imomus | Mazakon

Mazakon

2001: A Japanese man is lying on the ground in a waste plot somewhere, masturbating. "Mother! Mother!" he shouts. The man is Kaikai Kiki performance artist Mr, and he's in a video in the Superflat show in Los Angeles. It's a satire, perhaps, on the Japanese mother complex, the mazaa konpurekkusu or mazakon.

2004: Fuji TV in Japan is scoring high ratings with a new drama series called "Mother and Lover". Shingo is an actor and his mother is the woman he loves most in the world. One day he meets an office lady called Hitomi. She's late for work, so Shingo takes her to her office in a rickshaw. They make a date, and things go well. The conflict driving the drama is the inevitable moment when Shingo will have to choose between his lover and his mother. But will Shingo have to make a choice? Perhaps Hitomi will simply become his new mother.

A singer I worked with was explaining why she split up with her boyfriend. "He is mazakon," she said. "He wants me to be his mother. But he will never give up his real mother."

After children are born to Japanese couples, their rate of sexual intercourse falls off dramatically. Sometimes they stop making love altogether. It's quite common for the husband to start referring to his wife as okaasan: mother.

Here's "Mother and Lover" scriptwriter Yoshikazu Okada talking about his work in a Mainichi News article headlined "Submissive men need coddling from erotic mother lovers":

"There's too big of a gap between the reality that men are actually the weaker-minded of the sexes and the demand that they be manly," Okada says. "Men should act more naturally in showing their love for mothers and women."

The article has some stats which show that mazakon is getting more popular in Japan. Men are seeking older women, says the paper: "Back in 1987, only 17.8 percent of Japanese married men had an older wife, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, but by 2002, that figure had grown to 32.4 percent." And women are trying to emphasize not just large maternal breasts, but also large maternal instincts: "An An, one of Japan's top women's magazines, devoted a large chunk of its October issue to telling readers the techniques they'd need to show off the maternal instincts that would make them attractive to men. Among the headlines were "Three-Step Training Techniques for Waking Your Latent Instincts," "Where Guys Detect Maternal Instincts" and "Killer Maternal Instincts to Knock Out Guys in a Second."

I wonder what Betty Friedan, American author of the 3 million-selling 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique" (she died this week), would make of this definition of power? Friedan wrote:

"Forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people? Forbidden independence, they finally are swallowed in an image of such passive dependence that they want men to make the decisions, even in the home. The frantic illusion that togetherness can impart a spiritual content to the dullness of domestic routine, the need for a religious movement to make up for the lack of identity, betrays the measure of women's loss and the emptiness of the image. Could making men share the housework compensate women for their loss of the world? Could vacuuming the living-room floor together give the housewife some mysterious new purpose in life?"

For Friedan, women were not fully human unless they were in the workforce, dependent on the market rather than on their husbands. A job conferred power, motherhood did not. In fact, being a mother, you weren't even in what Friedan called "the world". Women needed to be compensated for "their loss of the world" -- in other words, for letting men go out and bring home the bacon. I wonder what Friedan would have made of the Japanese tradition in which the husband hands over his entire salary to his wife, who makes all the decisions about how to spend it?

It seems that Americans are not impressed by the Japanese mother complex. It's just not, well, manly. Here's what some American bloggers are saying about it:

"I found these actual mother-son relationships to be pretty sad (ie, 18-year old boy is too lazy to cut food for himself so he calls his mother who runs directly home to help him, or a different mother writes out mapped instructions to nearest train-station and calls her son "macchan")." (Source.)

"One guy left his girlfriend during her romantic birthday dinner so that he could pick up his mother at the local onsen and drive her home... it was a FIVE minute walk. Another young boy (13 years old) still bathes with his mother nightly. And in one of the most shocking parts, a mother confidently said that she wished her son would grow up gay." (Source.) Heavens, grow up gay! Can't have that! Girly men!

By the way, the pictures on this page show one of those only-in-Japan products: the Lap Pillow or hisa makura. It's a detachable rubberized woman's lap you can buy. Lie back on it and think of mother!

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That "pillow" is going to give me nightmares tonight. The poor woman has been hacked in two.
Great gift idea for the Norman Bates in your life.

red miniskirt with visible panty on mom
wow mom wow

yeah, those aren't old lady legs. those are OL legs.

