By Mark McLelland
Excerpted from "'A Mirror for Men?' Idealised Depictions of White Men and Gay Men in Japanese Women's Media"
Transformations
February 2003

In 1991 I was working as an editor in the Tokyo headquarters of the American publishing house Charles Tuttle Inc. which had brought out an English-Japanese phrasebook entitled Making Out in Japanese. The book provided simple, direct, pick-up lines for English-speakers to use to flirt with and hopefully take home Japanese partners. It quickly became Tuttle's best-selling title and a second volume with more of the same was hurriedly prepared. Soon after the book's release, Tuttle's marketing manager began to bring in articles about the book from the Japanese tabloid press and pass them round the office. Despite the fact that phrases in the book were divided according to gender[1](so that appropriate phrases could be used by men or women) the sensational and slightly hysterical tone of these articles showed that the book had touched a nerve with Japanese men who angrily denounced the fact that a phrasebook helping 'foreign' [gaijin][2] men pick up 'our' women had become such a best seller.

One female American editor, too, was incensed at the book's popularity, for, in her mind, it was being bought by male gaijin 'losers' who, because they were incapable of establishing relationships with western women, were pursuing more naïve and compliant Japanese women instead. This attitude was (and still is) quite common among expatriate western women in Japan and is exemplified by a cartoon in a magazine aimed at Japan's foreign community The Alien (February 1998) which shows a greasy, unattractive youth flipping burgers observed by two white women who comment 'geek'. In the next frame he arrives in Japan and is transformed into 'Charisma Man' surrounded by adoring Japanese women. The same white women look on and, again comment 'geek'. The apparent popularity of gaijin men with Japanese women clearly touched a raw nerve on both sides of the racial and gender divide.

Karen Kelsky's groundbreaking study Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams analyses the historical specificities, socio-economic relations, gender ideologies and global flows that have so overdetermined relationships between white men and Japanese women. It is a bold and provocative book that will no doubt cause controversy.

Kelsky does not deny that human relationships are the product of individual desires and preferences but she is primarily concerned with those supra-individual discursive formations that inescapably position white men and Japanese women in a specific economy of desire that works to disadvantage white women and Japanese men. As Kelsky points out, her purpose 'is not to cast aspersions on Japanese female—white male couples', rather she is concerned to point out the dangers in 'the endlessly repeated feedback loop' that occurs when 'representations of interracial romance as a symbol of redemptive pluralism and solution to the problem of Japanese sexism and insularity are recirculated back to Japan' (p. 230; emphasis in original). Although Kelsky acknowledges the potentially liberative and enabling aspects of these narratives of desire, she points out how they rely upon 'a Western country as a model for uncritical emulation' (p. 236) that ultimately reinforces orientalist assumptions privileging white men over both women and men of other races.

In researching and attempting to explicate these forces, Kelsky time and again came across indignation and resentment—from western men who rejected her suggestion that their sudden ascent in the desirability stakes was the product of socio-historical forces—and from Japanese women who insisted that they just 'happened' to have fallen in love with a foreigner. Given the large number of interracial marriages between white men and Japanese women in the Japanese Studies academy, it comes as no surprise that Kelsky met with considerable hostility to her project. She points out that 'I was told, more than once, that this was not an appropriate topic of academic inquiry' (p. 237). In the text Kelsky is honest about the many moments of self-doubt and trauma that she experienced in the process of the research. Indeed, Kelsky's own positionality is central to the narrative as it unfolds in the book, for her own status as a white woman married to a Japanese man was a lived contradiction that caused strain between herself and her Japanese female informants for whom 'the West' was a symbol of both liberation and desire.

