Restoration, Revolution, and Terror in Japan, Or How the Right and Left Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Ideology

Parts II and III

Okamoto Kozo and Shigenobu Fusako

The United Red Army was composed of two major branches: the Japanese Red Army, or Sekigun-ha, was initially led by Shiomi Takaya, regenerated by Mori Tsuneo after his arrest (and later by Sakaguchi Hiroshi), and had its origins in the leftist student movements of the 1950s; Keihin Ampo Kyoto, which maintained tenuous links with the Red Army, was led by Nagata Hiroko.  While the “more nationalistic” Keihin Ampo Kyoto was more focused on effecting political change within Japan (particularly the removal of the occupying American military), the Red Army was internationalist in scope and defined its goals alongside the Marxist ideal of establishing a worldwide community of workers within which colonialism, imperialism, and class-warfare would be absent (Farrell 4).  According to Patricia Steinhoff,

[t]he group espouses Trotsky’s theory of a simultaneous world-wide revolution in which the proletariat of the entire world must overthrow the bourgeoisie which rules individual nation states.  The Red Army believes the revolution must be violent to defeat the overwhelming power of the bourgeoise.  (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 831).  

While this goal in itself sounds political, the acts undertaken to bring about this revolution about, as I hope to show, take place on the level of Messianism.

Fundamental to the Red Army’s ideology was the idea of violence as both a legitimate means towards intergroup discipline and a tool for political change.  During the United Red Army’s purge in the winter of 1972, in which several suspected defectors who might have “compromise[d] the goals of the cause” if allowed to live were killed, Mori Tsuneo, then the leader of the Sekigun-ha, espoused a theoretical perspective on violence that would justify not only the murders of the purge, but the use of violence in general in the group’s endeavors (Farrell 6).  From this perspective, the distinction between “victims and perpetators [of violence]” among the members disappeared, since everyone was a perpetrator at one point, and members who showed signs of weakness were physically tortured as a test of their endurance and willingness to join the group.  The members “began to reject the victims to create distance, even as they tried to maintain the bizarre fiction that the violent attacks were really comradely assistance. . . .  The more wretched and inhuman the victims became, the easier it was to inflict further violence upon them” (Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism” 218).  Even when torturers did not know why a particular person needed to be tortured, they were “[u]nable to question the authority who ordered them to perform acts of violence against friends or the theory that justified their actions,” making them forced to “question only the friends themselves.”  This let them channel “their own fear, doubt, and confusion . . . into an anger that could be vented safely, even satiated, through physical violence against a dehumanized victim” (219).  This logic, which Steinhoff calls “blaming the victims,” is similar to the logic motivating Seventeen’s boy-narrator towards violence: anger is vented indiscriminately towards random targets (but not imaginary ones, as in Seventeen), which opens up the space for this violence to become attached to a real-world referent outside of the training camp.  If the members were more than willing to dehumanize each other to the point where torture is not only permissible but beneficial, then how difficult would it have been for them to translate this attitude outwards to the population of Japan and to the rest of the world?  Albert Camus has picked up on this very same phenomenon in his philosophical essay The Rebel: concerning the military regime of Hitler, he writes,

[The torturer] must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success.  When the concept of innocence disappears from the mind of the innocent victim himself, the value of power establishes a definitive rule over a world in despair.  (Camus 184).

No one is innocent – not the victims of torture nor the victims of terror – because no one can escape becoming the bearer of this “universal guilt.”  Force is the only way to practically empower oneself in the world, to succeed, and the civilians slaughtered in the name of this success are expendable precisely because they are not innocent.

Another mode of legitimating terrorist activity for the Red Army and leftist student movements in general is the accusation that the conditions of society has driven a group of otherwise normal socially-adept citizens into terrorists, that it is the government who is the real terrorist and the leftist groups the victims who must now resort to terrorism in order to bring about justice.  Jacques Derrida makes a similar point in his interview with Giovanna Borradori:

[A]ll terrorism presents itself as a response in a situation that continues to escalate.  It amounts to saying: “I am resorting to terrorism as a last resort, because the other is more terrorist than I am; I am defending myself, counterattacking; the real terrorist, the worst, is the one who will have deprived me of every other means of responding before presenting himself, the first aggressor, as a victim.”  (Borradori 107, author’s italics).

Even before the Red Army formed into a cohesive group, the student movements from which it sprang were already using this logic during their protests of Japanese support for the Vietnam War: the general response of the leftist students to a public which opposed the public protests was: “What is our violence compared with the violence generated by fifty thousand Americans in Vietnam?” (Farrell 63).  The student movements and their sympathizers also claimed that “the state—by co-opting the masses and quarantining the extremists (by surveillance and threatened arrest)—denied them the opportunity to leave their group and seek reintegration into society” (78).  Concerning the actual Red Army itself, from the moment of its foundation violence was advocated as the only means towards effective change domestically or internationally.  It was argued that

the student movement, as it was then configured, had essentially been defeated by the government.  New, more radical strategies—including an uprising with guns and bombs—were required.  They claimed the situation was ripe for the creation of an “army” to do battle with the imperialist government of Japan.  Adherents to this view also called for alliances with like-minded organizations throughout the world.  Japan’s revolution would be part and parcel of an international movement (86). 

Following this logic, terrorists become terrorists because a.) they have no other way of responding to social problems other than violent terrorism and b.) they cannot become lawful members of a society that has pre-emptively demonized them as terrorists.  By adopting the cloak of victimhood, terrorist acts can be justified as the only way that this marginalized group of people can effect lasting political change in Japan and worldwide. 

