ABSTRACT
Although Westerners may look upon Japan with a certain sense of misconstrued exoticism, and see its people as ‘primitive’ and ‘childlike’,1 not everyone is taken in by the veneer of harmony and group identification. Critics of Japanese film and popular culture, for example, have had occasion to comment upon the nihilism and violence often found therein. However, since anthropologists dealing with Japan have rarely been interested in film, and since film critics are rarely interested in Japanese social organisation, the paradox between an ideology based on harmony and a popular culture which, noodle westerns notwithstanding, makes much of unharmonious activities has rarely been addressed. Buruma (1984) has suggested that the sort of violence alluded to in the following sections of this chapter provides an outlet by which Japanese society is made safer, and that the kinds of sadism, masochism, torture, and other forms of violence found in films and popular literature, are in effect mere fantasies of a people forced in their everyday lives to be gentle and meek. Violence is, in short, seen to be no more than a reversal of normal, everyday behaviour (behaviour that is very much along the lines of the group model)—‘a direct result of being made to conform to such a strict and limiting code of normality’ (1984:225).
