Customer Reviews

Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Forty years ago, Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi wrote The Anatomy of Dependence (or Amae no Kôzô, literally: "The Structure of Amae"). In this book, as in everyday Japanese language, amae refers to the feelings that all infants at the breast harbor for their mother--dependence, the desire to be passively loved, the unwillingness to be separated from the object of desire and cast into a world of "objective" reality. Takeo Doi's basic premise was that Japanese men nurture these feelings well into their adult life, much more so than men raised in the West. For him, the concept of amae goes a long way in explaining the basic mentality of individuals and the organization of society in Japan.

What Takeo Doi did for amae, Karen Kelsky achieves it for another distinctly Japanese concept: the notion of akogare, translated variously as longing, desire, attraction, or idealization, in the context of Japanese women's feelings toward the West. The approach is different: it is grounded in social anthropology, not popular psychology or essayism. Whereas Takeo Doi espoused the then dominant approach of nihonjinron, or theories of Japaneseness, Kelsky takes a critical perspective on broad categories such as "the Japanese". Theoretically, Doi drew his inspiration from Freudian psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex (as interpreted by American psychologists), whereas Kelsky builds upon the notion of Lacan's desire that arises from a fundamental lack and finds expression in a partial object or fetish. Kelsky's book is therefore more attuned to postmodern sensibilities and critical perspectives that today dominate cultural studies in academic departments. More fundamentally, whereas amae was centered on Japanese men and their relation to their mother, akogare revolves around Japanese women and their sentimental or sexual attraction toward white men.

This makes Women on the Verge a profoundly disturbing book. Kelsky means to upset and to unsettle, as she herself was put off balance in the course of her research project: "I was told, more than once, that this was not an appropriate topic of academic enquiry". An early research paper on the topic of promiscuous young office ladies travelling abroad, and the wave of indignation they caused when the offending term designating them was popularized by the tabloid press, particularly came back to haunt her, with American men tracking her on the internet to confess pathetic details of their own experience. But what makes the book even more disturbing is that it addresses issues every Western foreigner in Japan has encountered in a way or another. Business executives have all been exposed to assertions about Japan's egregious "sexism" that "forces talented women abroad". The media and the advertising industry reinforce stereotypes about idealized mixed couples--invariably, a white man and a Japanese woman--whereas the other combination--Japanese men marrying Western women--has much less social visibility and even face negative prejudices--or at least that is what the author surmises, based on her own experience.

What keeps this book from stereotype, and the reader from voyeurism, is the rich theoretical apparatus, itself backed by a firm feminist perspective. Desire, Karen Kelsky underscores, is always an expression of power. And power itself is unevenly distributed along gender, racial, and sexual lines. Focusing on figures such as Tsuda Umeko (founder of Tsuda College), Sugimoto Etsu (author of "A Daughter of the Samurai") and Katô Shizue (a pioneer in the birth control movement and a strong supporter of labor reform), the author tracks the emergence of a women's discourse about the West/United States as a site of salvation from what they characterized as a feudalistic and oppressive patriarchal Japanese family system. Therein dates the idea, still fervently accepted by some women today, that Japanese women's independence and advancement lie in the command of the English language, and the image of America as home of women's emancipation. But the fetishization of the figure of the other crystallized during what Kelsky calls the "sexual nexus of the occupation": Japanese women were desired by American men, while Japanese men were rebuffed by both American men and women. As she notes, "Women were not only desired as exotic Madame Butterfly (although that image, of course, played a role); they were also quickly rehabilitated as the "good" Japanese who, in contrast to duplicitous and violent men, were imagined to be malleable and eager for democratic reform."

Having covered the historical background, the author turns to fieldwork, and to a new version of women's narrative of Western akogare. As she notes, "the turn to the West only emerged as a widespread and popular option for middle-class women with the growth of the Japanese bubble economy in the 1980." Using the money generated by the Japanese economy to embark on a program of intensive consumption of foreign goods, food, and travel, young single women soon emerged as the most thoroughly "cosmopolitan" population in Japan. There was a broad and deep shift of allegiance (the author uses the word: "defection") from what women described as insular and outdated Japanese values to what they characterized as an expansive, liberating, international space of free and unfettered self-expression, personal discovery, and romantic freedom. Language courses, studies abroad, work abroad, and employment at international organizations such as the United Nations or in foreign-affiliate (gaishikei) firms gave these new internationalist women a new set of options to resist the conventional tracks of the gendered economy and to enter into alternative systems of thought and value. But as Kelsky notes, this turn to the foreign occurred "within an overarching logic of capital": women's akogare is "anticipated and recuperated by commodity logic, a logic that operates in increasingly subtle registers".

In a way, commodity logic, and the dialectics between desire and its object, can even affect the reception of a book such as Women on the Verge. The same happened to Takeo Doi's Structure of Amae: rendered into popular discourse, it continues to feed the clichés that were served to the author by some of her informants ("Japanese men have their mothers take care of them and they expect their wives to do the same"). There is a thin line between academic scholarship, with its conditions of production and reception, and popular consumption of cultural products, which responds to another logic. In writing about women's akogare, Karen Kelsky has taken a great risk: her book could as well fall prey to the same shortcuts, and reinforce the very stereotypes she means to undermine. Maybe the advice the author received at the outset of her research was right after all: an anthropologist should not hang around in pickup bars and ask questions nobody wants to answer, let alone listen to.

so I put my rating right in the middle. The previous reviewer hopes that people "who don't know anything about Asia" will abstain from submitting reviews, but ours is a free world so thankfully nobody will listen to him.

