Page 33 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

20 Nightmare Japan

even as the trappings (both material and ideological) of western culture
became progressively familiar.
In contrast to writers like Inoue, twentieth-century Japanese
scholars and cultural theorists like Kamei Katsuichirō and Hayashi Fasao
perceived the introduction/incursion of western (largely US) culture as
contributing to a dissolution of a ‘sense of “wholeness” in life among the
Japanese’ (Harootunian 1989: 70). From this perspective, Westernising
forces are a deforming and disintegrating influence; the impact of western
culture disrupts a spiritually and socially coded ‘Japanese-ness’ that, as
Darrell William Davis asserts, had been shaped and reshaped ‘for a very
long time, even before Japan’s mid-nineteenth-century encounter with
American gunboats and the Meiji restoration of 1868’ (Davis 2001: 60-
1). Even to this day, over a half century after the Allied occupation
further facilitated the proliferation of western cultural hegemony, this
impulse to recover a perceived sense of social cohesion can still be
observed.
In contemporary Japan there has been a relentlessly obsessive
‘return’ to ‘origins’: an orchestrated attempt by the state to compensate
for the dissolution of the social by resurrecting ‘lost’ traditions against
modernism itself, and by imposing a master code declaring
‘homogeneity’ in a ‘heterogenous’ present. (Harootunian 2003: 66) Like
Inoue’s ‘monsterology’, which depicts enduring religious models (or
‘superstitions’) as a ‘monstrous’ pre-‘modern’ past threatening the
emergence of a newly modernist, industrial and internationally engaged
Japan, discourses that call for a resistance of western cultural and military
imperialism through the restoration of a conspicuously unified and
‘Japanese’ past promote a narrative in which a return of a ‘repressed’
and/or ‘oppressed’ identity figures prominently. 4 Both ideologies,

4
D. P. Martinez recognises the logic behind this narrative as a rhetorical (and frequently
aesthetic) construct that presents an almost panicked reification of a illusory ‘wholeness’
through a depiction of the Japanese national identity as discrete and homogenous: ‘Japan is
similar to many modern nation-states in that it has had to construct a model of a unitary
identity shared by all citizens. Identity no longer depends on religious models or on loyalty to
one particular ruler, leader, but on the wider construct of the imagined national community.
This nationalism depends on the mass production of mass culture and, while the logic of
capitalism (late or otherwise) demands diversification, the underlying logic of one identity (the
Japanese) as different from that of their neighbors (let us say, Korea or China) remains crucial