Abstract
Castellini takes 1970s’ Japan as a case study to explore the extent to which a maternal potential for violence may be allowed access to a realm of cultural intelligibility. Weaving together a Foucauldian understanding of discourse with a reflection on the politics of translation, he investigates Japanese conceptualizations of maternal violence and foregrounds translation as instrumental in creating a dialogic space between Western and non-Western theoretical, representational and political approaches to motherhood’s violent potential. Castellini exposes the silencing and erasure that operated to efface the possibility of thinking about maternal violence at the very moment when it was most insistently spoken about and confronts the challenge of translating that which is denied access to the realm of cultural and discursive intelligibility in the first place.
Every language’s struggle with the secret, the hidden, the mystery, the inexpressible is above all else the most entrenched incommunicable, initial untranslatable.
(Ricoeur 2006: 33)
What can’t be said can’t be translated[.]
(Bellos 2012: 149)
Not only is power deeply embedded in the words we use, power is embedded in the words that we do not use; there is power in silence. […] If violence is not named or is not allowed to be named, then its very existence is contested and women’s experiences reduced to “unreality.”
(Cavanagh et al. 2001: 702–3)
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Notes
- 1.
As I will explain in some detail in Chap. 2, the causes behind the practice of oyako shinjū were understood to vary, ranging from a mother’s perception of her child as part of herself, a desire to spare one’s child from the social stigma and discrimination faced in Japan by children with single parents and by adoptive children (to the extent that a mother who killed herself while leaving her child behind was frowned upon and considered cruel) up to a cultural romanticization of suicide as an honourable way of dying and a means to avoid losing face (Dolan 1985; Hayashi 1985a).
- 2.
In this respect, the article by Katie Kaori Hayashi, herself a Japanese immigrant and a mother and back then a reporter for the student-run newspaper of Santa Monica College The Corsair, was consequential in expanding early discussions of oyako shinjū and clarifying its cultural dimensions (Hayashi 1985a). Her piece was soon reprinted in the pages of the Los Angeles Times under the meaningful headline: “Understanding shinjū and the tragedy of Fumiko Kimura” (Hayashi 1985b).
- 3.
Despite the fact that a formal cultural defence, that is, the use of the defendant’s cultural tradition to excuse her actions and negate or mitigate her criminal responsibility, was not raised in court, it has been argued that cultural evidence was in fact used to better contextualize Kimura’s actions and further substantiate her mental instability at the time of the offence. In other words, even though culture was not taken into consideration as a mitigating factor, there was an understanding that Kimura’s cultural background had made her more vulnerable to the kind of psychotic conditions which eventually led to the crime (Matsumoto 1995; Kim 1997). This has led some scholars to draw critical attention to the dangers and ethical implications of a pathologization of cultural difference (Reddy 2002; Goel 2004).
- 4.
Rashmi Goel (2004) has called attention to the fact that, by refusing to formally engage in a meditation on cultural difference and its implications for a conception of justice, both prosecution and defence contributed to relegating the discussion of cultural factors to newspapers, magazines and television, entrusting them with an accurate representation of Japanese culture while disregarding the extent to which the news media thrives on sensationalistic reporting and often indulges in problematic stereotyping. We can easily recognize such an attitude in the extent to which misinformed reporters slipped into outright misrepresentations of cultural difference, especially in the early stages of such extensive media coverage, arriving to describe Kimura’s oyako shinjū as the “ceremonial drowning” (Dolan 1985) or the “ritualistic slaying” of her two children according to “an ancient Japanese custom” (Jones 1985).
- 5.
The media also reported about how Kimura would compose poetry in her prison cell and how she would write “in pencil in Japanese script about her love for the sea and her love for music” (Dolan 1985), thus buying into long-standing stereotypes of a highly poetic Japanese sentimentality.
- 6.
References to her commitment to Japanese cultural and religious practices came to signal Kimura’s “authentic” Japanese identity. Dolan’s (1985) article in the Los Angeles Times arguably provides one of the earliest and most obvious examples of this trend where mourning takes the form of a time-honoured tradition and where the words of Kimura’s husband further reinforce the idea of a Japanese cultural identity so deeply entrenched that it does not seem to warrant discussions of any sort:
With the deaths of the children, another tradition became a part of the Kimura home. Three times a day, meals for the souls of the children are set out on a small, low coffee table that serves as an altar. On a recent day, two small bowls of noodles sat untouched. A photograph of Kazutaka, the couple’s son, dressed in a little black-and-white kimono, has been placed next to his favorite cars, trucks and paper planes. There is also a photograph of the couple’s daughter, Yuri, wearing a pink dress. Two pink rattles and jars of baby food have been placed beside her picture. Between two small candles is a vase of white carnations. [Husband] Itsuroku Kimura said he does not discuss the altar with his wife but he is certain she knows it exists. “She would expect it,” he said.