Kelsky writes well, which makes for compelling reading here, except in those parts that are loaded with anthropological jargon. Like writers, she has her biases, in her case against white men who have relationships with Japanese women. But her book is hard to put down.

This is really a remarkable work.

While most will react to the salacious elements of the book as well as the politics of race, gender, and nation, this book's major contribution is in putting into practice various and sometimes disparate innovations in cultural studies, ethnography, gender studies, Asian studies, transnational studies (just to name a few) to bear on a contemporary social phenomena. Kelsey's genius is grounded in her ability to patch and borrow from wide-ranging academic and popular discourses to both shed light on the topic of her study while simultaneously reflect back on how her findings mesh with theory and knowledge. Her ability to resist theoretical polemics and to synthesize such a wide-ranging literature is simply remarkable as is her ability to balance theory with ethnography.

Another success of the book is in the writing. I have never read a social science work that so deserves the term "luminous" as this one. The beauty of the prose is stunning, and the book reads more like a work of modern literature than a serious ethnography. Kelsky's skills as a writer contribute enormously to an academic work that is free of obfuscating jargons and other perils of academic self-indulgences. Some of the high priests of contemporary cultural anthropology (Geertz, Clifford, Marcus, etc.) could learn from Kelsky the importance of humility and sensitivity to the "object" one's study, the benefits of interdisciplinarity and non-traditional disciplines (such as women's studies/ethnic studies), and writing for clarity and accessibility.

Frankly, as an Asian male, the book was a bit hard to swallow. But, I'll get over it.

This is really a remarkable work.

While most will react to the salacious elements of the book as well as the politics of race, gender, and nation, this book's major contribution is in putting into practice various and sometimes disparate innovations in cultural studies, ethnography, gender studies, Asian studies, transnational studies (just to name a few) to bear on a contemporary social phenomena. Kelsey's genius is grounded in her ability to patch and borrow from wide-ranging academic and popular discourses to both shed light on the topic of her study while simultaneously reflect back on how her findings mesh with theory and knowledge. Her ability to resist theoretical polemics and to synthesize such a wide-ranging literature is simply remarkable as is her ability to balance theory with ethnography.

Another success of the book is in the writing. I have never read a social science work that so deserves the term "luminous" as this one. The beauty of the prose is stunning, and the book reads more like a work of modern literature than a serious ethnography. Kelsky's skills as a writer contribute enormously to an academic work that is free of obfuscating jargons and other perils of academic self-indulgences. Some of the high priests of contemporary cultural anthropology (Geertz, Clifford, Marcus, etc.) could learn from Kelsky the importance of humility and sensitivity to the "object" one's study, the benefits of interdisciplinarity and non-traditional disciplines (such as women's studies/ethnic studies), and writing for clarity and accessibility.

Frankly, as an Asian male, the book was a bit hard to swallow. But, I'll get over it.

Having ordered but not yet read this book, I gave it a tentative rating of 4 stars (to be updated later).

While I do not have formal training in sociology, I have lived in both Tokyo (3 years) and Seoul (5 years), although born and raised in the United States.

From my understanding, Karen Kelsy is not judging individual cases of White Male/Japanese Female pairings, but examining broader societal forces that influence such relationships.

Frankly, from my personal experiences in East Asia, I agree with much of what she seems to be saying. Any Westerner who has spent significant time in East Asia cannot deny the two-way exotification/fetishation that runs rampant (if they are being truthful). And of course, some individuals privileged by such forces will indignantly deny they exist.

I suggest to anyone interested in this topic to do their own research and make up their own minds. Visit popular expat discussion forums on the net (using any search engine) and see the content of their discussion. Or simply spend some time in East Asia for yourself, or ask someone who has.

I was born in Asia, and I've lived in Asia for the majority of my life, and I still go there every year.

Everything said in this book is true. Yes, the truth is offensive and ugly, but deal with it.

The author only obeserved a particular type of Japanese women who can speak English and like white men. Then, she generalizes it as truth. But the majority of Japanese women do not speak English and do like Japanese men only. If you live within the circles of ordinary Japanese in Japan, this is obvious. I attended high school and college in Tokyo, but I had no Japanese friends who were intereted in Westeners. They had Japanese boyfriends and were happy. I lived in Britain and the US, and met some girls who were very interested in Western men. But many of Japanese women came to these countries not to chase white men but to study or work. This author is academic, but she doesn't know Japanese society and people's minds at all. Westeners often misunderstand because only those who are intersted in Western culture approach Westerners but ordinary Japanese who are not interested in Western men do no approach them. So they see part of the Japanese but think it as the whole. This author diffuses stereotypical images of Asian women. This book is just an insult to Japanese women.