REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE AND OTHER DESPERATE MEASURES

Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United StatesBy Adrienne Carey Hurley

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4942-6

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………….ixIntroduction……………………………………………………………………………….1PART 1 “Livid with History”: An Introduction to Part 1…………………………………………191. Survivor Discourse, the Limits of Objectivity, and Orpha……………………………………..302. Shizuko, the Silent Girl: Uchida Shungiku’s Fazaa Fakkaa……………………………………..463. “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean”: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina…………………75PART 2 The Message: An Introduction to Part 2…………………………………………………1074. Engendering First World Fears: The Teenager and the Terrorist…………………………………1225. “Killer Kids” and “Cutters”……………………………………………………………….1486. The Fiction of Hoshino Tomoyuki and Japanarchy 2k: Lonely Hearts Revolution…………………….177Conclusion. A Case for Reparations……………………………………………………………215Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………..223Notes……………………………………………………………………………………..225Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….247Index……………………………………………………………………………………..253

Chapter One

Survivor Discourse, the Limits of Objectivity, and Orpha

Over the past four decades, stories about childhood trauma have steadily become a mass media mainstay in everything from television talk shows to bestseller lists in both Japan and the U.S. Not surprisingly, the most conventionally successful examples can be characterized as inspirational or tabloid. In the U.S., for example, the popularity of David Pelzer’s autobiographies (A Child Called “It,” The Lost Boy, etc.), which recount his own childhood experiences of abuse and the dependency system, and several television miniseries about the murder of Jon Benét Ramsey fit comfortably into established genres of the uplifting and the scandalous, respectively. In Japan, volumes of letters describing memories of abuse and maltreatment were collected in a popular book series and website entitled Nihon ichi minikui oya e no tegami (Letters to Japan’s Most Despicable Parents), and television specials about celebrities who have beaten the odds and overcome illness, accidents, domestic violence, or other hardships provide a steady stream of inspirational viewing to complement the proliferation of iyasu-kei (soothing, healing-style, or therapeutic) literature.

Sometimes the inspirational and the tabloid merge with the melodramatic or the camp, as one finds in Miike Takashi’s Katakuri-ke no kofuku (The Happiness of the Katakuris; 2001), a musical-comedy horror film about a family whose country inn is the site of multiple gruesome deaths. While playing in the yard, seven-year-old Yurie, the youngest member of the Katakuri family, comes across a pile of decomposing corpses (who proceed to rise as zombies for a song-and-dance number), and her family’s response to her discovery is to “sing away” the trauma. Specifically, their song instructs the young girl to “look forward” and “be positive.” This comic enactment of the admonition to repress is presented as both tender and inspirational, the premise being that she will, of course, “get over it.”

The inspirational and the tabloid are also evident in news media accounts of high-profile incidents, particularly in the tendency to focus on certain violent crimes as isolated, extraordinary, aberrant, or shocking. This tendency would have us believe at times that there is an increase in school killings, for example, and at other times that these isolated incidents are rare spectacles for us to view or ponder from afar. Whether we are presented with an inspirational story of a courageous person who saved others or a tragic story of an innocent victim, the incident itself is often portrayed as shocking and “inexplicable.” Sensational characterizations of an attacker as “crazy,” “sick,” “deranged,” “hateful,” or “demented” offer diagnostic (if vague) conclusions that forestall understanding. For example, if we accept the opinion expressed by some reporters and analysts after the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 that Seung-Hui Cho was “demented,” we are not compelled to look further. In most corporate mass media reporting, Cho’s experiences of racism and class oppression, which were certainly discussed at great length and with empathy in some circles, did not warrant meaningful exploration because he was simply (if tragically) “demented,” and the temerity to suggest there may in fact be more to explicate and understand was preemptively framed as inappropriate and disrespectful to the victims.

When news stories about high-profile crimes circulate internationally, the tendency to forestall understanding is often pronounced even in the most responsible reporting. In his article of May 27, 2007, Bruce Wallace, staff writer for The Los Angeles Times, described the “grisly crimes alarming Japan,” such as the case of a twenty-year-old in Tokyo who had murdered and cut up his sister in January 2007. This incident was covered extensively in Japan at the time, and Wallace accurately conveys the sense of “alarm” fueled by the Japanese media’s coverage of ensuing murder stories. Wallace also carefully avoids assigning a peculiar cultural (Japanese) or historic (contemporary) cause to the series of crimes he relates by referring to cases of dismemberment from other countries and earlier historical periods. While refreshing in its refusal to rest easy with cultural peculiarity as an explanation, Wallace’s article nonetheless ends with the message that “some people” are simply so filled with “hate” that their actions cannot be explained. Specifically, Wallace quotes Jimmy Sakoda, a retired homicide detective from Los Angeles who had “close ties to Japanese police during his career,” as saying, “When someone dismembers a body, that’s total hatred … hate beyond reason.”