Although Kelsky's narrative is not primarily about interracial sexual relationships, it is this element of the book which will undoubtedly catch most readers' attention. This is unfortunate as there is a much larger and more significant story being told here. Kelsky's main theme is a phenomenon, apparent in a variety of women's media and social practices in Japan, that she terms 'oppositional internationalism' (p. 88). Kelsky points to a discourse of internationalism, particularly the promotion of English-language skills as 'the means by which women enter bodily into alternative systems of thought and value' (p. 101) that implicitly serves to reflect back the perceived inadequacies of the sex and gender system as it functions in contemporary Japan. She suggests that Japanese women's 'flirtation with the foreign' serves as:

a profound questioning of domestic Japanese expectations concerning the female life course, culminating in many cases in the assertion of a 'new self' [atarashii jibun] that is based on a broad and deep shift of allegiance from what women describe as insular and outdated Japanese values to what they characterize as an expansive, liberating international space of free and unfettered self-expression, personal discovery and romantic freedom (p. 87).

Kelsky gives a realistic account of the constraints that many young women experience in the Japanese labour system where they are consigned to non-career secretarial positions for the few years between college and marriage. However, rather than passively accepting their lot and diligently depositing their savings in the bank, Kelsky argues that many OLs (office ladies) with their flexible schedules and high disposable incomes, develop sophisticated patterns of consumption in which foreign (western) goods, in particular, are important signifiers of cultural capital. Japanese men, with their large workloads and greater incentives to invest in their career, are largely left out of this consumption cycle, so that 'Western goods [are] entirely contained as signifiers within a largely self-sufficient OL universe of style and status' (p. 135).

About 1987, according to Kelsky, a new phenomenon became discernible: the consumption of 'the "gaijin lover", the exotic sexual experience that represented the final frontier of the foreign left to consume' (p. 136). Within Japan gaijin men were sought out in the fashionable nightlife district of Roppongi in Tokyo as well as in similar areas of the port cities of Yokohama and Kobe and around Japan's many American army bases. Popular foreign tourist spots frequented by OLs included Hawaii, Saipan, Bali, New York and the US West Coast. Fantasies of sex with gaijin men appeared in manga and novels written by and for women, including a genre of eromanga (erotic comics) known as 'ladies comics'. Kelsky points out (p.149) that one of the most popular of these, Comic Amour, regularly features stories centred on white men.[3] In 1988 Cosmopolitan Japan was able to comment in an article illustrated with photos of 'heroic-looking white men' that 'We'd all like to be seen walking down the street with a gaijin boyfriend, wouldn't we, girls?' (p. 143).

However, this new interest expressed by some Japanese women did not go unnoticed in the mainstream press. Men's media responded to this trend with outrage. Shukan Gendai accused Japanese women who visited Hawaii of 'dancing on the tables in discos with their underpants showing for all to see'. Shukan Hoseki said of Japanese women tourists that 'they may all pretend to be little ladies, but actually, in their hearts, each one wants to be the first to get a gaijin to bed' (p. 137). The media began to brand Japanese women who sought out foreign men '"yellow cabs", a name allegedly to have been invented by American men who supposedly saw these women as "yellow" and as easy to "ride" as taxis' (p. 134) although it seems that the term was actually invented and popularised by a Japanese journalist. Ironically, the negative media attention given to this phenomenon wherein women's sexual freedom was yet again lambasted (Japan's extensive sex trade and the well-attested phenomenon of Japanese men's sex tourism, of course, went unmentioned) also provided Japanese women with the opportunity to speak back. Journalist Kudo Akiko summarised the many complaints Japanese women were expressing about Japanese men in an article that appeared in the women's magazine Fujin Koron in 1990:

The reasons Japanese women reject Japanese men are not just physical.... Women evaluate them badly in all areas—'they are childish and disgusting', 'they have a bad attitude toward women', 'they are fake and dishonest', 'they are narrow minded', 'they are bad mannered', 'they can't take care of themselves', 'they can't do housework' ... Japanese men are the opposite of the Japanese GNP—they are the lowest in the world! (p. 138).

Once, again, it is important to stress that Kelsky is not passing judgement on particular individuals' relationships, but is instead pointing to a specific discursive regime that inescapably politicises any interracial coupling in Japan. As she mentions on several occasions, as a white woman married to a Japanese man (thereby seen as deviant both by western men and Japanese women) she was repeatedly placed in a situation where she had to defend this aberrant choice. As Kelsky argues 'the Orientalist West has already established the racial hierarchy of potency and impotence that sets up its own mimetic appropriation in Japanese women's strategies of resistance' (p. 186)—through transgressing this hierarchy and intimately aligning herself with the subaltern Japanese male, Kelsky found herself haplessly precipitated into a discourse not of her making. As she points out, when the foundations for a choice of lover are questioned 'everyone becomes uncomfortable' (p. 187). This book is as much her story as it is that of her Japanese informants.