- 7.
For reason of simplicity I will not engage here with the deeply questionable assumption of a homogeneous linguistic community in the United States, an issue that Judith Butler and Gayatri C. Spivak acutely raised in their Who Sings the Nation State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (2007).
- 8.
Even though we should be wary of simplistically conflating Foucault’s conception(s) of discourse with an overemphasis on textuality, for the purposes of my investigation the three discursive arenas I will be exploring clearly presuppose the materiality of the written page and are characterized by distinctive modalities of production, conservation, access and recirculation that I will address in the methodological section of this introduction. For two examples of works that openly collapse the textual/material division in their approach to Foucauldian understandings of discourse, see Mary C. Beaudry, Lauren J. Cook and Stephen A. Mrozowski, “Artifacts and Active Voices: Material Culture as Social Discourse” in Images of the Recent Past: Readings in Historical Archaeology (Oxford: AltaMira Press, 1996), 272–310, and Derek Hook, “Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality, History: Foucault and Discourse Analysis,” Theory and Psychology 11(4) (2001): 521–47.
- 9.
For a selection of studies on the dichotomous (and biased) treatment of murderous mothers as either “mad” or “bad” in the discipline of criminology, see Wilczynski (1991, 1997a, 1997b) and Meyer and Oberman (2001); in journalism, see Goc (2003, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013), Barnett (2005, 2006, 2007, 2013) and Cavaglion (2008); in legal studies, see Huckerby (2003), Ayres (2004) and Stangle (2008).
- 10.
To analyse the complex and fraught articulation of a maternal potential for violence in the realm of cultural intelligibility also brings to our attention that the very notion of “maternal filicide,” instead of being the single, unproblematic referent that would confer unity to these discourses, may be far less stable than we might have originally assumed. The fantasy of a stable referent admittedly constituted an important, provisional criterion for the selection of the material to be included in my investigation—what Foucault describes as “a provisional division [that operates] as an initial approximation” (1992: 29). Yet, to call attention to the schema of intelligibility and the “field of emergence” (91) that allowed something we may call “maternal filicide” to surface as an object of discourse in 1970s Japan means to untangle a historically specific set of conditions that made possible the materialization of multiple ways of conceptualizing maternal murderous violence—discursive modalities that may have been at odds with each other or could have partially overlapped or simply coexisted side by side, touching each other only fleetingly.
- 11.
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault devotes a brief but significant passage to the relationship between discourse and silence:
Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (1998: 27, my emphasis)
- 12.
Until the recent publication of Setsu Shigematsu’s monograph Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (2012) ribu has remained a rather unexplored object of enquiry in English-language academic literature on the history of Japanese feminism(s). Arguably, one of the reasons for this gross oversight is the fact that ribu’s experience of political contestation has commonly been perceived as short-lived, spanning only the first half of the 1970s (Fujieda and Fujimura-Fanselow 1995: 159), and already waning by the time the UN-sponsored 1975 International Women’s Year marked a drastic change in the character of the Japanese women’s movement “from one that was targeted at bringing about changes in women’s consciousness […] to one seeking visible changes in social institutions” (Tanaka 1995: 348). However, Shigematsu (2012: 172) remains critical of similar interpretations that disregard the significance of ribu’s interventions during the 1970s, and she exposes the inaccuracy of traditional periodizations that would locate the end of ribu in 1975, thus ignoring the fact that many ribu activists remained committed to various forms of political struggle in the following decades (175).
- 13.
- 14.
Such controversies attest to the fact that the distinction between ribu and feminizumu, as Shigematsu (2012) aptly puts it, is rooted in a specific political history that was crucial in informing how ideas, theories and categories of political contestation travelled and were translated into ever-changing cultures of reception (see Shigematsu 2012: 171–5, 249 note 1; Mackie 2003: 160–1; Fujieda and Fujimura-Fanselow 1995: 158–9). Analogous “translational tensions” and the intersecting of local and global histories of political contestation characterize the adoption of the term “feminism” in China (Dongchao 2005, 2007a, 2007b). On this issue, see also the work of Lin Chun (1997) and Shu-Mei Shih (2002).
- 15.
- 16.
Lisa Baraitser and Imogen Tyler (2010: 117) speak to this discursive intensification around motherhood and the maternal body when they acknowledge the “extraordinary proliferation of public representations of maternity” in the last three decades. Tyler (2008: 2) argues that “the maternal has never been so very public, so-hyper visible,” but she also points at the profound incoherence that characterizes this multiplicity of commentaries on and portrayals of the maternal experience.