Now that some of the ideological justifications for the terrorism of the Red Army have been outlined, it would be appropriate to turn to the ways in which they have been put into practice.  In 1972 members of the Red Army murdered twenty-four civilians (including “[s]eventeen . . . Puerto Rican tourists”) and injured seventy-six at the Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel  (Goodman 183).  Two important figures in relation to this massacre are Shigenobu Fusako and Kozo Okamoto, both members of the Red Army.  Shigenobu got involved with the student movements during her time at Meiji University and proved to be an intelligent and capable organizer of and participant in several demonstrations.  After the leader of the Red Army, Shiomi Takaya, was arrested, Shigenobu decided to travel to the Middle East (obtaining a passport by marrying another activist, Okudaira Takeshi, who would accompany her) to “undertake guerilla training at [the PFLP’s] facilities in Lebanon” (Steinhoff, “Three Women” 314).  She was involved in the decision to respond to the United Red Army purge in the winter of 1972 by joining the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in carrying out the notorious Lod Airport Massacre on May 30, 1972 as a gesture of support for Palestine (Farrell 6).   Okudaira Takeshi, Shigenobu’s nominal husband, Okamoto Kozo, and Yasuyuki Yasude, another Red Army member, participated in the massacre, but Okamoto Kozo was the only survivor.

Okamoto Kozo was a much younger member of the Red Army who began demonstrating alongside the student movements at Kagoshima University, which he thought were a “form of ‘masturbation’ which made the students feel good.”  In his search for “a comprehensive ideology which would link all the issues and offer a clearcut solution [to sociopolitical problems worldwide],” he joined the Red Army Faction in 1970 and received his first assignment in 1971: to prepare a room for the screening of the Red Army propaganda film “Declaration of World War by the Red Army and PFLP”.  However, Okamoto was not concerned with “the finer points of ideology.”  For him, “[t]he idea of being an active revolutionary was the main attraction.  The precise theoretical rationale was not important, so long as it encompassed his general political frustrations and his concern about environmental pollution.”  Also, “[w]hile he was personally concerned about the state of the Palestinian refugees, he said that was definitely not his motivation for entering guerilla training.  He was moved by a much more global desire to participate in world revolution” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 833, 834, 830).  In this respect he is similar to the boy-narrator of Seventeen: both are politically-ignorant but angry (and frustrated) individuals who want to sacrifice themselves to the service of an ideology, whether this be the ideology of emperor service or the ideology of “being a revolutionary” and fighting the “real” terrorists (or the “first aggressor[s],” to borrow Derrida’s term) of the capitalist-imperialist order.  

The decision to attack the airport was not the result of careful consideration about how this would advance the cause of the revolution or how it would advance the cause of the workers of the world; it was an act from the position of what Camus calls “the end of history.”  As he writes, “Values are thus only to be found at the end of history.  Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgment of value.  One must act and live in terms of the future.  All morality becomes provisional” (Camus 142).  This is directly related to the kinds of justifications for the act and for the revolution given by Okamoto at his trial.  During his speech at the trial,

 [h]e . . . outlined the theory of worldwide revolution by the people of the third world. . . .  He said this was . . . a revolutionary war in which ordinary people standing on the side of bourgeois society would be massacred.  “The world did not understand what we Red Army soldiers did, but as the massacres continue, the world will perceive the true meaning of our war.”  Now that the Red Army soldiers had joined in the world’s revolution, he continued, if those residents of bourgeois society who suffer from pollution were added, the revolution would be half-completed” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 842, my ellipses). 

Additionally, Okamoto believed that “[s]ince the revolution is not being fought in the name of any specific values, there are no constraints on how it may be fought. . . .  Only history . . . can judge whether he and his companions have been right or wrong” (815, my ellipses).  Morality is provisional, as Camus tells us, insofar as any act performed in the service of a revolution will only receive its full significance once the revolutionary struggle wins or loses.  If the revolutionaries win, it will have been a beneficial act, a moral act, one that was worth sacrificing the lives of innocent civilians; if not, it will have been morally unsound.  The belief that lives could be sacrificed in the first place had been solidified through the aforementioned ideological presuppositions of Mori Tsuneo, under which victims were dehumanized and denounced as always-already guilty.  Okamoto was fully in line with them since “the people he killed were not enemies against whom he felt a direct animosity. . . .  Rather, he regards them all as faceless, inevitable casualties of the revolution” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 814, my ellipsis).  If the revolution will end worldwide capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and class-warfare, then the “inevitable” loss of any  number of civilians will be justified. 

 Walter Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” frames a similar argument along the lines of Messianism and the retroactive signification of the revolutionary act.  In Thesis XIV he writes: “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.”  The proper way to understand history, then, is not by reading it as a linear sequence of major events, but to read how events become “historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.  A historian who takes this as his point of departure . . . establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time” (Benjamin 261, 263, my ellipsis).  The revolutionary act takes place in a moment of Messianic time, from the position of “Judgment Day,” the only position from which the morality or immorality of a certain act can be evaluated (Thesis III, 254).  The problem arises when individuals or groups believe that they are fully justified in acting from the position of Judgment Day: violent terrorism, the murder of civilians, kidnappings, and torture can all be unproblematically justified as acts in service of a revolution whose morality can only be properly established retroactively.  This frees anyone (whether on the individual or group level) capable of appropriating the banner of “revolutionary” for their cause from the considerations of violence as an appropriate means towards social change, the morality of taking lives in order to save many more (echoing the sentiments of Marat, who once frustratedly asked, “Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a great number?”), whether or not it was ever possible to achieve the stated goals of the revolution (Camus 126).  We should understand the Lod Airport Massacre as an act which took place under the Messianic register: it had no direct political goals, or if it did these goals were merely nominal.  The main motivation for the attack was the idea that by attacking Israel on its own soil (the country responsible for the major problems in the Middle East), the revolution against capitalism and imperialism would be advanced.  However, the belief that massacring civilians at an airport would advance this cause in any direct way is substantially misguided.  Practical politics are suspended as the Red Army adopts a Messianic perspective towards world revolution in which the category of morality loses any positive existence, since the legitimacy and morality of the act can only be assigned from the temporal position of the Messiah, or “the end of history.”  Now the only relationships that matter are relationships of force: which side, which political entity can exert itself above the other to achieve its Messianic goals?  It is in this context that we should read Camus’s statement on the historical inscription of the terrorist act:

Cynicism, the deification of history and of matter, individual terror and State crime, these are the inordinate consequences that will now spring, armed to the teeth, from the equivocal conception of a world that entrusts to history alone the task of producing both values and truth.  If nothing can be clearly understood before truth has been brought to light, at the end of time, then every action is arbitrary, and force will finally rule supreme.  (146).

discuss the co-ordination of German and Jewish organizations in order to facilitate the emigration of Jews to Palestine.  Both the Germans and the Zionists wanted as many Jews as possible to move to Palestine.  The Germans preferred to have them out of Western Europe, and the Zionists themselves wanted the Jews in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible.  (Zizek, IBK 149-50).

While the context here is very different from that of terrorism in Japan in the post-war period, we can still see the same fundamental convergence of radically opposite ideologies into the same practical, real-world solutions.  The impulse towards violence and violent terrorism should be read as something inherent to political extremism in general, whether of the Right or Left.   

The terrorists I have briefly examined (whether actual or narrative representations) run into difficulties explaining exactly what it is they want to achieve in terms of real-world solutions to the sociopolitical problems they hold responsible for widespread inequality.  While we do not know what the boy-narrator of Seventeen would say if confronted by the question of practical goals, his response would likely be similar to Okamoto Kozo’s answer to the same question: as Patricia Steinhoff tells us: “When I asked him what kind of world he envisioned after the revolution, he smiled and said, ‘That is the most difficult question for revolutionaries.  We really do not know what it will be like’ ” (Steinhoff, “Portrait” 814-15).  Without over-generalizing, I think it is safe to say that the terrorists of the Red Army and of Oe’s fictional Imperial Way party share the same sentiments about being a revolutionary or a Rightist, respectively: it is more about fulfilling a desire to be dominated by an ideology, to have something to which one is willing to sacrifice one’s life for, than it is accomplishing anything in the way of practical solutions.   

The major problem with terrorism of this kind is that even with its orientation towards a Messianic time, its symbolic determination to be decided from the perspective of the future, the perspective of the end of history, it nonetheless has no future in terms of forming political solutions.  This is related to what Jacques Derrida has called the “bin Laden effect”: terrorism that is oriented towards destruction without the possibility of opening up new political or discursive possibilities.  As he says,

What appears to me unacceptable in the “strategy” (in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so on) of the “bin Laden effect”  is . . . above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future. (Borradori 113). 

Political terrorism in its ideal form is meant to open up new possibilities, perhaps the possibility of utopia, but more commonly the possibility for new kinds of things to be said and new kinds of action to emerge (not necessarily of the violent type).  The terrorism I have looked at in this essay falls far short of these ideals: it provides nothing in the way of practical solutions.  In this sense, the masturbatory theme of Seventeen comes full circle: terrorism of this kind produces nothing except the self-pleasure of the extremist groups who participate in and support the attacks.  We can put this much more succintly by manipulating Masao Miyoshi’s statement from the Introduction to Seventeen to say that “terrorism is inevitably masturbatory” (Oe xvii). 

 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003
Albert Camus,  The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, New York: Vintage, 1956.
William R. Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army, Lexington: Lexington Books: 1990
David G. Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa.  Jews in the Japanese Mind, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000.
Fred Halliday, “Terrorism in historical perspective,”    
www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=6&debateId=103&articleId=1865
Kenzaburo Oe, Seventeen and J, trans. Luk van Haute, Introduction by Masao Miyoshi, New York: Blue Moon Books: 1996.
Patricia J. Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables,” in Japanese Social
Organization, ed. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992.
- “Portrait of a Terrorist: An Interview with Kozo Okamoto,” Asian Survey, September, 1976, vol XVI. No. 9.
-“Three Women Who Loved the Left,” in Re-Imaging Japanese Women, ed. Anne E. Imamura, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989.
- Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London: Verso, 2003.

Restoration, Revolution, and Terror in Japan, Or How the Right and Left Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Ideology

An Essay in Three Parts

“The greatest fanatics are children and adolescents” – Dmitri Pisarev

Most definitions of terrorism refer to it as a tool to force political change through violent activity, including assassinations, bombings, and kidnappings.  An example of one such definition comes from Fred Halliday, who defines terrorism as

    a distinct political and moral phenomenon, though of course interlinked     with the issue of revolt and opposition to oppression. Terrorism refers to     a set of military tactics that are part of military and political struggle, and     which are designed to force the enemy to submit by some combination     of killing and intimidation.  (OpenDemocracy.com).

What such definitions miss is the fact violent terrorism can be understood on two different levels: as a means towards achieving realistic political goals or as an act directed towards the (politically unrealistic) achievement of utopia, of Heaven on earth, or the ushering in of a new golden age.  Much ostensibly political terrorism is infused with the substance of the latter in that the acts performed by terrorist groups have an eye towards revolution, not of the state or of any other viable political entity, but of the entire world order: what we might call a Messianic revolution.  Understanding terrorism in its dual nature allows us to read terrorism from the Right wing and terrorism from the Left wing in terms of their fundamental similarities: though the two sides can have radically different political goals, the underlying impulse towards a complete, Messianic revolution brought about through violent activity remains the same in both.  In other words, within the different kinds of terrorism across the political spectrum exists the same essential kernel which motivates revolutionary violence.  In the context of Japanese terrorist groups of the latter half of the 20th century, two in particular stand out: the Imperial Way Party, a fictional entity in Oe Kenzaburo’s novel Seventeen, which has as its goal the restoration of the Emperor to the seat of power and the destruction of all opposition from the left, and the Japanese Red Army, a leftist organization with links to Marxist thought and which stood for the dismantling of capitalism and imperialism worldwide.  Both groups present themselves as political revolutionaries fighting injustice (in Japan or throughout the world) but their actions are informed as much (if not moreso) by the Messianic dimension as they are the political dimension.  The process of identification with these terrorist organizations then is less a conscious choice to fight whatever injustice there is in the world than it is a means of erasing internal contradictions within the self and following the impulse towards violent revolution in the name of utopia.

