Page 52 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Guinea Pigs and Entrails 39

industry and property. Lost amidst such rhetoric, as Michael Schaller
reminds us in his history of late twentieth century US and Japanese
international relations, is the extent to which the US not only played a
significant role in the creation of the Japanese ‘economic miracle’, but
also depended upon a Japanese national stability to satisfy its own
imperialist agenda in East Asia (1997: 96-113).
Similar anxieties surrounding the rise of Japanese economic
power, accompanied by representations of monstrosity, permeated the
dominant social and political ideologies of other nations across the globe.
As Tanaka illustrates, Australia – whose soldiers in the South Pacific
during World War II contributed eye-witness accounts of Japanese war
crimes – was particularly noteworthy in this regard:

The reports of cannibalism dovetailed easily with the picture of the Japanese
developed in Australian propaganda during the war: that the Japanese were a
Jekyll and Hyde-type people capable in a stroke of switching from refined and
civilised activity to savagery and barbarity…This view…carried over into the
Australian image of the Japanese “economic miracle” in the postwar period.
On the surface, Japan is seen as a society to emulate and learn from, especially,
in its development of a highly successful business- and technology-oriented
society with a consumers-based approach to industrial relations. Yet
underneath there persists a belief that the Japanese are somehow different from
other cultures and that they would have been easily capable of purely
gratuitous cannibalism. (1996: 132-3)

This ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ motif appears throughout Tabe’s Devil Woman
Doctor. Its most explicit iteration occurs in a brief sequence during which
the title character dines with a patient whose body’s right half has taken
on a life of its own and viciously assaults the very organs and muscles
that give it life. Only a fork driven through the hand can temporarily
squelch the rebellion. The doctor calls the illness ‘Jekyll and Hyde
disease’ and notes that ‘every human being’ suffers from some degree of
this simultaneously internal and externalising combination of
‘[c]omposure and violence… [i]ndul-gence and daintiness’. Presented in
an overtly slapstick fashion (complete with ample physical exaggerations
on the part of the actor portraying ‘the patient’), this scene suggests that
the ailment afflicting the patient is one with which ‘everybody’ can relate.
It defines the self-combatant behaviour as universal, effecting humans as