Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society

Abstract

In Love in Modern Japan, Sonia Ryang attempts to read the workings, not merely the concepts, of love in its relations to sex and self in everyday scenes described in Japanese literature, public discourse and popular media. As Ryang cogently argues, love is not merely a matter of individual emotions or personal endeavor; rather, such feelings and the practices associated with them are inextricably interlaced with and derive from the technologies of social institutions and the particular ways in which a nation is engineered in modernity. To better understand her argument, we must first understand Ryang's complex positionalities because this really is the work of a scholar in diaspora, who is a heterosexual, female, former zainichi North Korean resident of Japan who now lives in the US. In her own words, as Japan does not grant citizenship to zainichi, she is a ‘naked individual’, who lives without the protection of the human rights accorded citizens of nation-states. Without such protection, Ryang has still been subjected to various forms of state and institutional control not in her ‘homeland’, which she does not have, but in other ‘foreign’ states, notably in Japan, where she was born, and the US, where she now works and lives. Meanwhile, Ryang grew up educated in the school system for North Koreans in Tokyo, where she learned to express a revolutionary comrade's love and other forms of affection for her ‘national’ leader, Kim Il-sung (Ryang 1997). Based on this state of (non)being, Ryang attempts to understand ethnic–national violence and conflict—in recent history and in contemporary global contexts—while committed to the ideas of love, freedom and democracy.

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