Gender, modernity, and eroticized internationalism

in Japan

Karen kelsky <University of Oregon>

It is by now a commonplace that,in translocal contexts, modernities must increasingly be theorized in the plural as diverse global phenomena reflecting multiple local agendas. The traditional/modern binary that was once a central mobilizing trope of anthropology, in which modernity is viewed as a "robust and noxious weed whose spread chokes the delicate life" out of "authentic" local and traditional meanings (Pigg 1996:164), has been revealed as inadequate to explain ways that discourses of the modern may be deployed oppositionally, for example, by those who seek access to modernity's language of rights against an oppressive state. At the same time "local" modernities do not proliferate indiscriminately without reference to the originally modern West; they are intimately implicated in questions of Western universalism and its relation to Western nationalism. As Rey Chow writes, modernity must be understood "as a force of cultural expansionism whose foundations are not only emancipatory but also Eurocentric and patriarchal" (1992:101).

In this article I will examine the personal accounts of a marginalized population of professionally ambitious Japanese women to show how they deploy discourses of the modern, or "narratives of internationalism," to construct an "emancipatory" turn to the foreign/West in opposition to gender-stratified corporate and family structures in Japan.(FN1) It should be noted at the outset that such internationalized professional women constitute a small minority of Japanese women; as Ogasawara observes in her recent book, the majority of young women in Japan still hold marriage and full-time motherhood as their primary life goal (1998:62-63). For the small number of women who are enabled by their age, marital status, economic resources, and familial flexibility (among other factors) to explore the cosmopolitan possibilities of internationalization, however, this option can lead to opportunities to travel, study, and work abroad and to the discovery of a female niche in the international job market as translators, interpreters, consultants, bilingual secretaries, entrepreneurs, international aid workers, United Nations employees, and so on. Examples of internationalist narratives abound in a genre of Japanese women's writing about the West by authors such as Toshiko Marks (1992), Miyamoto Michiko (1985, 1988), Mori Yoko (1988), and Yamamoto Michiko (1993).(FN2) These texts narrate an allegiance to a "global democratic humanism" that makes the modern West the universal model against which the backward particularities of Japanese tradition must be judged, rejected, or reformed. However, these narratives are not limited to published texts but are widely spoken, and acted, by a stratum of young, urban, middle-class Japanese women who are discontented with the highly regimented life course expected of both men and women in Japan (Brinton 1992) and who use internationalist opportunities to circumvent it. In 1993 and 1994, I interviewed 60 working women in Tokyo and surveyed 40 others who had internationalist experience through study abroad, work abroad, or employment in foreign affiliate firms or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the United Nations. My informants included bilingual secretaries, translators and interpreters, securities traders in British and U.S. brokerage firms, grants officers in the United Nations University in Tokyo, and freelance journalists.

Most of my informants were single, aged between 23 and 40, and had invested a great deal of time and energy to the mastery of English or other Western languages and the achievement of international expertise. About 70 percent had study abroad experience ranging from six months to four years. Most had been or were currently romantically involved with white Western men, and, as I shall show, professional and erotic (heterosexual) desires were often closely intertwined in their lives. There were, however, important distinctions between the published accounts and informants' versions of internationalism. Whereas the published texts were unqualifiedly celebratory, informants' narratives were tentative, shifting, contradictory, and contingent. Women aligned themselves with internationalism at different points in their lives only to reject it later and did not at any time unproblematically accept all of its claims. My project was to observe what happened when a group of women exploits transnationally circulating images of the West to open a much-needed and effective space for oppositional female praxis and to trace the steps by which they moved in and out of cosmopolitan associations as active subjects who were yet constituted by the limits of late capitalist and postcolonial regimes of power. For, in the broadest sense, this female "exodus" is a defection not to the West but to an idea of the West, which is synonymous with the international. In their most utopic forms, narratives of internationalism argue not for a search for professional advancement abroad but for an alliance with the "universal" ideals of Western modernity in Japan.

Thus they do not require women's physical displacement abroad but are equally predicated on an absorption of the West into Japan. Kapur has observed that "modernism always implies internationalism" (1991:2803); I would argue that internationalism always reveals the presence of (a certain kind of) modernity, inevitably set against the "traditionalism" of the national/local. There are certainly modernities that are nationalistic and isolationist, and indeed in this case an internationalist modernity is mobilized specifically to do battle with another kind of modernity: the masculinist modernization narrative that has fueled Japan's single-minded postwar economic growth and that imposes in the name of "national security" a rigid and binarized gender division of labor (Miyoshi 1989, 1991; Molony 1995; Sakai 1989).(FN3) The encroachment of a specifically Western modernity has also been viewed in Japan as a traumatic event of the first order: in Takeuchi Yoshimi's view, it is nothing but the "devastation" of being deprived of an independent subjectivity (Takeuchi 1980:131, cited in Sakai 1989:117). By contrast, however, women's narratives construct internationalist modernity as offering Japanese women their very first chance at a truly emancipated subjectivity.

