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19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Personally, I..., December 6, 2004
This review is from: Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) (Paperback)
I am a Japanese female college senior. I have spent several years in the U.S. and I like the country and its people.
So the author must have targeted at someone like me.
But as someone said in here, the author tends to put "young Japanese women" as a whole.
Personally I don't care who I would have crush on; any race is fine. Back in Japan, I spot white men walking everywhere but never think of approaching him and giving my personal info. At school, some girls just cannot stop flirting with white, tall, (but not so smart-looking) English-speaking exchange students. I'm loathed to see these excited girls' pretense of English language and infatuation to be with scarce white guys, but foreigner in campus is not new for us returnees.
Tons of fieldwork & reading examples were very interesting. I enjoyed her thorough work. But the interpretation was sometimes arbitrary. The passage about Japanese man - white woman "taboo", oh my.
Well, I call myself an internationalist, but I'm not addicted to white men.
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20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
excellent niche study, February 7, 2002
This review is from: Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) (Paperback)
As a 'veteran' of the American and 'gaijin' expat scene in Tokyo and a frequent traveller to Japan, I was very interested in finding out about what this book had to offer. Karen Kelsky does an excellent job in succinctly summing up the societal pressures and current trends in Japanese society that are swiftly and irrevocably changing the country. In particular, she addresses the long-standing adoration of western images and culture, particularly by young Japanese women. This takes place as an 'eroticization' of the west as embodied by the western/caucasian male, who serves to function as the symbol of an enlightened, 'victorious' culture to serve in place of/liberate from the vanquished, sexist, Japanese male-dominated old world culture of Japan. The resulting dynamics between these women and the foreigners that they meet make quite an interesting, if controversial subject. If I hadn't seen so much of it for myself when I was in Japan, I guess even I would be initially skeptical of the veracity of her claims. But 'Women on the Verge' is almost shockingly right-on-the-mark, and I consider this book to be a highly accurate, compelling account of one of the most major and least talked-about social movements occuring in Japan today. It is never easy or pleasant to question or have questioned one's deepest, most 'intimate desires', and Kelsky poignantly describes much of the opposition and flak that she went through in researching and interviewing for this book. But after having effectively laid the backdrop of this 'eroticization' and its effects on a widespread social level, Kelsky's revealing the rose-colored glasses worn by the individual participants in this pageant is even more effective. This is an important book for all those interested in modern Japanese culture and society. For those who have lived in Japan in recent years, once you have read 'Women on the Verge', you will know what I mean.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very good critical ethnography, though not without a few flaws, February 24, 2010
This review is from: Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) (Paperback)
I wanted to speak up for this book as a white guy living in Japan, married to a Japanese woman, as well as an ethnographer-in-training myself. Though many of the examples presented in this book are dated by now, and the refractions of the West as "Disneyland" ideal, more compelling than the reality upon which it is supposedly based, have become more complicated, Kelsky's basic finding that the "West" and "Western men" are still seen as a way out of the narrowly circumscribed roles felt available to many middle-class Japanese women seems, to me, to still hold. Though one could criticize Kelsky for focusing just on that middle-class norm, or for not giving Japanese and Asian men more voice in her ethnography, those were not her focus, and she admits as much.
I see the point of a previous reviewer that Kelsky creates too neat a dichotomy between "Japan" and "the West," but this seems to be how her informants experienced the divide, at least at first, and in the fourth chapter, Kelsky shows some of them developing a more critical and transgressive subjectivity that questions their once-sought "Western" ideal as well. I also agree that a more "imaginative" ethnography would go beyond this simple binary desire. On the other hand, I have no idea what book is being referred to by some other reviewers who seem to think Kelsky was somehow condemning Japanese women for marrying Western men, or for holding some sort of double standard regarding her own marriage to a Japanese man. Rather, I admired Kelsky's frank disclosure of her, and no doubt her husband's, discomfort at how some informants and others reacted to her norm-breaching marriage.
Reading this book has confirmed much of my experience on the receiving end of these fantasies of the West and of white men that Kelsky's described. I look forward to seeing more contemporary ethnography in Japan and elsewhere that explore the floating and varied significations of the "West" and the "Western"/"white" male as experienced in varied other cultures and contexts.
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