A Cocooned Identity: Japanese Girl Films: Nobuhiko Oobayashi's "Chizuko's Younger Sister" and Jun Ichikawa's "Tsugumi"

Tamae K Prindle

Introduction

Eiji Ootsuka, author of Ethnology of Girls (Shôjo Minzokugaku 1989)defines ''modern times'' (kindai) as the period when the Japanese stopped producing commodities and became non-productive ''girls'' (shôjo) (20). And postmodern feminist, Yoshiko Kanaicharacterizes the 1990s as the time when Japanese consumers are purchasing not only commodities and services but also feelings (kibun) and sensitivity (kansei) (52). The ''high consumption society'' (kôdo shôhi shakai), says Kanai, helps ''girlize all the one hundred million Japanese'' (ichioku sô shôjo-ka), meaning that the entire nation refuses to grow up (seijyuku kyohi) (52). Kanaiand Ootsukaagree that the ''obatarians'' (self-assertive middle-aged housewives) and ''ojisan'' (middle-aged ordinary men) alike close their eyes at the intrinsic use-values of commodities and use them as signs (kigô) to express their moratorium on adulthood.

Definition of a ''shôjo''

For our purposes, I define shôjohood as girls' teenage years. It is a ''crossroad''¹where childhood meets womanhood. It would be a ''gal (gyaru)'''s teen-age years, to further narrow the definition by borrowing Kazuma Yamane'svocabulary. Yamane's''gals'' were born in 1965 and are now in their early thirties. As they grew, they became ''self-centered, sumptuous, sexy, and asocial'' (Yamane 40). But already in their teens (which was in the 1970s and 80s), they had left a clear shôjo legacy in Japanese culture. And their legacy is ''asocial, infantile, and enchanting'' youthfulness (35). Yamane'sshôjo, then, shares the same terrain as Ootsuka'swho rejects adult values and seeks a sexless, genderless body (Ootsuka 203). John Treatalso suggests that the ''kawaii²shôjo is attractive, and thus valorized, but lacks libidinal agency of her own'' (Treat 281). Masuko Honda, meanwhile, uses in her Children as Another Culture (Ibunka toshite no kodomo 1992)³basically two images to describe Japanese shôjo, i.e.: (1) a cocoon which shuts out the outside

¹ I am borrowing the word from Lyn Brown and CarolGilligan. Brown and Gilligandraw this word from the Freudian Oedipus story of a son killing his father atthe crossroads of childhood and adulthood....