Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 2B, Panel (continuation)
Panel organiser: Elise Edwards (Butler University)
Sharon Kinsella (Yale University)
The privileged socioeconomic status of schoolgirls emerging with the first girls’ schools in the prewar period was expressed in their idealized attributes of virginity and cleanliness. It is probable that this early conception of a girlish asexuality, which veered waywardly at times towards androgyny, dematerialized same-sex romance, and later cuteness, was partly constructed against the sexual nature of its fearful opposite: the experience of girls from poor, rural, and lower classes entering into factories, workshops, domestic service, and brothels. The split history of the schoolgirl’s progress and the segregated exploitation, sexual humiliation and bondage of working girls in their teens and twenties between 1870 and 1930 in particular, is recalled in the mythological battle that constitutes one of the core narratives of Lolita complex material. Brave little girls with weapons or magical powers battle for survival, and more specifically to avoid having their uniforms stripped away and becoming prisoners in violent and sexual underworlds. During the 1990s the curious literary fascination with the fate of girls in uniform and the themes of Lolita complex subculture, migrated from novels, comics and films, into news and journalism. The news and investigative reportage into schoolgirls ostensibly involved in compensated dating (enjo kosai) that dominated the mass-media in the later 1990s, represented the further popularization and concretization of the cultural memory of girls teetering on the boundary between pedagogical privilege and sexual servitude.
Ellen Schattschneider (Brandeis University)
Since 1945, the varied uniforms associated with members of the tokkōtai (Special Attack or “Kamikaze” forces) have become objects of intense pity, nostalgic longing, repulsion and fetishistic desire. Surviving family members, friends, and comrades often recall in detail their last glimpses of the deceased’s uniform, before he departed on his final mission; these memorypictures often resurface as complex, uncanny, images in film, anime, manga, dreams, and popular artistic projects. Major museums and memorials, lined with photographs of the uniformed dead, often preserve scraps of the uniforms themselves. Young re-enactors attired in tokkōtai uniforms perform at military memorial ceremonies and theatrical extravaganzas that celebrate the pilots’ ostensibly joyous self-sacrifice. Aged veterans produce paintings of their fallen comrades, giving great attention to the minutiae of their adornment, for display at Yasukuni shrine and at rites at related institutions; illuminated lanterns at Yasukuni shrine sometimes feature drawings of the spirits of uniformed tokkōtai protectively hovering over the living. Others insist that the uniforms were a kind of screen, underneath which the doomed pilots secreted objects, including family photographs and talismanic dolls that evoked their own doubts and internal conflict over their impending deaths and militarism. Based on fieldwork and archival research this paper argues that in their original and mimetic forms, the uniforms, which simultaneously evoke the tangible absence of the youthful pilots and their enduring personhood, have come to embody unresolved tensions and contradictions associated with the Asia-Pacific war and its ambiguous postwar legacies.Fiona Graham (National University of Singapore)
In this presentation, I will look at the position of happi in traditional festivals, and the use of happi in traditional festivals as unifying symbols and markers of inclusion and exclusion. This topic unexpectedly emerged during the filming of a television documentary in 2004 about four Japanese festivals that involved immediate danger to participants. The festivals were the Konomiya Naked Festival, in which approximately 10,000 men in loincloths jostle to try to touch a holy man; the Ombashira (Giant Log) Festival, where thirty to forty people ride a ten ton log down a steep slope; the Toyohashi Tezutsuhanabi (Handheld Fireworks) Festival, a fireworks festival where participants release the fireworks with their bare hands; and the Kishiwada Danjiri (Float) Festival, where teams of kimono-clad men pull heavy wooden floats through the town’s narrow and winding streets at breakneck pace. All of the festivals involve personal danger and not infrequent incidences of severe injury, and on occasion, death. The documentary used four members of a cult group that specializes in performance involving dangerous stage acts – the Tokyo Shock Boys – to present the program. Our initial fears that the Shock Boys – with their cult status and blonde and pink hair – would receive a cool reception from the organizers of these very traditional festivals paled in comparison to what quickly became a larger concern. The Shock Boys’ abilities to mesh with the festival were unexpectedly and severely hampered by what they were wearing. In fact, the entire course of the documentary became increasingly dictated by whether or not our presenters were wearing the correct happi jackets; our access to filmsites became increasingly controlled by whether we acquired the right happi.