I suggest that careful attention to the discursive strategies that surround women's allegiance with an internationalist modernity reveals the increasingly complicated terrain of identity formation in transnationalized capitalist regimes, among cosmopolitan--or would-be cosmopolitan--subjects (see also John 1996). Women's internationalist identity claims not only challenge patriarchal nationalism in Japan (and they do challenge it effectively by giving women an unprecedented alternative to established female life courses), they implicate internationalized Japanese women in eroticized Western agendas of universalism and the emergence of a global cosmopolitan class that contains its own hierarchies of race, gender, and nation. Any Japanese female adoption of the universalizing claims of Western modernity both subverts and reinforces that universalism and the continuing Western hegemony that it serves. As such, it also requires one to think about the politics of ethnography on the borders of competing rhetorical trajectories, problematizing the role of the Western ethnographer as a "native" of a globally circulating West.

WOMEN HAVE NO NEED OF BORDERS

In August 1994, Kawachi Kazuko, a Keio University professor and feminist scholar, published an editorial on the status of women in Japan in The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper. Her piece, which was quickly translated into English for a foreign readership in The Daily Yomiuri (1994), is a powerful critique of the systematic exclusion of women from Japan's corporate structures and a ringing manifesto for women's rights. The essay's rhetorical force derives from a discourse of shaming of Japanese men in an "international" arena. Japanese men, Kawachi's argument goes, should be ashamed of themselves for their poor treatment of women, scandalous by European or U.S. standards. She insists that Japanese men must immediately reform their ways if Japan is to become truly "internationalized"; indeed, Kawachi equates "internationalization" (kokusaika) with the guarantee of women's equal rights by the Japanese government. The editorial concludes, "I look forward to the day when the U.S. administration denounces Japanese firms for having achieved prosperity at the expense of women" (1994:6). Kawachi's editorial is an example of the publicly subversive and performative Japanese female discourse of complaint and desire expressed through narratives of women's internationalism. These narratives depend on two sets of rhetorical contrasts, between a progressive West and a backward Japan and between internationalized Japanese women and "feudalistic" Japanese men. The narratives aruge a "natural" alliance between Japanese women and foreign, particularly Western, interests against the insular and wrongheaded Japanese male establishment. They construct the West as a site of emancipation for Japanese women whose ambitions and abilities are thwarted in Japan.

They take as their agenda the project to remake Japan (and Japanese men) in the West's image. Space is the recurrent image in these narratives, conspicuous in its alleged absence in Japan and abundance in the West. According to Tanabe Atsuko, an international business consultant who has lived in Mexico for over thirty years, the solution to women's "limited mental and physical space" in Japan can only be to seek "salvation" in the "limitless space of the foreign" kaigai no mugen no supesu (1993:170-173).

In an autobiography entitled Shall I Leave Japan?, Yamamoto Michiko, a journalist who spent five years studying and working in England and the United States, insists that Japan is a "pond" that keeps its women stunted in size and forever swimming in circles whereas the West is a giant lake that permits women to grow to their full proportions and capabilities (1993:167-168). Former "office lady" Fuke Shigeko, in her personal account Beguiled by New York (1990), claims that compared to the "sleepy hick town" of Tokyo, New York is "the big city," holding out the promise of success, fulfillment, and freedom for Japanese women. "Why do Japanese women all aim for New York?," she asks, and continues,. Because it is filled with everything that Tokyo lacks. On the one hand you have Japan, which emphasizes efficiency, order, and harmony, and which makes no effort to respect lifestyles ikikata that stray from the norm. Then you have America, a country in which individuality, creativity, and personal expression are the top priorities and which respects peoples' right to live as they please. 1990:281-282.

