When Escape is a Trap: The Gendered Construction of Identity in Japan

Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan, by Anne Allison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 225 pp. $16.95.

Ideology is so potent because it becomes not only ours but us--the terms and machinery by which we structure ourselves and identify who we are.

In Japan, not every comic book contains a story you can read to a child. The Japanese comic book (manga) industry is enormously profitable, as manga have wide demographic appeal among children, teenagers, and adults. However, manga are not necessarily an innocuous form of entertainment and escapism. A large market for pornographic comics that depict gender roles of female submissiveness and male voyeurism, as well as various forms of violence against women, also exists within the industry. In a wide-ranging discussion that includes analyses of various types of sexually explicit manga and their social impact, Anne Allison examines how desire and the "everyday life" define and transform identity in Japan. She explores a variety of social phenomena, such as the "education mama," the ideological and symbolic meaning of Japanese boxed lunches, and the urban legends of mother-child incest, as well as the government's response to pornography.

While the book begins promisingly by providing a contextual description of the status of women in Japan, it quickly digresses into a frustratingly broad variety of topics. Initially, Allison establishes the fact of fundamental inequity among the sexes in Japan, discussing wage differentials that place women's average wages at 60 percent of the average male's, the two-track career system women face in the workplace, and changing social roles for women. However, later chapters do not address the pressures that recent social and demographic changes will put on traditional social structures and the process of identity formation she describes.

Allison's argument is not designed to pass judgment on pornography as a social evil. Rather, it seeks to achieve a deeper understanding of power relations, not only between men and women but also between citizens and the state. The larger message of pornographic manga, Allison argues, reinforces the hegemony of a centralized state in which men perform a gendered role as financial providers and women function as homemakers and mothers. Allison discusses how the representations of women in pornographic manga, different types of which are designed to appeal to either male or female audiences, reinforce the existing social structure and reproduce the aims of the state. These representations protect the wholesome image of woman as mother while undermining the power of women to act beyond that role.

The construction of specific, limiting gender roles serves the state on a number of levels. Allison discusses how pornography encourages a way of looking at women that is institutionalized in the broader political, economic, and social context, reinforcing the marginalization of women outside the home. As Allison's analysis of specific pornographic manga illustrates, women are either innocently surprised to find themselves naked and feel ashamed, or actively seek sexual experience and are punished through rape or other acts of violence. Men, on the other hand, are often confined to passive, voyeuristic roles, particularly in children's comics. This passivity means that violence against women in manga is not automatically empowering to males, despite the fact that men are generally portrayed as having oppressive physical control over women.

Male and female social roles reflect the gender divide that manga reinforce. The Japanese society, according to Allison, values the mother's role more than any other society. The family, however, is the only realm in which women are granted such status. "A gendered division of labor is firmly in place. Labor from males, socialized to be compliant and hard working, is more extractable when they have wives to rely on for almost all domestic and familial management.... [F]emales become a source of cheap labor...because their domestic duties...