I.  Terrorism from the Right: Seventeen and Ideological Jouissance

Seventeen is based on the true story of Yamaguchi Otoya, who at the age of seventeen publicly assassinated the chairman of the Socialist Party, whom he labelled a “traitorous” leader (Oe vi).  In Oe’s narrative of the boy’s life, Yamaguchi begins as a socially-inept compulsive masturbator who rises to power once he joins and participates in the violent activities of the Rightist Imperial Way Party.  Up until he serves as a sakura, or paid cheerleader, for the Imperial Way speaker in the subway, the boy has no sense of identification with anyone or anything, but simply a desire to lash out (violently) against society.  His political leanings are initially towards the left, since during the argument with his sister about how the building up of the Self-Defense Forces is a misguided idea and how the Conservative party, far from improving things economically, has wrecked the country: “Japan’s prosperity is shit, and the Japanese who vote for the Conservative party are shit.  It’s all disgusting. . . .  That kind of Japan ought to be wiped off the face of the earth, and that kind of Japanese can all go to hell” (13).  However uneloquently he expresses his sentiments, from the very beginning we see that the boy thinks about politics on a level far removed from rational argument or democratic debate (a mode of thinking exemplified by his sister, who counters his violent rhetoric with logical argument rooted in the firsthand knowledge of contemporary politics she gets from being an SDF nurse).  The boy-narrator’s sentiments are those of a revolutionary who foregoes a consideration of politics in order to embrace a Messianic perspective on the status of Japan.  He thus adopts the role of divine arbitrator over life and death: he talks about which Japanese should “go to hell” and which Japan should “be wiped off the face of the earth.”  

But while he has (to some degree) identified a particular enemy and a particular problem with Japan and Japanese politics in the confrontation with his sister, this identification is all but gone in the next scene, in which he he swings his Raikokuga sword by himself in the shed and says:

The day will come when I’ll stab the enemy to death with this Japanese sword.  The enemy who I, like a man, will skewer. . . .  But where is this enemy of mine?  My enemy, is he my father?  Is my enemy my sister?  Or the American soldiers from the base?  The men in the SDF?  The Conservative politicians?  Wherever my enemies are, I’ll kill them.  (Oe 18).    

The boy-narrator opens up a space for violence against an enemy without having positively defined this enemy.  It is a kind of pure violence, devoid of political attachments and positive content in general, the adoption of which carves out a place  within which anyone unfortunate enough to incur the boy’s wrath can serve as the target of the boy’s violent tendencies.  The arbitrary designations of who “the enemy” might be point to the boy’s need for there to be an enemy, a target upon which he can exercise his violent hatred, an act which will allow him to overcome feelings of self-doubt. 

The ultimately unproductive ways in which his hatred is externalized in these first two scenes (kicking his sister in the head, swinging a sword in the dark) are related to the unproductive nature of masturbation itself, a preoccupation of the narrator for most of the novel.  When he kicks his sister in the head, a response to his own inability to form a rational counter-argument to her, he engages in a non-productive act, an act which resolves internal tension but creates nothing in terms of a resolution of the argument   In fact, the scene itself seems structured like masturbatory stimulation followed by orgasm: the boy’s rhetoric, which is solipsistic in that it does not engage with the arguments provided by his sister but projects political concerns into a realm in which he is divine arbitrator, escalates to a point at which retreat is impossible.  This build-up culminates in the final resolution of tension when the boy, in a flurry of rage and passion, kicks his sister in the head.  Afterwards, the narrator is embarrassed and ultimately dissatisfied that the feeling is gone.  In the first scene of the novel, in which he masturbates in the shower, he feels “the chill of an autumn afternoon [which] comes to call on my body” (4).  Similarly, after he kicks his sister in the head and is half-heartedly berated by his father, he “feel[s] myself freeze, right to the guts” (18).  These two images connect the actual practice of masturbation with a solipsistic argumentative method in which conclusions are not reached because the debater presumes himself to be above and beyond the realm of practical politics, making any attempt at a productive conclusion (not a violent release of pent-up tension) futile.  This is the same impulse behind the boy’s swinging of the Raikokuga sword at his imaginary (and undefined) enemies: self-pleasure in the form of violent fantasy.

This metaphor, through which the political is sublated into the divine (or simply to the beyond-political), connects to the pleasure involved in suspending critical thought, in giving oneself over completely to a political movement, in subverting one’s vision to a  particular ideological lens.  And this ideological lens can be that of the extreme leftist or rightist position, liberalism or fascism, the restoration of the emperor or the abolition of world capitalism.  After the boy has joined the Imperial Way Party and made some accomplishments in putting down leftist strikes, he experiences an unmatched degree of pleasure in devoting himself fully to the emperor: “I will keep this erection through my entire life. . . .  All my life will be an orgasm” (68).  Later on, he says, “I feel liberated.  I no longer know the anxiety of those who have to choose.  His Majesty the Emperor makes the choices” (71).  Masturbation, for the boy-narrator, is a mode of getting beyond the earthly concerns of logic, rationality, practical politics, but the problem is that the orgasm experienced is only a temporary resolution of contradictions, whereas the identification with the Imperial Way Party and the complete devotion to the emperor ensures that critical thought, rationality, and politics do not have to enter his mindframe, that the contradictions will be resolved simply because they will cease to exist.  

