Baby Making Machines

BABY MAKING MACHINES.

Women’s only other value outside the realm of pleasure and social adornment is their childbearing attributes. When I first got here, former Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa, addressing prefectural assembly members of the Liberal Democratic Party, expressed how he and other members of the gerontocracy truly felt about women. “The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed. Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head.” A month later, former Kochi City Assembly member Toshiyuki Shimazaki also from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, referred to women as rusted machines, after Social Democratic Party leader Mizuho Fukushima and other women politicians had criticized Yanagisawa, demanding his resignation after his uncouth and insensitive remarks.

“The SDP’s (Social Democratic Party) Ms. Fukushima and those old women whose machines are rusted are making a fuss,” Shimazaki was reported as saying at a party of three hundred. Showcasing the errant ineptitude and insensitivity of the misogyny, Shimazaki was happy to state that, at a previous gathering, he had passed a similar remark, which drew protests from women in the audience but, applause from men. Two decades on, the gerontocracy’s sentiments toward women have not changed.

Though currently and rightfully on reproductive go-slow, or womb strike, most women continue to internalize the aesthetic expectation from centuries past. Consequently, in this nation of acutely insecure and diffident people, it is impossible for women to even venture to collect the mail without make up and their armor of Gucci, Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo, or other name brands about which I knew nothing before arriving in Japan. Collectively timorous and self-effacing, Japanese women rely on these brands as a source of identity. In fact, wearing make-up and being well dressed is an obligatory display of courtesy to strangers, a cultural tenet which all but ensures abiding self-hate and the inability for them to accept themselves for who they are. Among those who go to the gym, especially in the countryside, many women do so in full regalia, and some, again especially in the countryside, even wear nylons to do aerobics, for reasons still a mystery to me.

Hence, Japanese society sees it as a woman’s duty to always look as beautiful as possible, while continually concealing any speckle of intelligence. Women are objects to be exhibited. The spotlessly dressed fashion models can be observed daily on the trains, peering at themselves in handheld mirrors in their ritual primping and preening, applying full make-up, even using eyelash curlers, engaged in what seems to be an endless futile battle to secure that unruly lock in place. Like prepubescent or teenage girls in the West, they suffer chronic appearance anxiety, constantly relying on the mirror for reassurance, checking every few minutes in utter disbelief at the discrepancy between their real and ideal perception of self.

Further reinforcing this behaviour is the fact that praises and compliments are not customary in the cultural terrain. In fact, Japan customarily relies more on negative than on positive reinforcement, so that it is the norm to be derided by family members, in hopes that one will become thicker skinned, stronger and a better person. But in achieving just the opposite effect, many of the chided and derided grow up with a strong hate for self and the inability to accept themselves for who and how they are. One of my girlfriends, Azusa, among the most beautiful women I have met ever, who grew up in an extended family, was always told since childhood that she looked too Asian, especially her eyes. So, at nineteen she went under the knife to remove her epicanthic fold, in the hopes of making her eyes more Western looking. Fortunately, the operation was somewhat of a failure and after spending some $2,000, to my delight, her epicanthic fold was still present. As if the Japanese collective wasn’t insecure enough, COVID 19 was the stake in the coffin bringing with it a new phenomenon: mask addiction.

When I taught in Ibaraki in 2016, one of my dyadic conversation students - a young woman in her mid-20s - showed up to class in a mask. Here in Japan, it is common courtesy to wear a mask when one has a cold, so as not to spread one’s germs around. Upon seeing her mask, I became worried about contracting her illness and began to question her about how long she’d been sick.

“I’m not sick,” she responded. “Today, no make.”

