Die böse Alte in d. japanischen Populärkultur d. Edo-Zeit

From the middle of the 18th until the end of the 19th century, Japan witnesses the rise of a strongly commercialized popular culture supported mainly by the urban commoner population. Some of the products of this popular culture such as the Kabuki theatre and the colour woodblock prints are famous throughout the world for their aesthetics; others, although in many ways related to these, are less known, that is, for instance, the mass of illustrated novels called gokan and yomihon, which, like modern penny dreadfuls, provided a not too sophisticated, but nonetheless widely literate public with entertaining reading matter. None of these genres, however, has received appropriate scientific attention so far, at least inasmuch as their contents and structure are concerned. Yet, since they, as trivial literature more generally, can be shown to exploit, although in fantastic and exaggerated ways, very real fears and hopes of the public, they can provide important insights in the field of a history of mentalities. As part of an ongoing research project on the social and cultural history of old age in premodern Japan, the present study takes a closer look on what it shows to have been one prominent feature of this cultural production, that is, its extensive use of figures of wicked crones. Through a thorough analysis of the "texts" (either written, performed or visual) of this cultural production, the study reveals that for these figures producers could fall back upon pre- existing negative stereotypes about female old age. These had long since been fostered mainly by medieval Buddhist legends which, in the attempt to neutralize an older crone-shaped goddess, had reinterpreted the many related magico-religious roles of elderly women in negative ways. Furthermore, in these crones who exercise a negative influence either in precarious working positions, or else as despotic mothers constantly, but unjustly insisting upon the fulfillment of filial piety and respect for the aged, the works presented consumers with figures onto which they could project the fears and aggressions they in all probability also harbored with regard to elderly women in real life. Because, as an exploration of the social context shows, how these literary figures are constructed is commensurate with a series of social factors that gained prominence during the same period. A considerable greying of the population since the end of the 18th century resulted in that the need to care for this growing number of aged and sometimes bedridden persons put considerable strain on intergenerational relationships, a strain which, for a number of reasons, was felt most strongly with regard to the aged mother(-in- law). Furthermore, elderly women, as mothers as well as in a series of liminal working positions such as that of the midwife or as peddlers and go-betweens, into which they were forced by poverty and precisely because they were not supported by their families as the norm would have it, displayed an amount of self-assurance that was bound to inspire fear, be it only because it sharply contradicted prevailing ideals of womanliness which increasingly ruled out female self-assertion or independence.