The boy’s moment of identification with the right occurs during his attendance of a speech by Kunihiko Sakakibara, an Imperial Way party member, in the subway.  He overhears someone saying, “That one, he’s a Rightist, and he’s still so young.  Look.  He’s a real pro,” after which he

turn[s] around suddenly to face the group of three office girls who’re lambasting me.  This gives them a fright.  That’s it, I think.  I am a Rightist.  I’m seized by a sudden, intense joy.  It makes me shiver.  I’ve touched the essence of myself.  I am a Rightist!  (55).  

The identification with the right emerges at the moment when he realizes that adopting this position will strike fear into the hearts of ordinary people, who will now “no longer see the wretched me who wets his penis in masturbation” and “no longer see the lonely, miserable Seventeen,” but will “look at me the way they look at other adults who possess an independent personality” (55).  There is no concrete reason why he should have identified with the right over the left (his initial political leanings were towards the left); the speech in the subway simply inspires him, even though (or perhaps precisely because) it is charged with the same kind of rhetoric the boy used in arguing with his sister: a rhetoric that translates politics into a divine struggle between good and evil: “I hereby vow to you: I’ll kill them, I’ll slaughter them, I’ll rape their wives and daughters, I’ll feed their sons to the pigs.  Such is Justice.  Such is my duty.  Extermination, that’s the divine will laid upon my shoulders at birth” (54).   By reading this decontextualized statement, we do not know who is the enemy here: we get the opening up of a space which any political leader or political party can occupy (which we saw earlier during the boy’s sword-swinging).  In this case, it is the left-leaning parties in Japan, particularly the parties affiliated with Socialism.  The particular ideology he subscribes to has little to do with the boy’s personal politics: he seeks power, even if this just means that people who see him on the street now do not automatically assume he is a chronic masturbator, and he will identify with whichever political ideology gives him both the power to make people afraid of him and to resolve the inner contradictions involved in engaging with politics in a complex everyday, as opposed to a sublime, capacity. 

This mode of ideological identification is discussed by Slavoj Zizek in the “From Symptom to Sinthome” chapter of The Sublime Object of Ideology.  He writes,

the real aim of ideology is the attitude demanded by it, the       consistency of the ideological form, the fact that we “continue to  walk as straight as we can in one direction” [Descartes]; the positive reasons given by ideology to justify this request – to make us obey ideological form – are there only to conceal this fact: in other words, to conceal the surplus-enjoyment proper to the ideological form as   such.” (Zizek, SOI 83).

Ideology is to be followed for its “educational effect,” but the subject must believe that s/he is following ideology in order to arrive at a definable teleological goal and not for its educational value, by which is meant the pleasure that emerges when the subject realizes that “I will lead a dignified, calm, moral, satisfying life, free of perturbations and doubts [if I follow this ideology] (83).  This “educational effect” is felt merely as a side effect, for if the subject becomes aware of the fact that s/he is following an ideology merely for its “educational effect,” ideology would lose its grasp: this “would reveal the enjoyment which is at work in ideology, the ideological renunciation itself.  In other words, it would reveal that ideology serves only its own purpose, that it does not serve anything” (84).  Only in circumstances like this (complete devotion of the self to an ideology) can the boy-narrator live out his dream of turning his whole life into one long continuous orgasm.  But he must believe that he is following Rightist ideology because this will accomplish the ultimate goal of the restoration of the Emperor to the seat of power, not because devoting himself to this ideology will provide him with endless pleasure; the orgasmic pleasure that arises once the self is dissolved in ideological identification is to be experienced as a side-effect of following the ideology.

But what about the real effects of devoting one’s self to an ideology?  Yes, the subject experiences supreme pleasure through sacrificing the will towards rational and critical thought, but how does this translate into the world?  Different ideologies will urge their subjects towards different goals, but in the case of the boy-narrator of Seventeen, the result is what I would call practical violence        (as opposed to the pure violence described earlier, in which there is no definable enemy against which to direct anger).  Violence is now directed against supporters and members of the leftist political parties in Japan: “The leftists have started organizing regular marches on the Diet.  I eagerly join the Youth Group of the Imperial Way.  Red workers, red students, red artists, red actors—beat them, kick them, pursue them!” He continues, “I fight like a hero.  I wield my stick of malice at the students, I swing my nail-studded wooden sword of hostility into a group of women.  I trample them, I pursue them” (Oe 72).  Pure violence acquires a practical component once the Left is forced to occupy the space opened up by the boy’s internal aggression against a formerly undefined enemy.  The most significant result of his ideological devotion, however, is left out of Oe’s narrative, possibly because it would be obvious to Japanese readers that the boy-narrator is also the future assassin of Inejiro Asanuma, the chairman of the Socialist Party in Japan.  This assassination represents the culmination of the boy’s identification with the ultranationalist ideology of emperor service, which involves the destruction of socialist-inspired movements and the silencing of Leftist criticism of the government.

The use of a Japanese sword provides a heavily symbolic charge to the act on two different levels: there is the weight of Japanese nationalism on one hand and the sexual metaphor of penetration (the sword entering the body of the victim) on the other.  If we read penetration in opposition to masturbation, penetration being a potentially productive sexual act between two people and masturbation being an act of pure self-pleasure, we can say that the boy’s progression from pure violence to practical violence is mirrored by his progression from masturbatory self-pleasure to productive penetration.  Of course, we should not read “productive” in a positive way (the act of murder is anything but productive), but under his particular ideological entrapment the act would be productive in that it advances the cause of ultranationalism.  This metaphor has its precedent in an earlier scene in which the boy imagines his “manhood” as a weapon:

“It is I, a man with his manhood . . . like a red-hot skewer ready to pierce through the virgin vagina of newly wed bride.  I will keep this erection through my entire life. . . .  All my life will be an orgasm.  My body, my soul, all of me will continue to stand erect.  (Oe 68).             

