Translating Maternal Violence: the discursive construction of maternal filicide in 1970s japan.

TRANSLATING

MATERNAL

VIOLENCE

The Discursive Construction of

Maternal Filicide in 1970s Japan

THINKING GENDER IN TRANSNATIONAL TIMES

Alessandro Castellini

Thinking Gender in Transnational Times

Series Editors

Clare Hemmings

Gender Institute

London School of Economics

London, UK

Kimberly Hutchings

School of Politics and International Relations

Queen Mary University of London

London, UK

Hakan Seckinelgin

Gender Institute

London School of Economics

London, UK

Sadie Wearing

Gender Institute

London School of Economics

London, UK

Gender theories have always been important, but no more so than now,

when gender is increasingly acknowledged as an essential focus for eco￾nomics, policy, law and development as well as being central to a range

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for the field are those that seek to combine interdisciplinary theoretical

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Times’ aims to redress this balance and to showcase the most innovative

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gender is linked to other areas of analysis such as ‘race’, ethnicity, religion,

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Alessandro Castellini

Translating Maternal

Violence

The Discursive Construction of Maternal Filicide

in 1970s Japan

Thinking Gender in Transnational Times

ISBN 978-1-137-53881-9 ISBN 978-1-137-53882-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53882-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962094

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Alessandro Castellini

Gender Institute

London School of Economics and Political Science

London, United Kingdom

To my many mothers

vii

This project has been a long way in the making. My first encounter

with literary representations of maternal animosity dates back to when

I was still an undergraduate student of Japanese studies at Ca’ Foscari

University (Venice, Italy). I am incredibly grateful to Luisa Bienati for

teaching a course on Japanese postwar women’s literature and for intro￾ducing me to a world of literary imagination and transgression that was

going to accompany me for many years to come. With time, the research

that made this book possible has taken a life of its own, and it almost feels

that I have spent the last few years trying to catch up with it and its many

changes of direction. I owe a debt of gratitude to Clare Hemmings and

Sadie Wearing for their guidance and encouragement in the painstaking

process of giving intelligible form to my intuitions. A deeply felt and spe￾cial thank you to Marina Franchi and Nicole Shephard for all their love

and friendship at various stages of this project and beyond. You know

way too well that without your support this book would not have seen

the light of the day! I am equally grateful to Francesca, whose enthusias￾tic spirit and heartfelt words helped me remember why this project was

important.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a family who taught me what it

means to love and be loved. There are no words to thank my mother,

Loredana, for her strength and wisdom. She’s been a guide, a friend and

an incredible companion in our common journey. This book is for her. It

Acknowledgements

viii Acknowledgements

took me quite some time (and a slow process of maturation) to realize the

incredible amount of love that my father, Maurizio, brought into my life.

His actions speak more than a thousand words, and I just want to take

this opportunity to remind him of how much I love him. When I was

a child, my sister, Micaela (Miki), made me feel safe when I was scared

of the dark, and I still treasure the memory of her hand holding mine as

I fell asleep. She’s an irreplaceable point of reference and my “second”

family.

I have benefited tremendously from the financial support of the Gender

Institute and the London School of Economics and Political Science. In

particular, I am very grateful to my colleagues, friends and students at

the Gender Institute for our engaging conversations and for reminding

me of the value of what I do. Portions of Chaps. 2 and 3 have appeared

in Feminist Review 106(1) in earlier form as an article entitled “Silent

Voices: Mothers Who Kill Their Children and the Women’s Liberation

Movement in 1970s Japan.” I couldn’t have completed Translating

Maternal Violence without my editor at Palgrave who kindly but firmly

chased me down when I was hiding behind my teaching commitments,

and the anonymous reviewers who provided encouragement and invalu￾able advice on early drafts of the manuscript.

