employs love strategically (biopower) for economic and political ends.

Her emphasis on the state's influence in defining love and sex was new to me. I sense that the relationship is weaker than she purports, but conceiving of love as a political technology is a pretty sexy idea and applying it to Japan's history of love seems a good fit.

[Liz Maas]

I'm not Japanese but I think this was a great starting point for research I was doing on the commodification culture of explicit sex, sexual services, and companionship in host club culture by going back to the time before host clubs became more prominent to get an idea of the cultural climate and treatment of love and intimacy. It was very informative.

[Lindu Pindu]

Though the author's goal is to link love and political exploitation of it, it ends up being much more than that; it looks at love in Japan throughout the ages, in a structured and positively engaging read.

[Geku]

I would happily recommend this to anyone interested in contemporary Japanese culture and society.