Mazakon

[imomus]

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!

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

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.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

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

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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".

[csn.livejournal.com]

"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?

[framework.livejournal.com]

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!

[nomorepolitics.livejournal.com]

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.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

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!"

[(Anonymous)]

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