B O O K R E V I E W E S S A Y S 885

Wrappings of Japan

ANNE ALLISON Duke University

Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language. Jane M. Bachnik and Charles J. Quinn Jr., eds. Princeton, N J Princeton University Press, 1994.310 pp.

Women, Media and Consumption in Japan. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran, eds. Oxford Marton Book Services, 1995.318 pp.

The act of wrapping-enveloping things that are carried, exchanged, presented, or purchased in casings that both mark and hide what they cover-is a com- mon and constant practice in Japan. Money that changes hands is put in decorated envelopes, pur- chases at stores are neatly packaged, toiletries carried to the public bath are wrapped in furoshiki (cloth that is tied), and even simple gifts of fruit are decoratively presented. For visitors to Japan, the custom of wrap- ping often appears as a charming ritual that decorates even the most mundane acts. Those who study Japan, however, often treat this practice as a paradigmatic behavior that congeals the patterns or logic of Japa- nese culture.

Ruth Benedict (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, New American Library, 1974) used the analogy of the onion to characterize the Japanese as so en- wrapped in ritualized expectations that there is no "real" center to their cultural practices. Roland Barthes (Empire ofs igm, Hill and Wang, 1982) simi- larly saw in the Japanese proclivity to package things, including themselves (in bowing, for example), a post- modern aesthetic of the decentered or emptied self: "the package is not empty, but emptied" (1982:46). In contrast, others have argued that the proclivity to ritu- alize external appearance reveals a subjectivity and social structure different from Western individualism, which has been variously called relational, context-de- pendent, and particularistic. Agreeing that Japanese have a distinctive cultural style, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (In Praise of Shadows, Leete's Island Books, 1977) suggested that it results from a preoccupation with localizing meaning, not on one or the other side of a given border, but in the border itself: in a dark lacquer dish flecked with gold, a wooden toilet that is kept dark and scented with boughs, or a woman dressed in a kimono that reveals only the nape of her neck.

The theme of two recent anthologies on Japan is wrapping. One focuses on the dichotomy uchiJsoto (in- sideloutside), which organizes linguistic and social discourse into a pattern of "situated" meanings. The

other focuses on the packaging of women in the mass media, which has skyrocketed in Japan since the 1980s. Both texts are grounded in the observation that external appearance in Japan often masks radically different aspects of identity, status, and power rela- tions. And, in both, the aim is to make sense of shifts in behavior, meaning, and identity in different con- texts.

The first of the two collections, Situated Mean- ing, edited by Jane Bachnik and Charles Quinn, exam- ines a concept with a long history in Japanese studies. Uchi/soto is a binarism that differentiates the world into categories of inside and outside that are contextu- ally relative. Uchi can refer to one's family, company, school, country, town, neighborhood, or gender and, as a marker of self, is organized in terms of what or who is constituted as "other." While certainly not unique, what distinguishes Japanese "othering" prac- tices, according to the editors, is the degree to which the linguistic markers of uchi and soto so fundamen- tally and extensively organize Japanese selfhood and society. This is reflected in the heavy usage of index- ing (in Peirce's terms, signaling spatiotemporal rela- tions between two points in a context), which coordi- nates with a construction of self that is interdependent and an organization of society that is relational.

As Bachnik writes in her introduction, the goal of the book is to illuminate the processual nature by which (1) uchi and soto index dualities, (2) they do so by operating in inverse relation to each other, and (3) the axis (uchi is more anchored and therefore acts as a deictic reference point) can shift, allowing a different organizational level of relationships to be indexed.

The contributors, drawn from linguistics, litera- ture, and anthropology, approach the'subject in a vari- ety of ways, ranging from theoretical to applied analy- ses of situated meaning. Articles examine the operation of uchi/soto in terms of the deictic anchor- ing of uchi (Wetzel), the processes of indexing and shifting in language use (Sukle), and the multiplicity of experiences that uchi/soto reference (Quinn). Quinn, in a second essay, offers a profound grammatical and semiotic analysis of uchikoto. Some of the articles mix linguistic analysis with ethnographic illustration: Rosenberger considers the indexing of hierarchy through gender by analyzing domestic interactions in her host family, and Bachnik (in the second of three essays) treats family organization (ie) as it is mapped onto and by the deictic anchoring of uchi.