At this point he transcends the shame of his compulsive masturbation habit and affirms his own sexual prowess (whether real or imaginary).  The sexual ability to penetrate and the ability to kill by penetrating become intertwined in this image of the penis as a weapon (“a red-hot skewer”) in the same way that sexual violence and political violence intertwine in the final orgasmic thrust of the sword into the body of the enemy. 

(Parts II and III coming soon!)

(Click here for AV Club Interview)

“I saw stunned pigeons sitting listlessly on the pavement in lower Manhattan for days after the explosions on 9/11.  It’s almost two years later, and most New Yorkers seem to have picked up the rhythms of daily life . . . but right under the surface, we’re all still just a bunch of stunned pigeons” – Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers.

The major difference between Art Spiegelman’s 2004 book In the Shadow of No Towers, a series of ten massive comic book pages on the attacks of September 11th and their aftermath, and his Pulitzer-Prize winning Maus, a chronicle (in comic book form) of his parents’ history as Holocaust survivors, is that for the former, Art Spiegelman was there: no longer merely a notetaker of tragedies beyond representation that took place before he was born, he delivers to us a scathing critique of the hyper-visibility of the September 11th attacks by way of media imagery, the proliferation of war rhetoric (“Let’s Have Rage!” a Time magazine editorial ran) and hasty political prescriptions (for the U.S. and for the rest of the world) in place of dialogue and debate (not to mention the feckless response of the American Left), and the state of panic generalized among Americans and intensified among New Yorkers like Spiegelman himself, all with the eye (and nose) of one who has seen the World Trade Center towers collapse before the media images “burned their way into every brain, or as one who, as he puts it more succintly, “saw it all live—unmediated” (Spiegelman 1).  In reference to Maus, Michael Rothberg (my teacher!) writes, “[T]he power and originality of Spiegelman’s effort derive quite specifically from this shock of obscenity that demands that we confront ‘The Holocaust’ as visual representation, as one more commodity in the American culture industry” (Rothberg 203).  Whereas the Holocaust and the experience of Holocaust survivors tended to resist visualization and, by extension, commodification, Spiegelman’s chronicle of September 11th and post-September 11th politics takes place in a world where the brutality of the attacks was conveyed almost solely through the mode of visualization.  Fittingly, then, each page of In the Shadow of No Towers is a collage of visual impressions of the artist’s personal recollections (the crazy homeless woman screaming at him in Russian about how the Jews are responsible for the attacks, him and his wife Anja’s mad dash to check on their daughter at the United Nations School near where the towers collapsed) and the “hijack[ing]” of “those tragic events” by “brigands suffering from war fever,” all amidst the glowing infrastructure of the soon-to-be-destroyed World Trade Center towers, the last “unmediated” image Spiegelman has of the towers (4). These pages represent, in a phrase, the extreme in the midst of the everyday, or, as Spiegelman puts it, “that faultline where World History and Personal History collide.”  In an attempt to overcome trauma by finding a pure, non-politicized realm from a more innocent age, Spiegelman turns to (where else?) the newspaper comics of the early 20th century, whose very form called for disposability.  However, as I hope to show, even disposable newspaper comics cannot ultimately resist politicization.  

In the first page of the book, Spiegelman draws at the bottom a crowd of people terrified at the prospect of a shoe dropping on them, specifically, a shoe manufactured by “Jihad brand footware” (1).  Towards the top of the page, another comic strip introduces the “21st century’s dominant metaphor”: waiting for the other shoe to drop, as in waiting for something bad to happen.  After September 11th, Americans are placed in a state of panic concerning the next terrorist attack, a state of panic which threatens to become naturalized as the default mode of living, which will be justified by the end of the comic  when the other shoe does in fact drop.  However, the other shoe is not “Jihad brand footware,” but the cowboy boots which rain upon the city in 2004 as “New York is transformed into a stage set for the Republican Presidential Convention, and Tragedy is transformed into Travesty” (10).  While it would no doubt be problematic to try to name the particular stance of Spiegelman, I think it’s safe to say that his anxiety is a product of both the attacks themselves and the fear-mongering and Biblical revenge fantasies of the Bush administration.  The second page depicts a self-portrait of the artist (as a mouse, the same way he portrays himself throughout Maus) asleep at his desk while being threatened from one side by Osama bin Laden and his scimitar and from the other by a smirking, pistol-waving George W. Bush with the caption “EQUALLY TERRORIZED BY AL-QAEDA AND BY HIS OWN GOVERNMENT” (2).  

We can read the artist’s paranoia towards his government and the world in general (“I insist the sky is falling, they roll their eyes and tell me it’s only my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”) as the natural mode of perceiving major political events, or what Peter Knight calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”  As his book Conspiracy Culture explains: “A postmodern form of paranoid skepticism has become routine in a world in which the conspiratorial netherworld has become hypervisible, its secrets just one more commodity. . . .   [I]t has become . . . more an expression of inexhaustible suspicion and uncertainty than a dogmatic form of scaremongering” (Knight 75).  Spiegelman follows this conspiratorial logic when he (in mouse form) rants about how “the government has been lying about the air quality [around the collapsed WTC towers]” and about the “displacement” logic of the government and of its major institutions (the media in particular) whereby “Iraq [is demolished] instead of Al-Qaeda” and the New York Times all but confirms the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and “displaces its guilt” by apologizing “for some minor journalist’s pattern of inconsequential lies” (in reference to Jayson Blair) (Spiegelman 3, 9). 