Also see Montgomery Clift in ‘A Place In The Sun’. Religious, puritan mother constantly on the phone checking that he is being ‘a good boy’ (unquestioning carthorse, veritable eunuch) although he is often waterskiing with ‘bad girl’ Elizabeth Taylor behind his Official girlfriend’s back (hands-off surrogate mom Shelley Winters) - whom he eventually disposes of in the same lake. The epitome of male (self) repression, this film is like a cog in the head of fundamentalism.

Although the former example regarding food is somewhat absurd, IMO, the general idea of makazon seems perfectly sensible; it seems like a healthy acknowledgment of the oedipal complex experienced by so many people in the world.

Then again, I am, for all intents and purposes, a "mama's boy", so maybe my opinion isn't particularly valid.

No, I think you're right that it's healthy. The weird people are the ones I quoted, who seemed to imply that mothers should abhor homosexuality and try to loosen connections between their sons and themselves. It seems totally sweet to go and pick your mother up from an onsen, even if it's only five minutes down the road. Americans are weird!

The unashamed celebration of the Oedipal complex reminds me once again of Lacan's passing remark that perhaps Japan didn't need psychoanalysis because everything here is totally on the surface. There is no repressed unconscious to bring out. This is perhaps the difference between a "complex" (something buried deep in the individual, suppurating) and a "kon" (a social phenomenon).

Then again, it's nice that Americans are finally turning against making unnecessary short car journeys, even if it took misogyny to make them do it!

only had the time to skim through this and as i was reading the original post didnt quite get your original point. the way it read while i thought i was at neomaremixisme then it got a bit clearer in the comments.
as i have said one time too many on NM japan is not oedipal, at least not in the european classical sense. a good example is h. murakami kafka on the beach (like the story or the writer or not) where the entire oedipal drama is fully enacted , climacticaly, literaly and apparently in the foreground only to disolve into meaninglessness in favour of other more relevant and deeper story lines.

i wonder if any serious study has been done in or about japan on the brother-sister myth. ultimately brothercon and sistercon is probably a stronger and more sublte complex than mothercom (well at least until the one child new yuppie gen.) , a superfrequent theme in literature and cinema and actually the founding myth of japan. (forgot their names amaterasu s parent or so , brother and sister)

American families are creepily distant and formal.

I would emend that to Anglo-Saxon (or Anglo-Saxonized) American families. I come from a vulgar and claustrophobically familiar family of Greek Jews.

". . .the Japanese tradition in which the husband hands over his entire salary to his wife, who makes all the decisions about how to spend it?"

Is that just the Japanese?

Yes, you are right. I also come from a Mexican/Anglo-Saxon family that is quite familiar.

CONSERVATIVE American families.

No, even the liberal ones, more frequently than you would expect!

well, let's just generalise the day away, why don't we?

It's a bit of a general topic, isn't it?

This isn't a shool essay, I don't need tables and charts to compartmentalize my observational reactions.

I seem to remember reading that the Japanese also had invented a pillow shaped sort of like a man's shoulder and arm for single women to snuggle up with at night.

You mean like this?

Are you pushing this idea just so that you can hog up more japanese women? I've heard time and again from women around here that mazakon is just about the worst thing a guy could be.
The bigger problem is that these men can't see past their own noses.

That women have to compete with men's mother's for their affection to a much greater extent than men do with any of a woman's relation is already pretty scandalous. That they should quite clearly lose that battle ought to drive them far far away from the arms of these men.

Wow... I sure am glad that "japan is the future".

::shudder::

Shudder? It's sinister to see a man with his head in a woman's lap? Okay, an artificial woman's lap, but still, it's hardly a sinister image, is it? Almost every future I can imagine is more shudder-worthy than this, if it's a picture of the future. Including the future conjured up in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where 'mother' is the most obscene word in the language.

A chopped up woman, created pirely for the comfort of men, is a sinister image for me, plastic or otherwise.

As for "everything being on the surface", I don't personally think that people's perversions are somehow acceptable if done in public. Quite the reverse.

That should have read "created purely for the comfort of men". I shouldn't wank and type at the same time.

I don't see this as a chopped up woman at all. I see the lap as a metonym, the part that stands for the whole. It's an abbreviated woman containing just the parts that give a man consolation. I also think that if one must objectify, it's good and appropriate to objectify... an object. It's not even objectification then, because the object is already an object.