Indeed, what is remarkable about these narratives is their almost religious faith in a redemptive West and their insistence that the very marks of gender discrimination--cultural marginality and professional exclusion--instantiate a natural female "flexibility" that frees Japanese women from oppressive and outdated laws of nation and race. Japanese women, it is claimed, can instinctively negotiate the demands of global society because they "are not hemmed in by the rules of Japanese male society, and haven't been subjected to the same social discipline based in the traditional Japanese social environment" (Kato and Berger 1990:272). As 53-year-old housewife and amateur poet Nakagaki Sachiko expresses it in a poem entitled "Women Have No Need of Borders," published in The Yomiuri Shimbun in 1993,. Women have no need of borders We need only bear the child of the man we love Race, nationality, religion--none matter Men war to make women theirs They make boundaries, they make nations But women have no need of borders We need only to love. 1993:12. The poetry editor remarks of this poem that "women are internationalists by birth."(FN4).

As Hannerz has shown, the enunciation of a cosmopolitan consciousness can be an enactment of autonomy vis-a-vis the native; and the more starkly the cosmopolitan and native are contrasted, the more conspicuously "surrender" to the foreign becomes "a form of mastery at home" (1990:240). Indeed, internationalist exodus is an unprecedented form of empowerment for the Japanese women who are able and willing to employ it. As I show below, women in dead-end clerical "office lady" (OL) positions are uniquely enabled to turn their marginalization from the centers of corporate power into opportunities to gain professional training and experience abroad. While this trend has not yet given rise to an identifiable backlash in Japan, it has undoubtedly shaken the smoothly self-sustaining and self-referential gendered divisions imposed by the corporate structure.(FN5).

In the narratives' most utopic form, women call on each other to break out of their "prison of culture" and the inward-looking obsolescence of Japanese particularity and to clear a path for the bright light of the universal West. One recent "primer" on internationalism targeting young women tells them that "international rules ruru are Western rules, and Western rules are universal" (Takahashi 1995:20). It is an Enlightenment vision of modernity, based on liberal democratic humanism, individualism, and verbal self-expression, which becomes the foundation for a critique of the "group conformity" and unspoken communication of Japanese tradition (what Ivy has called "the notion of a volkisch unity defined by a near-telepathic, transparent, harmonious communication" 1995:18 ). To be modern is to speak out in the international marketplace of ideas--the primary signifier of maturity on the personal and national levels is command of an assertive individual speaking voice: "Japanese are poor at speaking, withdrawn, and anti-social," Takata Kiyoko claims in her book A Little Bridge over the Pacific, "and must learn to speak for themselves like Americans if they want to be seen as 'adults on the global stage" (1995:244-246). The editorial collective of a 1990 book entitled Onna wa chikyu o aishiteru ("Women Love the Earth") writes the following:. Japan, Inc.--the original male-dominated society. But this society doesn't know where to turn in the midst of an era of internationalization and globalization.... Compared to Japanese men, Japanese women right now are clearly more independent, have more concern for society, are awakened to the interdependence between the individual and the world at large.... Nowadays there are many Japanese women who are active on the world stage; they are all individuals who have crossed borders, and embody a practical humanism in the midst of "global democratic society." UPDATE 1990:1-2, emphasis added.

REFUGEES TO THE WEST

As such discourses suggest, there is an exodus of professional women from Japan. Because many Japanese women are faced with persistent discrimination in the workplace based on gender and age (what Yamamoto 1993 calls "age harassment"), supported by a deeply entrenched gender division of labor in society, women require an alternative, and travel, study, or work abroad is it. Internationalism is an important and indeed courageous choice for Japanese women among a highly circumscribed range of domestic options. Women's domestic exclusions occur at both the family and corporate levels; indeed, the exclusions reinforce one another. Full participation in the urban white-collar corporate world is predicated on a male employment trajectory that begins with intensive schooling supported by the single-minded investment of a stay-at-home mother. It continues, with only a short break during college years, through hiring, training, promotion, job rotation and transfers, and (until recently) retirement. While the recent recession has certainly affected this pattern--reducing available positions for new college graduates both male and female, raising the incidence of lay-offs among regular male workers, and diminishing workers' sense of loyalty to and security within companies--it has not substantially changed the structure of the Japanese job market. As in previous recessions, women have overwhelmingly borne the burden of corporate economic "adjustment," with 50 percent of new female college graduates unable to find work according to the Sankei Shimbun (1998). Indeed, as numerous scholars have pointed out, the dominant urban white-collar employment pattern excludes women at every level; young women are nearly always hired for dead-end secretarial OL positions and are suspect if they continue working past the age of 30, at which time they are expected to have married and become full-time homemakers. Meanwhile, married women cannot combine family duties, usually entirely the woman's responsibility, with the demands of a full-time job, particularly the periodic transfers to other cities. Men, of course, cannot give the required devotion to the company without the support of a homemaker wife (see Iwao 1993; Lebra 1984; Molony 1995).

