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

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,

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!)