My whole career has been about trying to make perversion more acceptable (and, perversely, less perverse) by putting it out into the public zone. I want people to like other people more, like them even when (especially when) they know everything about them. The only downside is that not everybody will like everybody else when they know all about them, and those who don't will have a lot more ammunition to use against them. Also, when you remove taboo you also remove a certain amount of thrill. But this is a good thing: we shouldn't be thrilled by the forbiddenness of an activity (or the hiddenness of a body) but by the activity (or body) itself. I'm not really into fetish and substitutions as virtues in their own right. They stand for something else, and we need to move closer to that "something else".

"But this is a good thing: we shouldn't be thrilled by the forbiddenness of an activity (or the hiddenness of a body) but by the activity (or body) itself."

Why? Isn't that just as perverse?

Is it only a woman's pussy-region that gives a man consolation? Is it totally unthinkable that a woman that a man could snuggle up to might have... a brain? (Or, in this instance, tits).

The pillow is funny, but how could anyone derive emotional comfort from it? How could anyone even derive physical comfort from it? It doesn't look like the most ergonomic thing in the world. It looks like it would have that uncomfortable chemical plastic smell, too.

Then again, this is coming from a woman who has a serious phobia of realistic dildos. If I am going to have a fake, not-a-medical-prosthetic body part, I want it to be realllllly fake!

I agree, those legs leave a lot to be desired. Why not just lay your head on a stump with a picture of your mother on it?

The breast pillows come in many styles. The ones my girlfriends owned looked similar, but they usually had fabric on the outside. I didn't know what to make of it at the time; they said they liked the comfort.

In the end what really matters is what turns you on.

I'm curious if shut-in men actually buy them, or if the primary market for those lap things is just ironic Western Japanophiles. "Hey, Mike, look at this crazy shit I got from Japan!"

I don't think you've gone quite far enough in stating exactly why this is all so perverse. Other than the fact that the pillow (in you mind?) seems to suggest a woman who's had an axe taken to her. Would it be better if it was a whole women, like a store mannequin or even those absurd blow up dolls.
Nearly everyone I know takes the pillow as a sign of just how stunted Japanese sexuality is. And as I teeter on the edge of making the same old tired pleas to relativism I realise that maybe admitting what you want ( a tender and inviting place to lay your head) is at the very least a shade healthier than the parade of cocks who consider women "sport" and sex as "scoring" (yet another form of quasi hierarchical competition, toilet time is next!)

(I just realise I've drawn a rather spurious link between you and the parading cocks, which is more than a little unfair as your'e obviously much more intelligent and thoughtful than they could probably manage on their best day)

- Ivan

I think the pillow is actually meant to make you dream of Maria Sharapova. It is supposed to be modelled after her. She has tiny legs!

a woman will always be held up to the ideal that is "mother" even if the real mother is less than perfect, even with American men, if you can't be the hard working, self suficiant "system" that is "mother" to them, you haven't got anything.

The funny thing is that it is all false protest with them.. (in general) it also depends upon how "ethinic" one is in comparision to the culture of the west...

I guess Americans (my mother included) really don't know where to place me and my relationship to my child.. his father and I pretty much let him do most of what he wishes, and right now, at the age of 4 (almost 5) he still sleeps in the bed with us, and I confess, when he cuddles up to me, its like the cat, I have a great fondness for it, much like the cute "cuddle toys" of my childhood.. only this is a real warm human who NEEDS someone to fight the nightmares and "be there". Seeing that I was a sleep walker and would wake up in the strangest of places, I totally understand the clinging to mother and father (which I didn't have the opportunity to have). When the cat sleeps on the bed everynight with you, you kind of know there is more to being a mammal than just reproducing and then leaving your offspring in another room.. to all fairness, the cat sleeps on my husband too, as well as my son, and my son cuddles up with pappa occasionally.

Maybe he will have a "parent" complex rather than just a "mother fixation" in a Freudian sense..

BTW, I missed saying it, but happy birthday, Momus.

You're a week or so early, but birthday greetings happily received anyway!

I know what you mean about the mammal thing, even my rabbit loves to sleep rammed up against my face.

I found stuffed (not inflatable) ones in Shanghai. Only once at a fairly Japanese type store that sold stuffed animals and flip flops. I thought they were a bit nicer looking than this one. They had fishnets on though. lol.

not that it's something new. Article from "Young Lady" magazine (japanese version of Cosmo?) as quoted by Ian Buruma in his "Behind the mask. On Sexual demons, sacred mothers, transvestites, gangsters and other japanese cultural heroes" goes as saying: "The most attractive women are women full of maternal love. Women without maternal love are the types men never want to marry... One has to look at men through the eyes of mother". It's January 1982. Also look for some Tanizaki stories, hahamono films, etc.