The remainder of the articles treat the experien- tial, contested, and manipulated terrain of indexical

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boundaries. Dorinne Kondo discusses the multiple meanings triggered by “uchi no kaisha” (my company, company as inside), arguing that this strategic deploy- ment of power is naturalized because it is encom- passed within the parameters of uchi/soto. Matthews Hamabata presents the case of an elite family’s disinte- gration after the patriarch’s refusal to follow the rules of inside/outside in marriage. Michael Molasky ana- lyzes Shiga Naoya’s story “The Razor” as a study of someone driven to murder by the obliteration, both desired and feared, of the boundary between self and other. Bachnik examines the production of hierarchy and solidarity within a family unit.

This scholarly and elegant collection will be use- ful to anyone concerned about uchi/soto as a lexicon for contextual meaning. Its weakness is the adherence to a belief in an eternal, even essential, cultural princi- ple that locates Japaneseness. In Quinn’s words, the uchi/soto dichotomy, practiced since the eighth cen- tury in Japan, constitutes a “pattern which connects” for Japanese culture, and incorporates the contempo- rary world into the same framework. While the editors disclaim seeking core values of Japanese culture, this is precisely what they do in their reification of uchi/soto, despite their emphasis of its contextual and processual qualities. While the authors document be- havior that exists in Japan today, they overlook the ideological, historical, and political nature of uchi/soto (these problems are largely avoided by Kondo, Hamabata, and Molasky) and avoid considering as- pects of life in Japan that cannot be reduced or ex- plained in terms of shared characteristics. Race, for example, is nowhere mentioned in this book. Given that Japanese studies, as a field, has been so burdened and weakened by the tendency to seek Japaneseness through examinations of unique and essential traits, it is disappointing that any scholarship on Japan today continues in this direction.

This problem is avoided by the editors of the sec- ond volume, Women, Media and Consumption in Ja- pan, which aims to read the proliferation of images of and for women in Japanese consumer culture against the secondary position women hold in the labor mar- ket. As they argue, mass media provide the “corner- stone of feminine gender identification” in contempo- rary Japan because women are the primary consumers (p. 5). But does the prominence women assume in con- sumer culture (dominant as both images used to sell products and as targeted consumers) reflect the social centrality of women in contemporary Japan? Adopting a phrase from Dick Hebdige, the editors say that women are “hiding in the light.” While central as media images and consumers, women remain subordinate in other domains of society, namely production (which remains heavily masculinist despite the fact that 43

percent of wage earners are women). For Skov and Moeran, this means that the position of Japanese women is complicated and irreducible to a single model, whether it be as mass consumer, media image, or producer.

The editors’ introduction to this volume is master- ful. It reminds me of Joseph Tobin’s introduction to Re-Made in Japan (Yale University Press, 1992) in terms of its comprehensiveness in introducing the lit- erature and history of a new field in Japanese studies. In it, the editors offer a history of relevant issues (la- bor market, consumption, mass media, family, mar- riage, and the role of women in all of the above) and discuss the relations enveloping consumption today (e.g., sexuality, power, cultural homogeneity, the state, nationalism, women’s magazines, cross-read- ings, lifestyle, and work). In this, the editors focus on key points that are developed in a number of the other essays. One is questioning the historicity of the 1980s when the market directed more attention than ever to women as consumers. Explanations given here include the shift from a production- to a consumption-based economy, the rise in working women with consumer needs (such as convenience food), and the connection between women and lifestyle issues (women being more associated with leisure than men in part because they are less cemented to careers and permanent jobs), which became the target of so many consumer campaigns in the 1980s.

