Questioning the Virtue of the Human Form

I've been living in a town called Kakogawa in Hyogo prefecture since April. The town's famous for producing multiple shogi champions and it's known for its delicious katsumeshi--fried, breaded meat on rice. One of the first things I noticed about the town, though, were the bronze statues of naked boys in sensual poses everywhere. Here's one near my apartment:

I haven't seen any statues of girls so far though I saw plenty of great ones when I visited Kobe two years ago, like this one:

I wonder if that statue's still there, though, because to-day I see there are news articles on various web sites (like this one) about how Japan is removing statues of naked women and girls all over the country. Many of the articles just say "nude statues" are being removed but, clearly, it's primarily female statues being targeted, which may explain why Kakogawa has a surfeit of boys.

The article I linked to above quotes a university professor named Takayama Yoko as saying, "Japan is the only country with so many statues of naked women in public spaces." These statues appeared in the years after World War II to replace statues of military figures that had been melted down to provide material for weapons manufacturing. To the Japanese, these depictions of naked women symbolised peace. At least, that was the belief, but depictions of womens' bodies are now scrutinised under a new lens.

Anyone who compares Japanese manga and anime from the '80s to manga and anime to-day will notice a difference in quantity of nudes depicted. The recent anime remake of Ranma 1/2 is almost identical to the original except for the absence real nudity.

This kind of artistic circumspection will be familiar to western students of art and literature of the past forty or fifty years who've become acquainted with the term "male gaze", a term I've written about multiple times. One flaw evident in it is that it would likely not be applied to the statues of nude boys even though they were mostly made by men according to their ideas of beauty. Western critical concepts digested by Japanese culture don't always emerge in their same essential forms. To-day's Japan has been called a post-modern culture because in many ways it's a product of deliberate social engineering in an attempt to emulate the west. In the Meiji era, scholars, artists, and statesmen from Japan visited Europe and America with the specific intention of studying and importing western ideas to Japan's culture and institutions. This 19th century phenomenon was followed by another artificially imposed influx of western culture and ideas after World War II. In Japanese art using importing western ideas, there is often a marked sense of artificiality and imitation, as in the Panty and Stocking song I posted yesterday. In her review of 1954's Seven Samurai, Pauline Kael wrote:

There is no specifically Japanese tradition for film music, and the budgetary allowances for composers are minuscule. The result is what sounds to us like a parody of European music.

I can easily imagine Japanese intellectuals visiting Rome, seeing statues of naked people, and coming back home saying, "Okay, we gotta have statues of naked people if we want to be civilised." Now, as western culture is becoming neurotic about depictions of women's bodies, Japanese intellectuals are saying, "Okay, we gotta remove statues of naked women if we want to be civilised." It's strange how much this seems like the neuroticism of the colonised when Japan has never been colonised since the first migrations of people from continental Asia.

But it's not like the Japanese just saw statues and made statues. The statues of naked women were intended to symbolise peace so there was an idea behind it. As in the west, a victim of the crusade against the male gaze is the idea that the beauty of the human body is an aspect of nature that reflects the better qualities of the human psyche, be they sexual or spiritual. Mechanical morality continues to place the human spirit in smaller and smaller boxes.

X Sonnet 1958

The young gorilla paints a hero's face.
A champ'yon wears the C across his shirt.
We never think of pecs the brand replaced.
Abandoned muscles lie in dust and dirt.
Another jumper cleared the clearance rack.
To sweater weather, gymnasts now distend.
A Spirit shop foretells the march of Jack.
The ides of eight on zombies now depend.
To cure a walking corpse requires salt.
It short supply, the yahoos march to war.
Laputians keep a floating seasoned vault.
Their soup is mined from rainy clouds of ore.
It's dinner now at noon like olden times.
So breaking fast requires fewer dimes.