This book is written in loving memory of my grandmothers, Amelia

and Assunta.

ix

1 Introduction 1

2 Filicide in the Media: News Coverage of Mothers Who Kill

in 1970s Japan 39

3 The Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970s Japan 81

4 Contested Meanings: Mothers Who Kill and the Rhetoric

of ūman ribu 119

5 Filicide and Maternal Animosity in Takahashi Takako’s

Early Fiction 163

6 Conclusions 219

Bibliography 233

Index 261

Contents

xi

Table 1.1 Total number of articles per year 33

Table 2.1 Occurrence of the word shinjū in the Asahi shinbun

and Yomiuri shinbun 50

Table 2.2 Mother–child suicides and parent–child suicides

committed by someone other than the mother alone 52

List of Tables

© The Author(s) 2017 1

A. Castellini, Translating Maternal Violence,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53882-6_1

1

Introduction

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)

Encountering Maternal Violence:

The Kimura Case

On the cold, sunny afternoon of January 29, 1985, about ten days after

learning of her husband’s affair of three years with another woman,

32-year-old Japanese immigrant Kimura Fumiko walked with her two

2

children along an almost-deserted beach in Santa Monica. She carried in

her arms her infant daughter, Yuri, while her four-year-old son Kazutaka

ran in front, stopping every so often to play cheerfully with the sand.

No one saw the mother pick up both children at the water’s edge and

wade into the cold waters of Santa Monica Bay. They were found 15

minutes later and pulled from the Pacific Ocean unconscious, still cling￾ing together. The children died, but the mother survived (Dolan 1985;

Pound 1985). She was later charged with two counts of first-degree mur￾der and two counts of felony child endangering. The district attorney’s

office alleged the special circumstance of multiple murder, which meant

she could face the death penalty (Boyer 1985; Stewart 1985a).

When charges were first filed against her, however, Kimura did not seem to

comprehend that she was accused of murder, as she assumed that her crime

was failed suicide: in the attempt to end her life together with that of her

children, she thought she was committing what in Japan is known as oyako

shinjū (parent–child suicide). In the weeks and months to follow, this practice

was to become the focus of much public debate. News coverage reported the

voices of cultural experts calling attention to the sociological and psychologi￾cal factors that could have prompted what appeared to many an unfathom￾able (and unforgivable) gesture.1

They explained that oyako shinjū constituted

a frequent albeit tragic occurrence in Japan. But they also prudently added

that, despite its high incidence in Japanese society, it was not sanctioned by

law or custom and remained illegal, even though it was likely to be treated as

involuntary manslaughter and to result in a suspended sentence with super￾vised probation (Dolan 1985; Hayashi 1985a; Pound 1985).2

Kimura’s case sparked a media frenzy and gained international public￾ity. It became a rallying point among Japanese and Japanese-Americans

1As 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).

Translating Maternal Violence

3

with thousands of people from the United States, Japan and Europe

asking for lenient treatment and urging the prosecutor to take Kimura’s

cultural heritage into account (Jones 1985; Pound 1985). In the end,

however, Kimura’s defence attorney opted for not emphasizing the cul￾tural factors involved in the case. He chose instead to interpose a tempo￾rary insanity defence based on expert psychiatric testimonies according

to which Kimura—already tried by a previous failed marriage of eight

years and the unfulfilled dream of a music career as a pianist in her home

country—had been mentally disturbed at the time of the crime (Feldman

1985; Sams 1986). To the extent that it achieved the best legal outcome,

this strategy was deemed successful: Kimura entered a plea bargain and

was allowed to plead no contest to two counts of voluntary manslaughter.

The court sentenced her to five years’ probation with mandatory psychi￾atric treatment and one year in prison (time she had already served await￾ing trial) (Stewart 1985b; Matsumoto 1995).3

Quite predictably, if cultural evidence was not formally admitted

into court, news coverage of the Kimura case did unfold according to

a highly polarized interpretative framework evidenced in headlines such

as “Two Cultures Collide Over Act of Despair” (Dolan 1985), “Mother

Who Killed Children Trapped in a Culture Conflict” (Jones 1985) and

“Mother’s Tragic Crime Exposes a Culture Gap” (Pound 1985).4

It did

not seem to matter significantly that Kimura had been living in the

3Despite 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 dif￾ference (Reddy 2002; Goel 2004).

