The Last Paper I Wrote For College

The Wicked Webs We Weave

In Japanese literature, men are always dragging women down. Whether this means the general perception of women or if it means womanly virtue, men are always trying to find a way to pull women down. The idea of women being lesser is firmly rooted inside of confucianism. The husband/wife relationship is one of one-way respect, much like the ruler/subject relationship. Women are supposed to listen to men, especially their husbands. Therefore, it is easy to drag women through the moral dirt, when they are portrayed as not listening to their husbands.

This moral fraying of women can be portrayed in several ways, either metaphorical or quite literal. For example, Tajomaru from Rashomon is trying to pull down the Samurai's wife, literally. Granted the entire story of Rashomon and the court is about how different people have different self interest. Each of the four characters, who tell their version of the story, tell the story from their point of view. This makes it easy for them to bend logic and truth.

From the Samurai's point of view, he doesn't care as much about Tajomaru’s actions, but instead cares that his wife is willing to leave him. Her leaving is in direct conflict with the confucian ideal of what makes a good husband/wife relationship. A good wife would have stayed by her husband, even if it meant death.

To be fair to the wife, Tajomaru’s side of the story indicated that the Samurai didn’t care about his wife either. He follows Tajomaru into the forest, despite feeling suspicious of him, just so he can get discounted mirrors and swords. During this time, the Samurai was willing to leave his wife unattended in the woods. Interestingly, this aspect of the story does not appear in the Samurai’s point of view.

 In his version of the story, she even utters the phrase, “kill him” to Tajomaru. Even the thief in that version of the story seems a little put off by that. Whether or not she actually said it, is part of how the story unfolds. This would be my version of literally pulling women down through perception.

Another version of pulling women down can be found in Tanizaki’s “The Tattooer.” This version of pulling women down is highly symbolic. For one tattoos, though applied, and eventually permanent. If someone were going to get a tattoo of their identity, then it would represent them for a long period of time. Not much unlike a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on an old man's shoulder.

Tattoos were eventually banned from Japan because of what they represented. Enter Seikichi, the tattoo artist in “The Tattooer.” He desires to permanently add a spider onto a woman's back.

The tattoo is a symbolic expression of how women are viewed as whores, sluts, predators, when they don't meet a certain criteria in the eyes of men. In this way,the tattoo symbolizes that women will never be viewed as equals even when they are strong individuals capable of murder.

Consider that Seikichi only gave the women the tattoo because he found her beautiful. A tattoo artist’s job is to ruin people's skin. Skin is an outside reflection of who someone is. Whereas morals are inside reflection of who someone is.  Sikichi cares very little about how his actions change people’s lives. And he seems uninterested in the symbols he inflicts on people, because his main purpose is create pain. Seikichi loved to inflict pain on people, which was why he was obsessed with being a tattooer. 

In Japan, tattoos were used as two different ways throughout history. One way that tattoos were used was a form of spiritual expressing, sort of a mimicking of the inside morals of someone. The other way that tattoos were used was as a method to identify criminals. Certain tattoos would be given to individuals that had done certain crimes. Even today, tattoos are a method used by the Japanese Mafia, the Yakuza.

In this story, the tattoo artist has all of the power. He desires to inflict pain on the woman, because it will bring him joy. Seikichi ignores another aspect of confucian ideals. As a person, he chose to not care how he treated everything. In the story of the tattooer, it seems evident that Seikichi’s actions have caused the woman to become a killer.

By giving her the tattoo, he didn’t represent what her moral content was. Instead, the spider tattoo changed her. Again in a Japanese medium, the man was in direct control of how the woman was perceived.

This is not unlike Rashomon either. The story is told from four different point of views, each of them counter the other. The woodsman, the Samurai, the Thief, and the wife, create their stories around a fundamental idea of being seen a certain way. This is just like the tattooer. Each of the characters wants to put on a front, much like the symbol of a tattoo, so that they can be perceived in a particular way.

The Samurai does not want to be perceived as a coward or as weak. We are to believe from previous stories that Tajomaru was the one who killed him. In fact, several of the stories indicate that Tajomaru killed the Samurai. Obviously, the samurai does not want to be remembered as a man who was killed by thief, because that is not honorable.

So, he finds a way to drag his wife through the mud. He frays her morals in his story to the point that she seems like a wicked person capable of unspeakable evil. The Samurai even mentions that she was the one who put him in this dark place. She forced him, because of honor, to take his own life.
            Each of the women in these two stories is perceived as weak and moldable by the male characters. Yet, each of the women was the cause of death of the perspective male character. So, no matter where woman go in Japan, they are viewed as being weak or as being spiders, waiting to lure men. Either way, this strips women of their agency and of their identity.