This book is, in part, a response to what is often misidentified as a recent increase in “inexplicable” child abuse and youth violence in both the U.S. and Japan but could be more accurately characterized as an increase in reported—to both police and news agencies—incidents. However, my primary concern is the simultaneous attention to stories of youth and violence and assessment of these stories as beyond reason or understanding. Child abuse and youth violence have often been discussed together to lament a perceived breakdown in social and family structures, but the more profound connections, which are not unique to recent generations of young people, continue to be suppressed. That some in both Japan and the U.S. assert a specific cultural or national identity by insisting that theirs is a community that values family, one in which “the family” is of primary importance, only further suppresses the more troubling relationship between child abuse (writ large) and youth violence.

The emergence of survivors’ networks, self-help literature, and nonprofit organizations dedicated to preventing abuse during the latter decades of the twentieth century (a time when the deployment of images of sexualized children and teenage “super-predators” in Japan and the U.S. also escalated) and the growing awareness of the reality and effects of abuse among mental health professionals and survivors’ networks have opened up possibilities for a growing number of survivors of abuse to “come out.” This growing awareness and space for survivor discourse and movements have developed alongside the emergence of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in the U.S., a nonprofit organization that supports parents whose children have accused them of abuse, and a host of debunkers. Breaking through the Manichean framework of such highly charged cultural spaces remains difficult, especially for youth. This is in large measure exacerbated by the inadequacy of the terms according to which discussions of abuse occur.

The Politics of Power and Children

Many of the concepts so useful in understanding trauma in adult and multigenerational communities are insufficient when applied to the case of children. So completely is the parent–child—and adult–child—relationship structured in terms of dependency that we cannot identify it as a relationship of differential power per se; differential power relations can only serve as a euphemism given the lopsidedness of the adult–child relationship. As adults, we discuss children and their futures; we make decisions on their behalf. School boards, politicians, religious organizations, and parents vie for the moral high ground, claiming theirs is the truly pro-child agenda far above competing versions of what is “best for the children.” Some of the most fiercely debated issues in contemporary politics in the U.S. (such as juvenile criminal justice and the death penalty, same-sex marriage, gun control, welfare, health care, and immigration) are frequently discussed and debated in terms of how they affect children, and educators, politicians, and pundits strive to prove that theirs is the agenda espousing the most child-centric model of “family values.” The very material needs of children, who are, indeed, uniquely dependent, leave them especially vulnerable, as a group and as individuals, to their adult caretakers—from those who make policies to parents.

Decision making in the adult caretaker–child relationship is unilateral, particularly in the case of the very young who cannot yet articulate an opinion, feed or clothe themselves, or safely navigate their surroundings without assistance. Parents clearly have the greatest and most immediate access to their children, especially in states such as the U.S. and Japan where the nuclear family’s privacy and parental rights may be seen as hallmarks of a free-market neoliberal democracy’s ability to provide a better society. Parents whose children are taken into state custody or whose parental rights are terminated in these countries are, as a result, frequently portrayed as deviant, abnormal, or atavistic. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 includes two articles (16 and 26) asserting the importance of family and parental rights, and the subsequent reaffirmations of parental authority are too numerous to mention here. The erroneousness of the myth that First World countries lead the vanguard in the official protection of children’s rights is particularly evident in the case of the U.S., which (along only with Somalia) refused to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989.

Henry Jenkins writes, “If politics is ultimately about the distribution of power, then the power imbalance between children and adults remains, at heart, a profoundly political matter.” At the same time, the differential power models that are so useful in understanding injustice among nations and corporations, among adults, fall short of explaining the position of the child in relation to the grownup. As liberation theorists such as Frantz Fanon have so successfully demonstrated, the colonized adult “Native,” for example, can never appropriately be seen as infantilized and dependent (even when the colonizer’s “Prospero complex” would have it otherwise), for to do so is to “explain away” colonialism and deny the “Native” individual subjectivity. Fanon, in critiquing Dominique-Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, wrote that to espouse Mannoni’s claim that the “germ” for a colonized person’s “inferiority complex” is “latent in him from childhood” is to pretend that any “so-called dependency complex” antedates colonial racism. Ideas such as Mannoni’s (which infantilize and pathologize those whose lives and communities have been disrupted at every level by imperialist expansionism) have served as justification for countless attacks on indigenous rights and cultures and have fueled the destruction of societies and communities considered somehow fortunate to be helped out of their own histories and traditions and into enforced dependency. But a child, unlike the colonized, occupied, or otherwise oppressed adult, is for a period of time necessarily dependent on adults for survival, a developmental reality that points to the limits of adult liberation theories’ applicability to the problem of child abuse.

