(Page 2 of 23) - Masculinity in the Construction of the Ethical Citizen in Japanese Political Discourse authored by LeBlanc, Robin.

In the pages below I tell a story about a Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)

candidate for a seat in a ward assembly in Tokyo. I have changed the name of the ward to
Shimano and the name of the candidate to Takada, but with the exception of other minor
details altered to protect my informants’ privacy, the story comes from extended
fieldwork, first as a participant observer in his kōenkai (electoral support organization)
office and campaign organization in the winter and spring of 1999, then from time spent
observing him as a member of the local assembly and at constituent events in the summer
of 1999 and again in the fall of 2002. I spent a great deal of time with him one on one, as
well, talking about everything from politics to our favorite music. Once he, his wife, and
I even went out to the suburbs together to buy cheap diapers for our babies at a baby
superstore.

I tell my opening story, and subsequent stories, to make a simple point. Male

dominance in democratic politics has ethical consequences. As long as it continues, the
Japanese polity (or any other political system in which men dominate) will have access to
some ethical possibilities and not others. This is because, in seeking political power, men
rely, to at least some extent, upon the persistent association of masculinity and political
competence, virility and power. Men win power in part by demonstrating that they are
men, and they do so by showing the ways in which they fit into popular notions of
masculinity. These notions are heavy with ethical content. How could it be otherwise? To
say who is truly masculine is to say who, as a man, a person should be. The “should” is
inescapably prescriptive, at least a partial blueprint for an ethical universe. Thus, in
emphasizing their manhood as they seek power, men attach themselves to preexisting
ethical notions, and because those notions are part and parcel of what it means to be a real
man, male powerseekers do not have full control over the makeup of their political ethics.
To take a critical stance vis a vis part of the ethical system is to endanger one’s claim to
manhood.

This does not mean that all political men define themselves as men in similar

ways. Along with my study of conservative Takada-san, I have studied the careers of
progressive political men, and while they share Takada-san’s eagerness to appear manly,
they define their masculinity in peer groups with different notions of what should be
called manly. Not all ethical manhood is constructed equally. I do not have the space here
to treat alternative political masculinities, so I have focused solely on demonstrating how
the manhood-ethics link operates in Takada-san’s case. He is a good case on which to
focus for several reasons. As a member of the LDP, Takada-san is a member of Japan’s
long-dominant political party and thus a seeker of definition as a kind of hegemonic
political male. Moreover, as a second-generation political man (Takada-san’s father
served in elected office before him), Takada-san has to wrestle with the paradoxical task
of claiming his father’s legacy while proving he is “his own man.” In Takada-san we can
see quite explicitly (because his father literally embodies it) a tension between conformity
to preexisting notions of masculinity and the requirement and urge to shape one’s ethical
destiny despite the claims of these notions.