Page 32 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 19

and H. D. Harootunian demonstrate, 2 Japanese artists and intellectuals
often employ the image of the body, and the integrity of its ‘boundaries’,
within a larger allegorical framework; as such, it frequently provides a
vital component for imagining modern and contemporary notions of
‘Japanese-ness’.
For instance, one can clearly discern a discourse of ‘monstrosity’
and dangerous transmutations underlying contesting interpretations of
Japan’s so-called ‘modernisation’ in the years following the Meiji
restoration of 1868, a tumultuous period during which Japan emerged
from a relatively isolationist paradigm as a response to not only the
impact of Western cultural and military imperialism, but also the rapid
3
process of industrialisation it engendered.
As Tateishi notes, Inoue Tetsujiro, in his writings on
‘monsterology’ during the 1890s, merges metaphors of monstrosity with
a pathologisation of pre-‘modern’ Japanese theological (or ‘super-
stitious’) precepts in an attempt to reify convictions that ‘the conflict
between the past and the modern’ represented ‘a battle against monstrous
forces’, and that the ‘eradication of superstition…was instrumental to the
constitution of a healthy, modern Japanese state’ (Tateishi 2003: 296).
Marilyn Ivy advances a similar thesis in her description of the
construction of an increasingly discrete Japanese social body during the
mid- to late-nineteenth century. In particular, Ivy links Japan’s self-
identification as a ‘nation-state’ with ‘the threat of domination by
European and American powers’ (Ivy 1995: 4). In this sense, one can
understand the very idea of a ‘Japanese culture’ as ‘entirely modern’ (4).
A response to colonialist overtures, the creation and maintenance of a
definitive Japanese social body evolved within the cultural imaginary

2
As Elizabeth Ann Hull and Mark Siegel note in ‘Science Fiction,’ ‘[t]he industrial revolution
was not simply imported by the Orient; it was forced upon it, either through imperialistic
exploitation or, in the case of Japan, as a defense against exploitation.’ See Powers, R. G. and
Kato, H. (1989) Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture. New York: Greenwood Press, p. 245.
3
One manifestation of this ‘disintegrating’ effect was the apparent rise in individualised,
‘autonomous disciplines’, a system of social compartmentalisation in which an emerging
concentration on specialised fields of ‘knowledge’ led to the establishment of ‘barriers between
different areas of culture, causing mutual isolation and preventing genuine self-understanding.’
Harootunian 1989: 74.