This is a difficult and at times painful book to read that will no doubt ring true for anyone who has lived in Japan for any period from the late 80s through the 90s. Kelsky should be congratulated for having persevered with a topic that caused her so much anxiety and distress, both personally and professionally. It was clearly a difficult story to tell, but I foresee that for many people it is going to prove an even more difficult one to listen to.


Endnotes

[1] Men's and women's language in Japan can be very different—women generally being expected to use a more polite register than men. Choice of personal pronouns, honorifics and sentence particles expressing emphasis also differ between the sexes.

[2] Gaijin is a contraction of the term gaikokujin meaning 'person from an outside country' and is faintly derogatory. When used without modification it usually signifies a white North American or European.

[3] It is interesting to bear in mind that Japanese gay comics, of which there are six major ones, seldom feature stories about foreign men. Except in small clique publications, foreign men are never featured as objects of desire in Japanese gay men's narratives (see Mark McLelland, Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities, Curzon Press, 2000, chapter 5).

Any Country That Has to Export Women's Frustrations is Just Not Right: Japanese Women's Turn to the West

After dozens of books about representations of Japan by the West, Women on the Verge presents Japanese imagery of the West, and it does this by focusing on one of the most central topics: the West as the target of Japanese women's dreams and aspirations for something they do not seem to find in their own country. Karen Kelsky, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon, dives into the world of Japanese women's narratives of internationalism both in the past and in the present. Women's internationalist narratives center around Western akogare, translated as "longing, desire, or idealization" of the West. Kelsky's central argument is that this "turn to the foreign has become perhaps the most important means currently at women's disposal to resist gendered expectations of the female life course in Japan" (p. 2). In Women on the Verge Kelsky demonstrates this with a thorough analysis of contemporary Japanese women's use of the West as a mirror image of critique against their own society.

As the starting point Kelsky takes some central indications of a profound change in Japan's social relations during the past two decades. The 1.57 shock (declining birthrate), defeminization of the countryside, Equal Employment Opportunity Law (1987) and rising marrying age bound together with the internationalist narratives of Japanese women Kelsky sees as the strategies to flee the conventional roles offered to women. As the various ways with which Japanese women transform their akogare for the West into action, Kelsky presents foreign-language study, study abroad (ryugaku), work abroad and work in foreign-affiliated companies in Japan, short-term visits to Western countries (increasing overseas tourism by young Japanese women), and romantic and/or sexual relations with foreign men.

With statistical facts the author demonstrates how women monopolize the international niche and goes on to argue that this still does not mean that they could effectively use their transnational abilities and experience to alter the Japanese gender reality, or to get satisfying results on a personal level. The "internationalist Japanese women," as Kelsky calls them, have, however, built up a "new self" (atarashii jibun). Women on the Verge presents us with different ways this altered identity enables women to continue their existence somewhere between Japan and the West. Some try to settle in Europe or North America permanently, and the ones who fail to do this travel to Western countries whenever possible; whereas others later regard their Western akogare as a "symptom of immaturity [in] the prior self" (p. 214), eventually preferring Japan to the West. As Kelsky articulates, the West is not defined on a map, but consists of European and North American countries as well as Hong Kong and Singapore--all of which Japanese women regard as merit-based societies. Traditionally it is the United States that has been the closest of the (mental) West and is the usual target of internationalist Japanese women.

The first chapter traces the roots of female internationalism in Japan by focusing on selected phenomena and characters from the Meiji era (1868-1912) to the Occupation period (1945-1952). Kelsky briefly mentions the sexual nature of early contacts between Japan and the West in the form of arranged wives and prostitutes for foreign men who stayed in Japan for longer periods in the era of isolation (prior to 1859). She would have done well to go deeper into this since the most persistent element in the imagery of Japan in the West has been, and may still be (as this book also indicates), the lure of the Japanese woman as sexually liberal and doll-like at the same time.[1] This image is male-dominated, no doubt, and although it is Kelsky's agenda to let the women speak, elaboration on this topic would have helped in finding the historical roots of present-day consensus between some Japanese internationalist women and western men in their mockery of Japanese men.

