The Anatomy of Akogare

A review of Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams, Karen Kelsky, Duke University Press, 2001.

Forty years ago, Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi wrote The Anatomy of Dependence (or Amae no Kôzô, literally: “The Structure of Amae“). In this book, as in everyday Japanese language, amae refers to the feelings that all infants at the breast harbor for their mother–dependence, the desire to be passively loved, the unwillingness to be separated from the object of desire and cast into a world of “objective” reality. Takeo Doi’s basic premise was that Japanese men nurture these feelings well into their adult life, much more so than men raised in the West. For him, the concept of amae goes a long way in explaining the basic mentality of individuals and the organization of society in Japan.

What Takeo Doi did for amae, Karen Kelsky achieves it for akogare

What Takeo Doi did for amae, Karen Kelsky achieves it for another distinctly Japanese concept: the notion of akogare, translated variously as longing, desire, attraction, or idealization, in the context of Japanese women’s feelings toward the West. The approach is different: it is grounded in social anthropology, not popular psychology or essayism. Whereas Takeo Doi espoused the then dominant approach of nihonjinron, or theories of Japaneseness, Kelsky takes a critical perspective on broad categories such as “the Japanese.” Theoretically, Doi drew his inspiration from Freudian psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex (as interpreted by American psychologists), whereas Kelsky builds upon the notion of Lacan’s desire that arises from a fundamental lack and finds expression in a partial object or fetish. Kelsky’s book is therefore more attuned to postmodern sensibilities and critical perspectives that today dominate cultural studies in academic departments. More fundamentally, whereas amae was centered on Japanese men and their relation to their mother, akogare revolves around Japanese women and their sentimental or sexual attraction toward white men.

This makes Women on the Verge a profoundly disturbing book. Kelsky means to upset and to unsettle, as she herself was put off balance in the course of her research project: “I was told, more than once, that this was not an appropriate topic of academic enquiry”. An early research paper on the topic of promiscuous young office ladies traveling abroad, and the wave of indignation they caused when the offending term designating them  (“yellow cabs”) was popularized by the tabloid press, particularly came back to haunt her, with American men tracking her on the internet to confess pathetic details of their own sexual experience. But what makes the book even more disturbing is that it addresses issues every Western foreigner in Japan has encountered in a way or another. Business executives have all been exposed to assertions about Japan’s egregious “sexism” that “forces talented women abroad.” The media and the advertising industry reinforce stereotypes about idealized mixed couples–invariably, a white man and a Japanese woman–whereas the other combination–Japanese men marrying Western women–has much less social visibility and even faces negative prejudices–or at least that is what the author surmises, based on her own experience.

The Japanese Woman and the Western gaze

What keeps this book from stereotype, and the reader from voyeurism, is the rich theoretical apparatus, itself backed by a firm feminist perspective. Desire, Karen Kelsky underscores, is always an expression of power. And power itself is unevenly distributed along gender, racial, and sexual lines. Focusing on figures such as Tsuda Umeko (founder of Tsuda College), Sugimoto Etsu (author of A Daughter of the Samurai) and Katô Shizue (a pioneer in the birth control movement and a strong supporter of labor reform), the author tracks the emergence of a women’s discourse about the West/United States as a site of salvation from what they characterized as a feudalistic and oppressive patriarchal Japanese family system. Therein dates the idea, still fervently accepted by some women today, that Japanese women’s independence and advancement lie in the command of the English language, and the image of America as home of women’s emancipation. But the fetishization of the figure of the other crystallized during what Kelsky calls the “sexual nexus of the occupation”: Japanese women were desired by American men, while Japanese men were rebuffed by both American men and Japanese (and American) women. As she notes, “Women were not only desired as exotic Madame Butterfly (although that image, of course, played a role); they were also quickly rehabilitated as the “good” Japanese who, in contrast to duplicitous and violent men, were imagined to be malleable and eager for democratic reform.”

Having covered the historical background, the author turns to fieldwork, and to a new version of women’s narrative of Western akogare. As she notes, “the turn to the West only emerged as a widespread and popular option for middle-class women with the growth of the Japanese bubble economy in the 1980.” Using the money generated by the Japanese economy to embark on a program of intensive consumption of foreign goods, food, and travel, young single women soon emerged as the most thoroughly “cosmopolitan” population in Japan. There was a broad and deep shift of allegiance (the author uses the word: “defection”) from what women described as insular and outdated Japanese values to what they characterized as an expansive, liberating, international space of free and unfettered self-expression, personal discovery, and romantic freedom. Language courses, studies abroad, work abroad, and employment at international organizations such as the United Nations or in foreign-affiliate (gaishikei) firms gave these new internationalist women a new set of options to resist the conventional tracks of the gendered economy and to enter into alternative systems of thought and value. But as Kelsky notes, this turn to the foreign occurred “within an overarching logic of capital”: women’s akogare is “anticipated and recuperated by commodity logic, a logic that operates in increasingly subtle registers.”

A profoundly disturbing essay

In a way, commodity logic, and the dialectics between desire and its object, can even affect the reception of a book such as Women on the Verge. The same happened to Takeo Doi’s Anatomy of Amae: rendered into popular discourse, it continues to feed the clichés that were served to the author by some of her informants (“Japanese men have their mothers take care of them and they expect their wives to do the same.”) There is a thin line between academic scholarship, with its conditions of production and reception, and popular consumption of cultural products, which responds to another logic. In writing about women’s akogare, Karen Kelsky has taken a great risk: her book could as well fall prey to the same shortcuts, and reinforce the very stereotypes she means to undermine. Maybe the advice the author received at the outset of her research was right after all: an anthropologist should not hang around in pickup bars and ask questions nobody wants to answer, let alone listen to…