A second theme, introduced here and reiterated throughout the book, is that Japanese women are not now and never have been peripheral to the “main dy- namics” of Japanese society. The editors critique the dominance of this view in Japanese studies, including what they argue to be an insensitivity to gender in analyses of Japanese postmodernism and consumer society, such as those by Harry Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi. The aim here is to move beyond con- ceptions of Japanese women as “merely passive dupes” in their role as consumers. One of the strengths of the book is the attempt to actually examine the lives, desires, constraints, choices, and frustrations of Japanese women as a means of making sense of how and why they consume what they do of mass media.

The essays in this book are varied and rich. Paul Harvey nicely analyzes the incredible popularity of Oshin, a morning “serialized novel” (asadora) on tele- vision in 1983-84, whose heroine combined a new kind of female role model (tough and successful) with tradi- tional feminine values. Brian Moeran examines the magazine Katei Gaho, which is geared to the tastes and “dreams” of the archetypical, 40-year-old, married, middle-class woman. Moeran’s thesis, that these dreams (of beautiful houses, and beautifully dressed women) are both fantasies of displacement and aes-

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theticizations of the everyday, is similar to Rosenber- ger's argument that, in the magazines geared to women over 25 she examined, there are two worldviews pre- sented a local world, which is work and family ori- ented and Japanese, and a global world, which offers the escape of leisure and travel. Similar examinations of the dreams presented to particular types of female audiences recur throughout the book.

Lise Skov's essay on environmentalism seems less pertinent to the issue of women but is wonderful in its demonstration of how ideas get fetishized in Japanese media; the word ecology is used to sell commodities not ecological in the least. Noting the saturation of advertising in Japan (ads constitute 50 percent of the content in many magazines), John Clammers examines media with three targeted audiences (female, male, and both) to question whether their depictions of women significantly differ (no, he concludes). By con- trast, Sharon Kinsella's essay on the "cute" (kawaii) trend in consumer culture, started by Sanrio with de- signs of adorable animals like "Hello Kitty" in the 1970s, is as well grounded ethnographically as it is analytically provocative. Cuteness is related to pitiful- ness (kawaisu), she demonstrates, and symbolizes the liberation from responsibility (enticing but mutilating) embodied more broadly by the female-led youth cul- ture.

Merry White studies the packaging of teenagers by the mass media and, based on a four-year study, con- cludes that consumer culture offers an "identity forma- tion" for youth that both complements and contradicts that established for them in education and family life. John Treat's essay, a beautiful complement to Kin- sella's, looks at the incredible appeal of Yoshimoto

Banana's novel Kitchen (Washington Square Press, 1988), written by a shoju (young female) and about shojo (as really a gender-emptied term-"not quite fe- male"), as the subjectivity for Japan's consumer cul- ture of the 1990s. Seeing the kitchen in the novel as a site of both production and consumption that yields a new kind of family formation, Treat analyzes its ab- sence of phallicism as "anti-Oedipal" (using Deleuze and Guattari) and questions whether this is the model for consumerism in Japan's postmodern era.

The note on which this book ends, Treat's contem- plation of Japanese postmodernism, is one on which I wish more of the book had been spent. Despite the editor's framing of their problem as the prominence of women as consumers and images considered "in light" of the hidden place of women in the labor market, this relationship is not sufficiently problematized. That is, while both sides of some sort of consumptiodproduc- tion line are adequately described (though one major lapse is in examining the image of and role played by women as mothers), the line itself is not really probed, either analytically or theoretically. The danger of not tweaking or pushing this line is in potentially reifying it as some sort of cultural fact about Japan: a place that wraps its women as (no more than) mass consum- ers and images. None of this takes away, however, from the incredible contribution Women, Media and Consumption in Japan makes to the multiple fields (Japanese studies, anthropology, mass culture, mass media, and feminism) long devoid of scholarship on Japanese mass media and women. This is an incredibly solid, careful, evocative, creative, and sparkling collec- tion, which should be read by anyone interested in the subject.