CAPONISED MALES? A HALF HELPING OF MAN
EDUCATING FOR CORPORATE, NOT INDIVIDUAL NEEDS
JAPAN 1988
W. David Kubiak, contributing editor to Kyoto Journal
Syndey Morning Herald 14 June 1998.
"CAPONISED MALES? A HALF HELPING OF MAN"
Introduction
One full helping of man. The perpetual banninmae – a half
helping of man. Anyone who has ever caponised roosters, for example,
knows the fascinating spectrum of personality and physical changes that
accompany the transition from natural bird to corporate broiler. It
might be inferred that a steady diet of miso, tofu, soy sauce and so on
might not be best for leadership trainees or aspiring Lotharios.
Do stress levels inflicted on Japanese students repress full sexual
maturation, resulting in a compliant male population? W. David Kubiak
examines the evolution of the Japanese schooling system.
There are a variety of proven methods to enhance a people's reliance
on authoritarian groups and curb their sense of, or desire for,
personal autonomy. Japanese culture presents a catalogue of such
techniques.
Education is perhaps the best example. Most of the recent heavy
breathing over Japan's educational "product" has come from the world's
managerial class. And if schooling is defined as among fish –
incessant attachment and responsiveness to the heading of the group
– then mangers have much to hyperventilate about.
Of the two competing drives we each harbour – to belong and to
become recognisably unique – Japan's education educes and
enhances only the first. The Japanese student is trained to not even
question authority, let alone challenge it.
The only acceptable behaviour is obedience; total, enthusiastic and
if possible, brilliant obedience.
Students here are virtually never taught or required to speak or
write their thoughts, whether concerning a problem a policy or a poem.
Most young Japanese can tell you "what is thought", but have great
difficulty expressing what they themselves think.
This creates an extreme permeability to prevailing authority, which
is probably the true key to so-called consensual decision-making.
Japanese schooling is carefully designed to enhance this psychic
porosity and thus prepare "open minds" for their future group's
influence. But over and above the present system's specific, we should
consider its evolution and how it cam to serve corporate, rather than
individual, ends.
In pre-industrial Japan, a fully competent craftsman, musician or
healer was referred to in Japanese as ichininmae – one full
helping of man. After traditional education ended, the master released
his apprentice to the world in a ceremony that recognised the graduate
as ichininmae, an independently viable professional.
The short-term economic competition this created for the master was
more than offset by the pride in siring a new talent upon the world.
This pattern of education breathed enormous life into creative,
individualistic professions, but it was deadly for non-productive
trades and the creation of corporate groups. Dealers, politicians,
gangsters and military types did not have much cultural paternity to
propagate in the first place and the prospect of spawning a plague of
their competitive equals upon the land seemed profitless in the
extreme.
Cultural birth control therefore became a serious concern in these
circles. While accounts differ, the wealthy Osaka wholesale house of
the early Meiji era (from 1868) are often credited with the modern
Japanese solution: the perpetual banninmae – a half
helping of man.
Hanninmae were essentially stunted apprentices. They were trained to
serve useful functions but never permitted to individuate or
professionally mature and thus were obliged to spend their whole lives
as dependent and subservient members of their widening corporate
group.
The hanninmae were just never meant to grow up. These devoted and
docile half-people are the cultural antecedents of the compliant
salarymen so much in demand this century. State education eventually
stepped in to produce them en masse and their proliferation prepared
the ground for the rise of the great bodies we face today.
The shift from education for individuation to mass corporate
anthroculture (growing and harvesting of humans) not only affected
human social roles, it also covertly affected the psychosomatic being.
A couple of biological parallels may offer some evolutionary
perspective on the process.
When multi-skilled and overworked solitary wasps began to dream of
specialised subordinate workers and queenly leisure, they learned to
stunt their first-born lava with special secretions that repressed full
sexual maturation and enslaved them to the nest.
Humans likewise learned that sexually debilitating their slaves and
livestock could almost magically increase production and managerial
efficiency. Anyone who has ever caponised roosters, for
example, knows the fascinating spectrum of personality and physical
changes that accompany the transition from natural bird to corporate
broiler.
While caponisation is intended to enhance agricultural productivity,
human castration was practised for the purpose of behaviour
modification. It was employed in China as early as the Chou period of
about 100 BC to "keep feudal society orderly" and reached a peak when
the bureaucracy incorporated over 100,000 eunuchs during the late Ming
Dynasty.
Manly individualism is founded on a frail substrata of male
hormones, called androgens, secreted by the testes and related tissue.
Their sudden increase in 12 – 13 year old boys produces puberty
and the subsequent rebelliousness, strength and sexual longing of
adolescence. Androgens literally mean "manhood produces" and without
their activities males are infinitely easier to unite with tight
bonds.
As feminists archly yet accurately observe, the evolutionary
baseline is female and men are a fragile evolutionary afterthought
(hence male nipples). Women are physically and psychologically more
resilient and live longer. At the hormone level too, the force is with
them; female hormones or estrogens given to men in small quantities can
quickly overwhelm androgenic activity.
It is interesting to note that certain edible plants produce
estrogenic molecules in biologically significant amounts. These include
an isoflavanoid compound called daidzein, produced and concentrated in
the common soy bean.
In Japan, soy is a staple food. There is a paucity of research on
endocrine activity, but it might be inferred that a steady diet
of miso, tofu, soy sauce and so on may not be best for leadership
trainees or aspiring Lotharios.
Androgens are also suppressed and disabled by fear, anxiety,
exhaustion or any prolonged, intense stress. That stress hormones are
functionally estrogenic explains their effectiveness for building group
spirit in military basic training, gruelling cult initiations and
Japan's famous management training ordeals.
While concerned executives and military types have funded
considerable research into stress effects on their own sexual
performances and aggressiveness, virtually no work has been done on
behalf of children.
The stress levels inflicted upon students during the years of shiken
jigoku, Japan's infamous "examination bell" are outstandingly high and
bear down at precisely the time they are trying to negotiate puberty.
Extrapolating from adult studies, stress effects may, in many cases, be
severe enough to miscarry that fateful transition and psychosomatically
fixate the child in early adolescence.
Indeed, some social critics are beginning to describe the standard
behaviour of Japan's salarymen as maturational disorders; for example,
their love of comics and toy guns, their taste for sado-masochism
(classically a juvenile or pre-sensual for of sex) and their poor
adaptation to fatherhood.
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