In the case of the air quality, it is important to note that Spiegelman detects this “lie” through his sense of smell: “I remember my father trying to describe what the smoke in Auschwitz smelled like. . . .  The closest he got was telling me it was ‘indescribable.’ . . .  That’s exactly what the air in lower Manhattan smelled like after Sept. 11!” (3).  While the “Cremo” brand cigarettes¹ Spiegelman is smoking and the direct reference to Auschwitz give us a connection between Auschwitz and September 11th as events for which representation fails to do justice and for which representations in their “all-too-real materiality” are given to us by “the culture industry” as the only real window into the reality of these events, it is important to note that Spiegelman, by using his sense of smell, operates outside the realm of the visible and outside of the representations provided to us by the culture industry (Rothberg 205).  Smell is inevitably opposed to vision as a sense which purports to detect the reality behind visual representation by “smelling [it] out.”  As Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “—I was the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.—My genius is in my nostrils.”  According to Akira Mizuta Lippit, he “refus[es] the privileged sense of human beings—sight—for that most frequently associated with the animal: smell” (Lippit 82).  What better way to detect post-September 11th conspiracies than by “smelling out” the lies behind the official reality fed to the American public by the newspapers and news networks?  What better way to reinforce the inadequacy of representation towards an event like September 11th than by pointing out that the “indescribable” “odor of death” (in the words of W.H. Auden) surrounding the destroyed towers (and Auschwitz too) brings us closer to the real of this event than visual representation ever could?  And who better to perform this task than an animal (Spiegelman’s mouse) who has not been bombarded (or terrorized?) with images and can thus smell out the reality behind a media-manipulated reality predicated on the power of image? 

But it would be wrong to simply say that Spiegelman has smelled for himself the ashes of the collapsed World Trade Center towers and is thus able to provide us with a “real” account of the attacks and a deconstruction of the logic behind the American government’s response to the events.  The reason why smell retains a privileged position in preserving the trauma of an event is precisely because it cannot be reproduced (and commodified) the same way an image can.  Smells are “indescribable,” they “do not provide material and thus repeatable signifiers, and therefore cannot form a semiotic system” (Lippit 123).  Smell, like the event itself, is unrepresentable.  In the Shadow of No Towers itself is a series of images which share the similar handicap of media images in that they can never do justice to their object.  The “Weapons of Mass Displacement” sequence, which I have briefly touched on earlier, is an exercise in the manipulation of the image.  The panel starts with Spiegelman (as a human) sitting in a chair with a cat in his lap and a lamp on his side.  As he details how various things are displaced in the media and by the government (the drive to destroy Al-Qaeda becomes the drive to destroy Saddam Hussein, the NY Times apologizes for the white lies of a reporter instead of the lie about WMDs, Haliburton is rewarded with contracts for Iraqi oil while Martha Stewart is imprisoned on fraud charges, etc.), the images themselves become displaced as Spiegelman’s head switches places with the lamp, the cat switches places with Spiegelman, Spiegelman’s shoe switches places with his head.  Any attempt to represent the (il)logic of displacement through images is subject to the same laws that rule the image: any image can be displaced, wrenched from its context, and made to serve whatever truth or untruth those in power want to communicate. 

Now, returning to the image of Spiegelman asleep at his desk with bin Laden on one side and Bush on the other, I have left out the most important figures of this image (and the smallest): the innocent but confused comic characters populating the artist’s desk, caught (along with the artist) in the crossfire of the “war on terror.”  These comic characters – Hapless Hooligan, the Kin-der Kids, Little Nemo, Little Lady Muffkins and Old Man Muffaroo – will reappear throughout the comic as casualties of September 11th, figures forced to inhabit a new context outside the comfortable realm of newspaper print.  The cover hints at this motif of lost innocence: in front of the black on black drawing of the World Trade Center towers, we see an Osama bin Laden goat kicking into the air one of the World Trade Center towers (embodied in one half of a set of twins with the towers for hats) along with classic comic book characters, now disoriented and removed from their situatedness within a purely aesthetic realm (as much as newspaper comics can fall under the “Aesthetic” with a capital “A” banner).   In an interview with The Onion’s “AV Club,” Spiegelman discusses his recourse to comics of the early 20th century:

I felt the world was ending, relatively literally, and I found these works  presumed a long, glowing march through enlightenment into the future.   That was even though there wasn’t one for the comics, because they were really made for the day they were made, and nothing else.

As much as the comics for him have been removed from contemporary events, he cannot stop them from becoming politicized, from having their innocence stripped away.  One example of a classic comic reappearing in a resignified form in the pages of his book is the brief panel from Little Nemo’s Adventures in Slumberland, in which Little Nemo would dream up grand adventures of himself travelling the world and, in the last panel, be woken up by his mother, who would tell him it was all a dream.  At the end of the story about the crazy homeless woman screaming at the artist about how the “kikes did it,” we see a panel where a Little Nemo in mouse form has fallen out of bed and tells his mother, “Then John Ashcroft pulled off his burka and shoved me out the window and,” to which she, wearing a gas mask, replies, “Hush, you fell out of bed, Sweetie” (6).  Fantasy and reality for Little Nemo are now forced to bear the weight of September 11th, as his dream is a bizarre conflation of anti-terrorist law, Afghan culture, and the tragic deaths of those who jumped out of the windows of the collapsing World Trade Center towers, and his reality is one in which the very air he breathes is potentially harmful.  Besides this type of insertion of contemporary trauma into classic comics, there is the postscript of the book, in which many of these classic comics are simply presented as they were printed in the newspapers.  This collection of comics, which concern the drive to war against England, malignant genies, patriotic speeches disrupted by disobedient youths, collapsing buildings, and Arab masquerades, could have simply been remnants of a bygone age in a pre-September 11th context, (or "ephemeral" in Spiegelman's words), they now become a network charged with the weight of contemporary politics.  September 11th has retroactively politicized what was once an apolitical realm. 