As for Buruma's book, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The Momus/Marxy world polarisation between America and Japan is starting to get a bit weary by now. Is there nothing in between or beyond to talk about?

What can I say, by now I'm off to other shores!

Are you a Democrat or a Republican? Gay or Straight? Momus or Marxy? YOU CAN ONLY CHOOSE ONE!!!!!!

Handing over your salary still exists in a lot of blue-collar British households! Personally it is my ambition. But the power still lies with the giver. The receiver is on much shakier ground should she want to a) escape abuse b) escape utter tedium c) go get some decent sex with someone not exhausted and turned into a twittering quasi-fascist through "working". Everyone wants tenderness or comfort from a partner but it can so often come with an obligation to become furniture, a kind of objectification (like dollification, surely another way to deny someone a real sexuality, the former a simulacrum of the erotic, the latter increasingly "not right").

Having watched people voluntarily transform themselves into dolls and strike erotic poses on a couch on Sunday, I'm not convinced that either dollification or objectification aren't completely central to the erotic experience. But I think you're talking about transforming oneself into furniture, which isn't quite so sexy. Perhaps the solution is to buy a Lap Pillow and get all your "furniture"-type consolation from it, then treat your wife like a mistress?

I´ve heard before this quote of a mother wanting her son to grow up gay, so he would go shopping with her and discuss fashion.

A: My mother made me a homosexual!

B: If I give her the wool, will she make me one?

Hello, quick question for you Mr Currie (sorry, there no longer appears to be an email link to you on the site).

Just wondering, as a former occasional correspondent of yours, whether you have any particular opinions on the London Design Festival that you would care to share...? As in, do you think it's any good, how does it compare to other similar events worldwide (Tokyo, etc), and what can/should be done to improve it. Any comments gratefully recieved (would leave my email but am a bit scared of spam).

ta.

matt muir

Never 'eard of it, Matt! I can't check it out, neither, because I'm in Japan, innit!

No matter what, those legs will never remind me of my mother. When I first saw the picture I thought it was some sort of up-skirt fetish.

Perhaps this is because when I have childhood memories of comfort with my mother my head is on her large soft breasts. Maybe this is where Asian culture differs from the west; I never thought about it: is it because they always sit on the floor? or because Asian women tend to have smaller breasts?

But they are selling those breast pillows, too; or they did when I was there. I remember some girls showing me their breast pillows; girls must miss their mothers too.

I like breasts! Legs are nice, too! ...eyes and ears, and mouth and nose, fingers, tummy, thighs, knees, calfs, feet and toes... girls, girls, girls; but they don't usually remind me of my mother. I guess it must be really subconscious.

I've seen those lap pillows for sale here at a 'joke' shop.

I've always been amused by (what I assume is) an urban myth about doting Japanese mothers so worried about their teenaged sons being distracted from their test and exam studies by hormonal urges that they...service them...to get their minds back on track.

Did I read it on WaiWai years ago?

Humouristic bloggers I say. I wouldn't try be less with my mother only because it would be seen as dull by the west. My mum is ultra-cool! I love walking around shopping with her too. Tsss, dull masculine westeners!

I've heard of this "issue" before or so because I have a few vague memories of that pillow designed as a half sitting woman! Now where did I see once again? And what was the name of it?

Somedays I wouldn't mind laying my head in a lap. My mom is Japanese and she was not physically affectionate. I didn't get much cuddle time so maybe I should buy that lap.

"The breast pillow costs $17, while the lap pillow $29. The Japanese appear to find the lower part of Sharapova’s body more attractive than its upper part, the paper wrote." (http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/07/13/sharapovabreast.shtml)

And the following is more popular in the US, it seems.

"I wonder what Friedan would have made of the Japanese tradition in which the husband hands over his entire salary to his wife, who makes all the decisions about how to spend it?"

The English working-class male used to do this too. But it wasn't to liberate the wife, it was to harrass, because of course there was never enough in the pay-packet to feed, clean & clothe a family, and the woman went without.
Things improved by the 60s, though there's an apocryphal tale about a computer company bidding for the payroll contract at the Birkenhead Cammell Laird shipyard. Seems that the computer people couldn't handle the procedure by which each man got two paypackets - one for himself, and one to hand over, unopened, to the wife.

Oh wow...I love this. I'm a young female American and my boyfriend is from Vietnam. I can really see this in his behavior. Great essay!
Laurie

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not only in japan...

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mazakon