- 17.
- 18.
Rich’s Of Woman Born (1976) constitutes perhaps the only exception here as it devotes an entire chapter to the already mentioned “heart of maternal darkness.” However, hers remains a rather singular intellectual endeavour that weaves together autobiographical accounts and diary entries with a carefully researched historical, social and feminist account of the maternal. A rather different but much needed perspective is provided by Michelle Oberman and Cheryl L. Meyer in their When Mothers Kill: Interviews from Prison (2008).
- 19.
It feels outrageous to even consider the possibility of relegating to the space of a footnote the ever-expanding corpus of feminist scholarship that in the span of several decades has been calling to task the essentialism, white solipsism and universalist pretences of early (and sometimes more recent) Western feminist writing. Important interventions by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981), Adrienne Rich (1986 [1984]), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988 [1984], 2003), Judith Butler (1992), Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994), Linda Alcoff (1995) and Susan Standford Friedman (1998) may come to mind, but they are offered here as merely indicative, not representative, of a much wider and heterogeneous scholarship (in English!).
- 20.
My use of the expression “Western solipsism” clearly owes to Adrienne Rich’s (1978: 299) formulation of the notion of “white solipsism” which she describes as the tendency “to think, imagine, and speak as if whiteness described the world.”
- 21.
A comparable geographical (and cultural) reductionism is recognized by Allaine Cerwonka (2008) in her examination of power relations within the global academic political economy, especially as they concern Western feminist hegemony in Central and Eastern European countries. In that context Cerwonka considers a certain critique of multiculturalism according to which “showcasing the particularity and difference of nondominant cultures in the name of respect” (817) may just preserve cultural hierarchies and leave unchallenged implicit assumptions of the West as the primary referent. In her cautious suggestion that the privileging of difference constitutes “an imperfect solution to Western hegemony” (816), Cerwonka’s considerations find a parallel in Naoki Sakai’s (1997) recognition of the mutually reinforcing nature of universalism and particularism (see especially the chapter “Modernity and its critique: the problem of universalism and particularism,” pp. 153–76).
- 22.
But see Reader (1998) for a review article that explicitly takes to task Sakai and Harootunian’s (1999) critique of area studies as anti-theoretical and which draws attention to works of academic scholarship on Japan that make an enriching contribution to sociological theory.
- 23.
For an excellent account of the question of the native, see Rey Chow’s essay “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” in Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, 27–54). Chow (2014a) further explores questions of identity, hybridity and nativism with a lens that privileges the “psychic, cross-cultural, institutional, and geopolitical effects” of the unequal confrontation between languages and cultures that is at the heart of the (post)colonial experience (Chow 2014b). See Lai (2008) for a rather different account of nativism as an oppositional practice within forms of cultural contestations under global capitalism.
- 24.
With a move that simultaneously refuses the false belief in translation as the dream of a perfect equivalence without residues and calls into question the suspicion of self-referentiality that Chow (2006) ascribes to area studies, Szanton (2004: 1–2) argues that
[p]erfect translations are rarely possible, something is almost always lost in translation; rough or partial translations are the best we can expect. Inevitably, translations from or of even very distant languages and cultures will produce some familiar ideas and images, and will support some familiar concepts and propositions. But they will also almost certainly generate some surprises. Merely finding or imposing our own selves, structures, or dynamics in another culture—in effect, reading it as a Rorschach inkblot onto which we project out own experience—only tells us about ourselves. It also probably means that we have missed whatever we might have learned from it. Such failure to understand—or projections onto—other societies and cultures often result from forms of ethnocentrism. […] When successful, Area Studies research and teaching demonstrates the limitations of fashioning analyses based largely on the particular and contingent histories, structures, power formations, and selective, and often idealized, narrative of “the West.”
These and similar reflections have operated as a cautionary tale in the structuring of Translating Maternal Violence and have motivated my decision not to introduce an investigation of Japanese material with a detailed account of Western feminism’s engagements with maternal violence. I hope to have sidestepped in this way some of the problems inherent in unwittingly making Western feminism(s) into a privileged interpretative lens and a ready-made grid of intelligibility. In fact, the tendency to reduce non-Western local realities and experiences to case studies mostly framed by metropolitan (i.e. Anglo-European) conceptualizations (Connell 2014) does nothing to challenge a global economy of knowledge characterized by the theoretical hegemony of the West or Global North (Connell 2015), but further reinscribes the West as the normative interlocutor.
- 25.