In chapter 1 the book familiarizes the reader with Tsuda Umeko, the famous Japanese women's educator who herself was schooled in the United States between the 1870s and the 1890s and eventually found her path in promoting Japanese women's education by founding a higher academy for girls' English study (now the Tsuda juku daigaku, Tsuda College in Tokyo). What is noteworthy in Tsuda and in many other Meiji Japan women activists is that they were also Christians--unlike present-day internationalist women. Considering the basis of internationalism in Japanese women's thinking, this is something that may explain Kelsky's notion that today "internationalist desires derived from this fantasy image [of the West] give birth to no social movement" (p. 224). To contemporary Japanese women their various investments to internationalize (to the West) mean first and foremost an individual project. Where Tsuda Umeko used her learning in the West to improve the lives of young women under her guidance, present-day internationalist women in Japan are driven to the West because of individual agendas.

From Tsuda the text moves through the Taisho (1912-1926) and early Showa (from 1926 onwards) periods, to wartime female internationalism concentrating on Mishima Sumie and her memoir published in 1941. After World War II, the Occupation period offered ordinary women a chance to write to other women what could be called "a program of relentless self-reform" (see p. 59) where the American women were taken as forerunners of liberation politics. No doubt the Occupation administration in its two D's program (Democratization and Demilitarization) was keen on supporting these kinds of ideas. In addition to written Western akogare, Kelsky deals with the actual relations between the occupation troops and the Japanese women which began to constitute the "sexual nexus of the Occupation" (p. 69). Despite the fact that the women who were intimate with American soldiers were scowled at and ridiculed (and as a historian I would add: as in many other countries during war-time where native women associated with foreign soldiers, allies or occupiers), these relations among others helped push the Japanese men to the backstage and create a more gentle and peaceful image of Japan in America.

This phenomenon constitutes yet another phase in the "eroticization of national power relations" which Kelsky very skillfully presents in her book. One of the many strengths of Women on the Verge is the theoretical contextualization of Japanese women's Western akogare. In addition to tracing the meanings of the foreign realm in the lives of internationalist Japanese women, Kelsky also exposes their connections in transnational relations, from individual to economic, from political to gendered. In this web of global markets, national policies, and individual tactics the internationalist women are shown to be conscious of the representations of themselves as Japanese women and of the representations of the West in Japan.

In chapter 2 Women on the Verge turns to "internationalism as resistance" in the lives of contemporary Japanese women. This resistance grows primarily from the Japanese workplace reality which discriminates against women in the white-collar sector by age, marital status and gender. Analyzing discussions in the media about women and women's role, and the ideas of her female informants, Kelsky presents the aims and fantasies projected onto study abroad, work abroad, work in international organizations (like the UN), and foreign-affiliated companies in Japan. Some women head abroad on career-oriented trips while others go on "refresh-type" short-term visits to study language (see p. 104). Kelsky's interviewees are also conscious of the price they have paid for their international flair: even a short period abroad might mean that they would not be hired by Japanese companies who recruit new employees from fresh graduates. At the same time, during their study or work abroad, "interactions with the Other" often launch a process of examining their prior Japanese self and sometimes help them discover a new self "in the atmosphere of 'freedom' of the foreign/West" (p. 121). For these women the gaishikei (foreign-affiliated firms) are presented "as the Messiah" (p. 114) after they have been "'spoiled' by the individualism and equal treatment" in the West (p. 116). The women Kelsky interviewed regard themselves as more flexible and as having an adaptability that Japanese men lack. Thus the alienation that is the consequence of their internationalism is transformed into a mark of (a new kind of) identity. The West is not just a job opportunity, but a realm of identity formation.

