Re-inventing Japan by Morris-Suzuki Tessa

Author:Morris-Suzuki, Tessa.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317461142
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Placed in the context of philosophies of the family state, this image of the emperor’s two bodies—one male, the other often implicitly female—is very illuminating. It not only symbolizes a constantly repeated identification of masculinity with visibility, action, and change and femininity with invisibility, equilibrium, and continuity; it also enables the family state, and its symbol—the body of the emperor—to become the place where the harsh realities of gender difference were obliterated. This construction of national identity, in other words, is one where the all-embracing love of the family state is seen as absorbing and consuming gender difference in rather the same way as it was also seen as absorbing and consuming cultural and racial difference. Just as the Japanese state was understood, in many versions of nationalist ideology, to be the still center which endlessly assimilated ethnic minorities without losing its essential “Japaneseness,” so too in the person of the emperor, it has become the still center which invisibly embodies and therefore subsumes the female without losing its visible male essence.

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