This is not to say that there are no such things as untranslatables, but that any such discussion will have to take account of the fact that “the untranslatable, or what appears to resist translation, cannot exist prior to the enunciation of translation” and, therefore, it is already internal to that moment of encounter with alterity that unfolds through translation (Sakai 2009: 177). “[T]he incommensurable and excessive,” Sakai claimed on a different occasion, “cannot be apprehended outside the contexts of contact” (Sakai 2001: 800).
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
It seems pertinent at this stage to take some time to reflect, at least in passing, on some of the implications of this account of the translator as an agentic subject who mediates between two languages and cultures. Berman (1992: 5) describes, for example, the psychological ambivalence of the translator who wants to force two things: “to force his own language to adorn itself with strangeness, and to force the other language to trans-port itself into his mother tongue.” In light of Venuti’s account of how the identification of message and signifying chain in the target language is the outcome of a decision process that speaks to the interventionist and transformative nature of translation, we can understand why Berman urges the translator to engage in “self-scrutinizing operations” that should enable him “to localize the systems of deformation that threaten his practice and operate unconsciously on the level of the linguistic and literary choices—systems that operate simultaneously on the registers of language, of ideology, of literature, and of the translator’s mental make-up.” (6) Berman likens this constant “keeping in check” of the translator’s own conscious and unconscious attitude vis-à-vis the original to a “psychoanalysis of the translator” (ibid.).
- 29.
In a way that clearly resonates with Venuti’s understanding of the violent, transformative and inevitably interventionist character of translation work, Benjiamin adds that “no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change” (2007: 73). The transfer that translation is meant to perform can thus never be total, and we must content ourselves with an asymptotic relation between translation and original whereby “a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux” (80).
- 30.
Considered in this light, what I propose may be deemed the most unfaithful practice of translation. And yet, Antoine Berman offers some important insights into the work of translation when he describes it as an instrument that allows something of the original to appear that may not appear in the source language. Translation, he perceptively observes, has the potential to turn the original around and reveal another side of it (1992: 7); in so doing it may also contribute to a “potentiation” of the source language (Ricoeur 2006: 8).
- 31.
In his book The Experience of the Foreign Berman offers an important contribution to an understanding of the praxis of translation as the site of transformative dialogic possibilities. There he argues that
[e]very culture resists translation, even if one has an essential need for it. The very aim of translation—to open up in writing a certain relation with the Other, to fertilize what is one’s Own with the mediation of what is Foreign—is diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of every culture, that species of narcissism by which every society wants to be a pure and unadulterated Whole.
- 32.
See Sara Ahmed’s account of the Western self-referentiality and narcissistic character of Orientalism in a chapter of Queer Phenomenology (2006, pp. 109–59) aptly entitled “The Orient and Other Others.”
- 33.
Such relative homogeneity has much to do with the news-gathering system in Japan, called Press Club (kaisha-kurabu): news organizations send their reporters to the Press Clubs attached to government offices, law courts, political party centres and major economic and industry associations which allocate large rooms for use by the reporters in charge of covering those agencies for their companies. Feldman describes these clubs as the operation rooms where reporters “gather, confirm, organize and write all the news that emanate from a certain location,” where they “receive briefings, handouts, press releases and other communications” and where they “interact with their information sources” (1993: 69) (see also Lee 1985: 62–73; De Lange 1998; Hayashi 2000: 154–6). The press clubs shape reporters’ relationship with their information sources and determine to a great degree the nature of the information they may have access to, thus explaining the similarity of newspapers’ media coverage.
- 34.
For example, writing within the parameters set by American legal discourse, Lucy Jane Lang identifies “infanticide” as an umbrella term that includes the three subcategories of neonaticide (the killing of a child within the first 24 hours after its birth), filicide (the killing of a child older than one day) and abuse-related death (Lang 2005). However, the legal definition of “infanticide” in England and Wales (UK) describes the crime as the killing of a child younger than 12 months at the hands of his or her biological mother (Brookman and Nolan 2006), while filicide denotes more broadly child homicide by either parent.
- 35.
To set the bar at 18 years of age remains, admittedly, a rather arbitrary choice: not only the age of majority in Japan is 20, but the category of kogoroshi (literally child killing) is sometimes used to describe the killing of a son or daughter independently of their age, to the extent that the killing of a middle-aged disabled son by his senile father can be still categorized as “child killing.” However, the occurrence of such cases in my data set was rather insignificant and this made setting the limit to 18 years of age seem a more useful approximation.
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Castellini, A. (2017). Introduction. In: Translating Maternal Violence. Thinking Gender in Transnational Times. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53882-6_1
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