It must be emphasized that young, unmarried urban OLs occupy only one position (a position highly circumscribed by class, age, region, and ethnicity) in a diverse female labor market that includes blue-collar factory work, farming, fishing, shopkeeping, service jobs, and so on. However, although the urban, white-collar, corporate job market by no means exhausts the possibilities of employment in Japan for either men or women, it remains an important one in the public imagination (fueled by the unabashedly Tokyo-centric mass media), as well as in the urban middle-class strata of the population among whom this research was conducted. As Ogasawara notes, the relative number of women in white-collar clerical jobs has steadily increased since 1960, and the relative number of women in blue-collar jobs has decreased; in 1995, one-third of all women employed held white-collar clerical positions (1998:19). Although it takes on somewhat different forms, deeply entrenched gender discrimination exists in these other work settings in Japan as well (see Kondo 1990; Roberts 1994). While blue-collar women are often required to work to support the family, they are often funneled into part-time jobs (at virtually full-time hours but with no benefits or security) in order to accommodate continuing domestic responsibilities.

This gendered division of labor has been discussed intensively by both Japanese and foreign observers over the past 20 years, but few to date have observed that it has produced a residual effect: an observable disparity in Japanese men's and women's interest in, involvement in, and access to the realm of the foreign, through foreign-language study, foreign travel, study abroad, work abroad, employment in foreign affiliate firms, and participation in NGOs (see Kelsky 1996c).(FN6) Yet the direct result of women's exclusion from positions of responsibility in the domestic corporate establishment is that ambitious women (who have economic and social resources) often must leave Japan even when they would prefer to stay, while men often must stay, even if they might prefer to leave. In one particularly vivid example, a bilingual secretary with two years of study abroad experience told me, "I used to spend all day every day serving tea and coffee to the men in the office. 'This one takes two lumps of sugar ; 'this one takes only green tea. ... Can you believe it? This is what Japanese women have to deal with. I couldn't stand it anymore and escaped.

I had to go abroad. There was nowhere else to go.". Ogasawara notes that Japanese female office workers frequently choose the option of "exit" over protest (1998:63-64; see also Ueno 1988). The choice to turn one's allegiance to a foreign country, language, or firm is the ultimate form of exit and one that is a critical opportunity for those who wish to reject or at least avoid the only other socially condoned form of exit: marriage (Ogasawara 1998:62-63). For ambitious, capable women with the resources to leave, extended periods of study or work abroad constituted a kind of last-minute "escape" from a desperate situation. Women used the strongest possible language to describe themselves: in their accounts they are "refugees" (nanmin), "exiles" (bomeisha), and "emigrants" (imin), fleeing the killing oppressiveness of their OL jobs. Matsui Machiko titled her sociological study of Japanese female study abroad students "Exiles from a Sexist Culture" (1994), whereas Yamamoto Michiko refers to herself and other Japanese women fleeing abroad as "social not economic or political refugees" (1993:7). Foreign countries, foreign affiliate firms, and NGOs such as the United Nations are perceived as offering women the equal opportunities for advancement that they are denied in the Japanese corporate establishment. Japan now has a higher proportion of women in its delegation to the United Nations than Britain, France, Germany, and the United States; currently 44 of a total of 92 Japanese employed by the UN are female (Sato 1993; see also Ozaki 1993).(FN7) This rate is increasing as numerous elderly first-generation males retire, leaving women to fill the gap in the absence of Japanese men, who at least until recently had rarely been lured to such organizations at any price (Sato 1993). Indeed, men find it difficult to leave the domestic establishment. Informant Mori Mayumi, an international volunteer nurse, spoke of her husband as follows:. He sometimes says he's jealous of me for being able to travel abroad so much. He plays rugby and has always wanted to go to New Zealand for a year to play. But the company would never permit it. If he went, he would lose his job and all the benefits he gets as a male in Japanese society--good salary, status, company perks. When push comes to shove, he won't leave. He doesn't feel like I, as a woman, do, that he needs to go abroad to do the things in life that he wants to do.... Conversely, I sometimes wish I could get what I want without having to travel abroad constantly.