4Rashmi Goel (2004) has called attention to the fact that, by refusing to formally engage in a medi￾tation 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 misin￾formed 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).

1 Introduction

4

United States for 14 years when she committed her dramatic gesture or

that, upon her arrival from Japan, she had studied for two years in a com￾munity college (albeit without graduating). The mass media emphatically

described her as a woman who had “remained Japanese in her thinking

and life style,” and preferred to focus on those daily practices that could

be deemed “unquestionably traditional” such as sleeping “on Japanese

mats instead of beds” or not wearing shoes indoors, but “faithfully” leav￾ing them by the door (Dolan 1985; my emphasis).5

A persistent cultural

essentialism permeated lengthy descriptions of the Kimuras’ Japanese tra￾ditions that were formulated in exotic undertones and then fed to the ori￾entalist gaze of an avid readership.6

Kimura was even said to be “trapped

in [a] cultural time warp” (Jones 1985), thus implicitly conjuring a hege￾monic conception of (US) modernity and progress against a (Japanese)

pre-modern temporality (Butler 2008).

The portrayal of Japanese culture as an intractable alterity was fur￾ther marked by a distinct linguistic dimension. To begin with, Kimura’s

defence attorney Gerald Klausner pointed at the fact that, after 14 years

in the United States and despite her college education, Kimura had still

not mastered English and that Japanese was the language spoken at home.

Translations, mistranslations and disputed translations also took a special

relevance at different stages of the legal proceedings. The Fumiko Kimura

Fair Trial Committee, established by the Japanese-American commu￾5The 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.

6References 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.

Translating Maternal Violence

5

nity to raise awareness of the cultural specificities of Kimura’s actions

and to petition for a lenient sentence, criticized, for example, the way

in which she had initially been questioned through police interpreters

and doubted that she had fully understood her rights under federal and

state law (Wetherall 1986). In a similar vein, Kimura’s defence attorney

also asked that her statement to investigators be excluded from evidence

on the grounds that the police officer had mistranslated her rights to her

(Boyer 1985). Furthermore, while gathering the testimony (by means of

an interpreter) of Yoko Hirose, a Japanese neighbour of the Kimuras’,

Klausner repeatedly asked her whether she believed the defendant was

sane on the night before the crime, but the proceedings were delayed

because “two interpreters argued over the proper translation of the word.”

It was reported that, in the end, Hirose never replied directly to the ques￾tion and that Kimura’s defence attorney “was not satisfied with the trans￾lations of his questions and Hirose’s answers” (Stewart 1985a).

It is worth noting that, while linguistic issues and translational dif￾ficulties punctuated the unfolding of the case, the paramount role of

translation in promoting intercultural understanding was never fully

or sufficiently explored. This was emblematic, for example, of the dis￾tinctive ambiguity that surrounded attempts at understanding Kimura’s

dramatic gesture and to provide a degree of discursive and cultural intel￾ligibility to the violence she perpetrated. On the one hand, the foreign

expression oyako shinjū took centre stage and became synecdoche for an

assumed intractable cultural alterity. On the other hand, the rendering

of the Japanese original with the English expression “parent–child sui￾cide” arguably functioned as a form of (unproblematic?) cultural trans￾lation that implicitly claimed to introduce a notion deemed culturally

specific (and thus, in principle, alien to Western conceptualizations) into

a Western cultural landscape. Granted, “it may be necessary to enter into

a field of translation [for a concept or analytical category] to make itself

communicable beyond the community of those who speak the idiom”

(Butler 2014: 7). But we should also take notice of the fact that the sub￾stitution of oyako shinjū with the expression “parent–child suicide” was

hardly ever critically addressed and appeared to rely instead on a simplistic

understanding of translation as a straightforward process of “restitution

of meaning” or “restoration of an original” rooted in a dream of perfect

1 Introduction