But how does this work?  How can one event, regardless of how powerful it is, change all that has come before it?  Slavoj Zizek, in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, a fascinating roller-coaster ride through post-September 11th politics and philosophy from Descartes to Lacan and Giorgio Agamben and a critique of both American politics and the impotent Leftist response in Europe and elsewhere, refers to something he calls the impossible act, which is “simultaneously probable and impossible,” an act which rearranges the symbolic coordinates of what has come before, making the impossible possible, or even the logical result of preceding events.  He continues,

The encounter of the real as impossible is thus always missed: it is experienced either as impossible but not real (the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe which, however probable we know it is, we do not believe will really happen, and thus dismiss it as impossible) or as real but no longer impossible (once the catastrophe happens, it is ‘renormalized,’ perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always-already having been possible).  The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is the one between knowledge and belief: we know that the catastrophe is possible, even probable, yet we do not believe that it will really happen” (Zizek 62). 

Zizek goes on to connect this with the recent debates on legalizing torture in America in dealing with terror suspects (partly accomplished through the redefinition of the term “torture” to exclude everything except organ failure and death).  For Zizek, the idea that a liberal democracy would even consider the legalization of torture is an impossible act in itself, the potential collapse of democracy into fascism, but one which is eventually accepted by the American public as a legitimate tool in the “war on terror.”  Zizek quotes Henri Bergson: “[O]ne can . . . insert [into the past] the possible, or, rather, at every moment, the past inserts itself there.  Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past: this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible” (62).  Doesn’t this work the same way with September 11^th, that once we investigate the historical background surrounding the attacks we see that not only has the impossible event forever been possible, but it has been probable: bin Laden had been #1 on the FBI’s most wanted list for five years, the Bush administration had received the report “Osama Bin Laden determined to strike within the U.S.,” and, in more of a symbolic vein, didn’t we see the destruction of buildings by low-flying aircraft in the movie The Matrix?  Of course, the last reference is not meant to be taken as a legitimate warning about future terrorist attacks, but that’s the point: September 11th rearranges what has come before so that the most facetious or benign images can become part of a symbolic network which points towards not only possibility but the probability of the impossible act.

Getting back to the postscript of In the Shadow of No Towers, we can interpret this series of classic comics as one of these symbolic networks detailing the possibility and probability of September 11th: images as harmless as a giant-sized Little Nemo running away from a man named Flip who is knocking over buildings trying to catch up to him or the Hapless Hooligan dressing up as an Arab for a circus show, running into a “tower” of acrobats, and getting beaten by them or kids attempting to disrupt a July 4th address with sticks of dynamite, are now part of a symbolic network pointing to the occurrence of the impossible act.  These comics are stripped of their innocence because of the way in which, to quote Bergson again, “the past inserts itself” into “the possible,” into the symbolic coordinates of our reality, reconfiguring the past in order to make the logical occurrence of the impossible act possible.  What was once a refuge the artist could turn to for relief from contemporary trauma, paranoia, and helplessness now cannot help but point directly back to the source of this trauma, paranoia, and helplessness over and over again. 

When Jacques Derrida accepted the Theodor Adorno Award on September 22, 2001, he said in reference to the attacks, “My unconditional compassion, addressed to the victims of September 11, does not prevent me from saying this out loud: with regard to this crime, I do not believe anyone is politically guiltless” (Zizek 66).  While Derrida’s statement seems directed to those who would wish to paint the contemporary situation as one of a battle between Good and Evil as well as to the American and European Leftists standing for what Zizek calls an “abstract pacifism” in the face of terrorist threats, perhaps we can apply the statement to Spiegelman’s beloved comic characters, who are violently separated from their comfortable place within “ancient” newspaper prints and injected into contemporary politics, now forced to bear part of that lost innocence we all share as a result of September 11th.  In the Shadow of No Towers then is not simply a critique of contemporary politics, but a forceful reminder of how September 11th recurs endlessly and endlessly injects new interpretive frameworks into even the very realms – poetry, religion, comics – we flee towards in order to escape our memory of the impossible become real.

(1.)  The “Cremo” brand cigarettes, as Michael Rothberg points out, pun on the name Vladek Spiegelman, Art’s father, uses to describe the crematorium at Auschwitz: the “cremo building.” 

Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture, London, Routledge: 2000
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 2000
Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 2000 (what are the odds of that?)
Slavoj Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London, Verso: 2003

No one contemplating the state of our alley would ever believe what the poets say in the coffeehouses. Who are Gabal and Rifaa and Qassem? What sign is there, besides the coffeehouse stories, that any of them accomplished anything? All the eye can see is an alley sunk in darkness and poets that sing of dreams. How did this happen to us? (363).

God damn them all. . . . Each of them [Al Gabal, Al Rifaa, Al Qassem] is so stupidly, so blindly proud of its man—all proud of men of whom nothing is left but their names.  And they never make any attempt to go one step beyond that false pride! Bastards.  Cowards. (367).

And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself, his own miracles this time, and will bow down to the miracles of quacks, or women’s magic, though he be rebellious, heretical, and godless a hundred times over. . . . You did not [come down from the cross] because . . . you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted for faith that is free, not miraculous. You thirsted for love that is free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that has left him permanently terrified (Dostoevsky 256).

Overpowered by fear, the overseer and his men sent their spies everywhere to search homes and shops and impose the cruelest punishments for the slightest offenses. They beat people with sticks for a look, a joke or a laugh, until the alley endured a nightmarish atmosphere of fear, hatred, and terrorism. Yet the people bore the outrages steadfastly, taking refuge in patience. They held fast to hope, and whenever they were persecuted, they said, “Injustice must have an end, as day must follow night.  We will see the death of tyranny, and the dawn of light and miracles” (448).