I damn near fell out of my chair in shock. Never before had I heard this or heard of this: Someone wearing a mask because she was not wearing any make-up. Later that year, a survey in Tokyo revealed that 30% of women wore masks because they were not wearing make-up. That was long before the pandemic. Fast forward to March 2021, my return to Japan at the height of the pandemic. There was not an uncovered face outdoors save for mine, my wife’s and our daughter’s. The Japanese even masked up alone on their bicycles, alone in their cars. I met a 3-year-old at a nearby park, whose mother told me she had been putting the child in a mask since the child was a year old. And at 3, the child will not leave the house without her mask. Of course, being the wonderful, knowledgeable mother she was, she was only happy to enable the child by accessorizing all her masks and making sure they had matching outfits. The pandemic is now in the rearview mirror, but many Japanese, women and girls especially, after having not seen their own faces for three years, can’t stand the looks of their faces. It is my opinion that, collectively afflicted with such profound insecurity many Japanese women eagerly welcomed the opportunity to hide their faces

I am all too familiar with such insecurities. As a child, I too checked the mirror obsessively in hopes for a metamorphosis of my then perceived ugly black face. Akin to repeatedly opening the door of one’s bare refrigerator, hoping that some food would mysteriously appear between viewing intervals, I too was compelled to constantly comb my hair, hoping that the kinks would straighten. Like many empty women in the West, the Japanese female’s tenebrously low self-esteem propels rabid consumerism in desperate attempts to fill the void created by their oppressive socialization. Some Japanese men too can be observed in this public preening ritual, tirelessly fixing their hair and on occasion the string in their eyelids to give their eyes that Western look.

As a voyeur the unhealthily high level of self-consciousness and insecurities possessed by Japanese women were exceptionally frustrating. Frequently they wanted to have sex in the dark, while I wanted the floodlights on. But a few showers together did the trick of deleting their inhibitions and self-obsessions. In fact, no Japanese woman without prior contact with foreign men, with whom I have had dinner had ever been bathed by a man except her father in her childhood. Programmed to be givers of pleasure, they had never experienced the ecstasy of a lover giving them a bath, which I always did, in complete role reversal. Possessing a full understanding of the power of the sheer heavenly nature of receiving a bath, it was my ritual to impart this watery pleasure to all my Japanese dinner guests. For if there is one thing at which I excel, that is giving a woman the most sensuous and sapid ablution of her life. My memories of my mother washing me in that yellow plastic tub are as vivid as if they were this morning. Her fifteen-minute washes were brief escapes from my wretched environment, and I would cry, plead and beg her to continue when she was done. In giving those affection-deprived Japanese women the unspeakable pleasure of a proper cleansing, I always applied my mother’s technique. If they didn’t return for the sex – in cases where it was too painful - they would most certainly return for the shower, about which many said they’d often read in Japanese romance novels, but never actually experienced.

Soon thereafter, they all lost their pre-occupation with their bodies and began to allow me to shoot cell phone photos and videos. In no time these insecure overly self-obsessed women became porn stars in my apartment. Having shedded the burden of unhealthy self-consciousness, they gained self-confidence and lost their make-up dependence, which had been plaguing them for years. Many expressed to me that my having complimented and approved of them even without make-up gave them the confidence to accept themselves. By no means am I some kind of Amish or member of some other fundamentalist group who, like my mother, thinks that wearing make up ensures a one-way ticket on the bullet train straight to hell. On the contrary, I quite like make-up. What I hate is make up dependence, an affliction of most Japanese women and of many insecure women in the West.

Unlike in the West - especially in the United States - the pursuit of individual happiness is not a right and is a relatively recent foreign concept in the Japanese psyche. During feudal times the masses held no rights, only obligations, an arrangement still present in contemporary Japan. In this hierarchal Confucian society, human rights abuse is the norm. Workers have the right to paid overtime, but a hundred hours per week of unpaid overtime is common in Japan. Running counter to natural human thinking, the Japanese appear in general to minimize pleasure and maximize pain. All of life is an unending, character building shugyou (endurance course) to develop one’s strength, one of the reasons promoting the absence of central heating in Japanese homes. Only after arriving in Japan did I become cognizant of how much I had taken for granted, the constitutional right in the United States, to the pursuit of happiness, a pursuit, which in Japan is likely to invite the term wagamama (selfish). It is this socialization to view life as mostly painful, which causes them to cling so desperately to their hobbies, that one thing in which they bury themselves obsessively. The hobby is of utmost importance to the Japanese and when I tell them that my hobby is life itself, they’re overcome by confusion.

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ASHIYA PRINCESS: THE HEAD GAME CONTINUES