In chapter 3 the analysis moves into the romantic and sexual aspects of the Western akogare by Japanese women. The educational and professional opportunities in the West and the promises they make for Japanese women as described in chapter 2 are closely bound to the gender relations anticipated as being based on equality in the West. Thus it is no surprise that the critique of Japanese men and their domination over the working culture is most explicit in Japanese women's idealization of the Western man. It is in this arena that the cultural and gender aspirations of Japanese women and Western men are knitted together in a way that excludes both Japanese men and Western women. Women on the Verge points out how the historical eroticization of the Japanese woman in the West has found its counterpart in Japanese women's eroticized and fetishized imagery of the Western man. Kelsky portrays this with a careful reading and analysis of Japanese popular female fiction and commercials, as well as her female interviewees. The Western man is presented as a "prince on a white horse" who is expected to save the woman from the oppressive conventions of her own culture. Being conscious of the Western man's fetishized imagery of the Japanese woman, some internationalist women "have constructed themselves as 'she-who-must-be-saved'" (p. 174). Race in the post-colonial world is also seen as being more problematic to Japanese men and western women than to Japanese women who do not, at first sight at least, admit to being subjected to any racial assumptions on behalf of Western men, black or white. Kelsky's interpretation emphasizes the fetishization of race rather than the women being excused by their race.

The power of these sexualized fantasies is further strengthened by the market forces which unscrupulously utilize them. TV commercials and printed advertisements depict especially the white man as the target of female fantasies. At this point I must make a comment on Finnish advertising to show the globalization of these fetishized imageries. A Finnish chocolate company has during the last years produced several TV commercials to advertise its Geisha chocolate bar that has been produced since 1908. One of these commercials depicts a big-nosed Western man rowing on a river towards a Japanese woman. The scene can be dated somewhere in late nineteenth-century Japan and the commercial clearly makes use of all the clichés of the traditional image of Japanese women in the West. What makes it odd is that while chocolate is mainly marketed to women, Finnish women are certainly unable to find any of the hidden agenda that so explicitly points to Japanese women's akogare for the West. My example also refers to what Kelsky brings out: "the female-targeted commercials that employ the female desire for the white man are the creations of Western multinational companies" (p. 196). The fantasy they thus depict is that of the capitalist West, although they appeal to the Japanese women's Western akogare. What happens is that "the commercial posits the Japanese woman as the exotic object of multinational desire, a border-crossing Madame Butterfly in an era of late capitalism" (pp. 197-98).

The counter side of this is the mockery of Japanese male as the mutual opponent of both (some) Japanese women and Western men. In the commercials, popular fiction, and even English language books, Japanese men are infantilized. Japanese internationalist women's frustration, voiced, for example, as follows (and as in the citation of the title of this review): "I'm right! Japan is wrong!--I knew that Japan is the one with the problem, not me" (p. 228), finds its target in castrating Japanese men both physically and mentally in a union between Japanese women and Western men. Infantilizing the male of the Other is a traditionally Western way of depriving the men of other cultures of all their independent abilities as, for example, Stuart Hall has written.[2] Kelsky does not refer to this, nor to the fact that the mockery of Japan, and its men especially, has also been adopted particularly in the American media as a means to fight Japanese economic power since the 1980s.[3]

After reading the first three chapters I started to wonder whether the Japanese women interviewed by Kelsky had experienced anything negative in their turn to the West. The West depicted in popular fiction, commercials, language books, and the women's internationalist narratives had begun to resemble a flawless fantasy land. In chapter 4 Women on the Verge eventually comes to the limits and downsides of internationalism. In organizing the research material into a thematic approach, this order proves to be a well-chosen one. The anger a Western female reader starts feeling toward the global markets and the prevailing neo-liberal economics in exploiting (Japanese) women, and towards these women's (and Western men's) ridicule of Japanese men, all realized as subconscious mechanisms rather than deliberate tactics, fades away once the reader reaches the last chapter. This is not to say that the reader would not sympathize with Japanese women when they bring out the negative experiences that have resulted from their internationalization with the West. It is rather that with this chapter the internationalist Japanese women are illustrated as standing "on the verge": for many the West and Japan have become integral parts of their identity molding, "pragmatic exercises in hybridity" (p. 217).