Having all been children, we can conceive of childhood dependency in particular and personal ways. We have all “been there.” Yet when it comes to discussing the ways in which adults harm children, many adults feel uncomfortable and turn away from such stories. Since children rarely have the language to speak their experiences, our collective denial is made all the easier. We may oscillate between romanticizing children at play in a world free of adult stress and responsibility and lamenting how “horrible” youth are today. But we rarely engage in sustained and serious efforts to listen to children who struggle to communicate how they experience their realities to us. Anyone who interacts with severely abused youth knows it can be very difficult for children to comprehend and describe what has happened to them. Even those taken away from daily torture may, for example, speak lovingly of a parent who burned, beat, and raped them—or blame themselves, saying that they “made” a parent angry or somehow caused the abuse. It is not until years have passed that some adult survivors are able to find words to begin to recount what they endured and extricate themselves from the belief that they were “bad” and deserving of maltreatment.

Orphic Survival, Creative Writing, and the Model of the Good Reader

Central to the analyses that follow is the claim—counterintuitive perhaps, yet still demonstrable—that the very process by which an abused child manages repression can be transformed into a vehicle for speaking or writing about the abuse. That is to say, waiting among the fragmented and atomized shards of the abused child’s personality might be a way to integrate the traumatic experience into a more fully aware adult survivor identity. This seed or fragment and its possibilities, identified by Elizabeth Severn (a patient of Sádor Ferenczi) who called it “Orpha,” can be understood as the “organizing life instincts” that propel the victim toward self-preservation. Like the art of its likely namesake Orpheus, Orpha’s “music” can be both mysterious and beneficial. To better understand the significance of Severn’s and Ferenczi’s notion of Orpha, it is helpful to revisit the legend of Orpheus and the meanings attached to Orphic literatures and beliefs in classical Greek and Roman traditions. Orpheus’s descent to the Underworld to find his dead wife, Eurydice, is a familiar story that has inspired countless variations and allusions. Using his musical gifts to charm the spirits and win access to the Underworld, Orpheus searched for Eurydice, who had died from a snakebite. Her liberation required that he refrain from looking back at her and at hell, but Orpheus, afraid that Eurydice might not be behind him, looked back in contravention of the rule, and she disappeared. The message here, to understand Orpha, is that Orpheus’s music could work magic, but his desire to look back led to pain and amplified or prolonged grief. As conceived by Ferenczi (and Severn), Orpha similarly refers to a traumatized person’s simultaneous belief in (or experience of) the efficacy of a skill (such as musical performance) and fear of looking back.

Although he charms the gods and spirits of the Underworld with his music and they allow him to take Eurydice back from death, Orpheus is unable to resist looking behind to ensure that she is truly following him even after he is warned that doing so will mean that he will lose her forever. There are many other stories of Orpheus’s musical powers, such as the lyre performances that won the Argonauts safe passage through dangerous situations or stormy seas, and the religions, cults, or societies (described, for example, by Plato and Aristophanes) known as “Orphic” were in part defined by their belief in the efficacy of the “charms and incantations of Orpheus.” Common to the different myths and legends is the portrait of Orpheus’s ability to use music to pass through tremendous dangers. Orpheus’s ability to overcome adversity relies on what might best be described as creative distraction or trance. He fails only when he looks back and breaks the trance, an element of his story that surely made sense to Severn, who had repressed memories of sexual abuse until undergoing psychoanalysis with Ferenczi.

Severn saw her literal survival prior to analysis as rooted in a fragmented self she called Orpha. Like the magical Orpheus, whom one noted classicist explains “refuses to be submerged,” Severn’s Orphic fragment fought against psychological entombment in her childhood past. It warrants at least casual mention here that Orphic religions left behind literature and artifacts resembling toys dedicated to the “divine child,” and the figure of the child seems to have been central to Orphic worship. Although Ferenczi makes no mention of such historical practices, the appropriateness of Severn’s choice of the term “Orpha” to describe the remaining fragment of a tortured child’s personality is striking.

Like Orpheus who was instructed not to look back, the abused child is taught to look forward and away from traumatic experience. As Ferenczi noted in writings that departed from the teachings of his mentor, Sigmund Freud, every message that the abused child hears is designed to deny the traumatic abuse or prevent the child, whose communication skills are developing, from accessing a language that can speak to the trauma.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE AND OTHER DESPERATE MEASURESby Adrienne Carey Hurley Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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