Lovesick Japan: Sex, Marriage, Romance, Law (review)

How often does a Monumenta reviewer worry about reading his assigned book on the plane, lest the person sitting next to him glance at it over his shoulder? But then how often does a Monumenta author review books with chapter titles like "Coupling" and "Private Sex"? I did worry about reading Lovesick Japan on the plane, and I think with good reason. When my eighteen-year-old daughter saw me with the book, she warned: the person next to you might "think you're kind of creepy."

And "kind of creepy" it is. "Love glooms eternal" in Japan, warns law professor Mark D. West (p. 216), because people are "lovesick." According to Japanese judges, when "people fall in love, they suffer, in the most extreme cases to the point of death, experiencing overwhelming, unavoidable, and disruptive emotions" (p. 216).

Japanese want love, West tells us. They dream of it. They pine for it. But they almost never experience it. And when they do, it brings nothing good. Think Emily Brontë's Catherine and Heathcliff. Love in Japan seems a brooding obsession that hovers disembodied over a dark landscape, destroying homes, careers, families, lives. Perhaps I overstate West's point a bit—but I do not think I overstate it much. Glooming eternal, as West put it, "love in Japanese court opinions is often darker and . . . more difficult to overcome" than love in the West. It is "an overwhelming, disorienting force to which people unwittingly cede self-control" (p. 29).

Tranquil, according to West, Japanese love is not. Happy it is not. And comforting it is not. West's young men do not befriend women (pp. 30-31, 218). When they have sex, often they do not have sex with lovers. Instead, many hire prostitutes—"the first sexual partner for more than half of men over 30" (p. 108). Presumably (by my simple algebra), most young women must not be having sex very often either. They do apparently read modern pulp variations on Brontë's Catherine and Heathcliff. They do yearn for love and passion. But they keep their yearning safely compartmentalized, West tells us. They dream of passion, but marry for comfort and security instead.

A prolific and brilliant legal scholar, West draws these conclusions from Japanese court opinions. Some of them concern criminal prosecutions for rape or murder. Others involve civil suits for divorce or damages. West carefully and thoughtfully combs these opinions for discussions of love, sex, marriage, and romance, teasing out what judges think about it all. He constructs what he calls the "official perspective on how real individuals in Japan confront the painfully human issues that surround love, sex, and marriage" (p. 8). He contrasts the thoughts of Japanese judges about these subjects with those of judges in Western countries and of Japanese citizens more generally.

West understands the organizational environment within which judges work, and he provides a description as good as anything available anywhere (see chapter 1). He recognizes the incentives litigants have to skew their stories in their favor. He realizes that court cases are a collection of "outliers" rather than a random sample of disputes (p. 11). He is well aware that when judges write opinions, they "choose, eliminate, emphasize, and downplay facts to justify their decisions" (p. 11).

In drawing his conclusions, West necessarily takes two crucial intellectual steps: (a) from court opinions, he infers what judges think about love, sex, marriage and romance, and (b) from these judicial attitudes, he generalizes to the thoughts of Japanese overall. Very much to his credit, West takes these steps with great care and sophistication. He self-consciously describes what he does and explains why he does it. Both steps, however, remain inherently worrisome.

Ask first what a court opinion might disclose about the thinking of its author—a judge—concerning love and sex. Apparently, two of the more common types of cases in West's data set are rape prosecutions and divorce petitions. "Among the recurring factual elements in the...