What many internationalist women experience as their "authentic self" (p. 203) becomes alive only outside Japan and the need to relive this draws them over and over again to the West. This produces narratives of homelessness and stories of the many difficulties in trying to find a way abroad a second or third time. Some pursue green cards by marriage with foreign men, some through successive study periods and permanent professional positions. The gaishikei, foreign-affiliated companies in Japan, offer a safe harbor for some, where they, however, come face to face with the fact that clients still prefer to deal with men, and that Western men sometimes treat their Japanese female colleagues primarily as women expecting white men to save them, or as willing play-mates. Many internationally oriented Japanese women find themselves being chased by Western men who want to have a "docile" Japanese wife. Thus they as individuals become trapped in the traditional imagery of Japanese women.

As Women on the Verge shows, there are several sets of narratives that record women's positive and negative experiences of the West. Some women have turned back to Japan, primarily in two ways. The ones who do not pursue a career criticize Western women for neglecting their families at the expense of their working lives. Some women cast blame on Japanese men and reveal "the degree to which gender relations in Japan have been destabilized without reaching a resolution in a direction that women find acceptable" (p. 219).

At the threshold of the conclusion, the reader is puzzled: what happened to Japanese men in all this female projection to the West? They were silenced by internationalist Japanese women and the globalized consumer culture presenting the white man as the phallistic hegemonic figure. Although Japanese men are not the object of this book, their role in the internationalist narratives of Japanese women (and in the thinking of some Western men) left an annoying feeling that there should be some way to react to the representations depicted of them. The opportunity comes eventually. One of the aims of Kelsky's research is to "query the role of the Western ethnographer as native of globally circulating West" (p. 31). In the process of interviewing internationalist Japanese women she found both these women and Western men in Japan trying to ally with her as an American woman and as a researcher. The women automatically take her as an icon of the assumed Western gender equality, whereas the men see her as a Japan-specialist who will understand Western men's superior role to Japanese men. Kelsky's own private life, especially her marriage with a Japanese man, questions all these presumptions. In the conclusion she "rehabilitates" the Japanese man by recalling her own reactions against the mockery of Japanese men by some of her female informants and by some Western men. Through her own case Kelsky indisputably tears down the image depicted of Japanese men by the material she has just analyzed. I willingly applauded her for this "methodological turn."

Positioning herself as a researcher in relation to her material and topic is necessary in another way, too. The "taken-for-granted levels" at which the "foundations of women's international impulses operate" (p. 237) also show the dangers one faces in trying to translate internationalist Japanese women's Western akogare. It is all too easy to take them as signs of Western superiority over non-Western cultures and societies, and it is all too easy to find an audience that will readily use these oppositional discourses as confirming the Asian women's misery and oppression. Therefore, Kelsky wishes to emphasize that although "Japanese women's internationalist rhetoric feeds Western 'vanity'" it does not "diminish its effectiveness or value as oppostional discourse within a domestic Japanese context" (p. 246).

Karen Kelsky's Women on the Verge makes a strong case in showing that Japan, although never formally colonized, was and is affected by imperialist and colonial ideological domination. The importance of Women on the Verge lies in its effectiveness at tearing down the popular, historically loaded imagery of both Japanese women and the assumed Western superiority.

Notes

[1]. See for example Seija Jalagin, "'The Fidelity of the Wife and the Purity of the Maiden': The Image of Japanese Woman as an Example of the Origins of a Stereotype," Japan: Reflections of the Eastern Mind, Seija Jalagin, ed. (Acta Universitatis Ouluensis, Humaniora B30. Oulu: Oulu University Press, 1998); Seija Jalagin, "Gendered Images: Western Women on Japanese Women," Looking at the Other: Historical Study of Images in Theory and Practice, Kari Alenius, Olavi K. Fält and Seija Jalagin, eds. (Acta Universitatis Ouluensis, Humaniora B30. Oulu: Oulu University Press, 2002); and Ian Littlewood, The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths (London: Secker & Warburg, 1996).

[2]. Stuart Hall, "The Spectacle of the 'Other'," Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications, 1997).