Akashi Yasushi, the retiring UN undersecretary general for Humanitarian Affairs (and the first Japanese ever selected for a high-ranking position in the United Nations), has recently noted, looking back over his years with the United Nations, "Japanese, particularly men, appear to take a passive attitude about working in international jobs. This is a grave problem" (Hokubei Hochi 1997:6). Study abroad (ryugaku) is currently the most common means that women employ to circumvent the Japanese corporate system. From the 1950s through the 1970s, ryugaku was the privilege of elite, management-track men who were sent by their corporations to earn MBA degrees at high-ranking U.S. business schools; now, however, such men have been almost entirely eclipsed by independent self-funded women. Currently nearly 80 percent of all Japanese studying abroad are female; approximately 130,000 women travel abroad to study each year (ICS 1996). Influential feminist social critic Matsubara Junko wrote the following of this female ryugaku phenomenon in her book I Can Speak English: "U.S.-Japan trade friction might soon be resolved--right now Japan doesn't export Toyotas and Nissans so much as female study abroad students" (1989:145). As a bilingual securities trader in her early thirties told me of her study abroad experience at Loyola University, "The reason that I first decided to study in America was that Japanese society is male dominated. And if a woman tries to fit into this society, it will always be as an assistant. When I thought about how I could get my foot in the door, the first thing that came to mind was to study English in the United States and get qualified abroad.". Many women flow from study abroad into a more permanent defection to the West. In contrast to the highly bounded stays of male corporate expatriates (chuzaiin), women's sojourns abroad tend to be extended, with the possibility of permanent relocation left open. As Tanabe observes of former OLs studying abroad in Mexico, "Many of the women who come to Mexico for study abroad stay and find jobs with expanding corporations, or marry Mexican men and settle here permanently. Rather than calling this trend 'OL study abroad, I think it may be more appropriate to call it 'OL emigration OL imin " (1993:174). Mori Mayumi told me, "I have a lot of friends who won't come back to Japan. It's not that they hate Japan but that when they tried to do what they want to do here, there are too many obstacles, just too many things in the way." Matsui observes that more Japanese women are working on Wall Street than in Japan's financial district of Kabukicho (1995:376), and it is precisely the "borderless" world of high finance that constitutes one of the most compelling sites for female cosmopolitan practice (and that points most clearly to its class boundedness as a phenomenon). It is difficult to obtain reliable information on the percentage of Japanese female study abroad students who do not return to Japan. Although one writer has estimated it as high as 50 percent (Matsui 1994), my research suggests the figure must be much lower, not because so many women want to return to Japan but because they cannot easily acquire the foreign working visas required to stay. Several informants referred to the U.S. green card as a "Platinum Card," reflecting both its value and scarcity, as well as its ability to confer status on its possessor. Yamamoto calls the lucky women who manage to acquire a U.S. green card "Green Card Cinderellas" and writes that some women's desperation to acquire a green card can force them into unfortunate marriages with U.S. men. She writes the following of her own involvement with Robert, an American man who intermittently promised her marriage: "regardless of whether I did or did not love him, he held the key to my life" (1993:160-161).

THE (UN)MODERN MAN IN JAPAN

Narratives of internationalism simultaneously produce their phantasmic other: the Japanese male, for whom the possibilities of internationalist transformation and universalist alliances are foreclosed. Japanese men, in women's accounts, are characterized as backward (okureteru), the static and dehistoricized emblems of particularity. They are accused of being privileged by the domestic system and intransigent defenders of "feudal" Japanese tradition. A 31-year-old technical designer told me, "Men's values and priorities have not kept pace with changes in the world. They still want things to be like they used to be and women to be like they used to be." Japanese men are portrayed in women's accounts as hating and fearing the West and working actively to prevent its influence on Japan. As I was told by Maeda Seiko, a 36-year-old housewife who has made nine trips to Western countries, been employed in two foreign affiliate firms, and spent one year studying abroad in the United States, "We cannot look forward to significant internationalization in Japan. The problem is Japanese men. They think Japan is number one in the world and refer to white people as keto "hairy barbarians" . Men hate foreigners. As long as Japanese men's attitudes don't change, true internationalization is out of the question." Senior Asahi Shimbun journalist Shimomura Mitsuko argued in 1990 (presciently as it turned out) that while Japan may appear on the surface to be a global economic superpower, Japanese men have in fact created a "rotten, pus-oozing" system, literally putrefying from the inside out from its pathological insularity and paralyzed in the face of globalizing forces (UPDATE 1990:90).

It is worth noting that a survey of men's popular media sources such as young men's magazines SPA! and Popeye revealed scant discussion of the West compared with equivalent women's media, and what little there was took an ambivalent or negative tone. Where women's magazines each year come out with Christmas special issues full of breathless descriptions of "authentic" Christmas celebrations from Europe and the United States (and instructions on how to recreate these at home), an article in the December 1993 issue of SPA! grumbles, "Aren't you people Buddhist? You're not even Christian! What is this 'Meri kurisumasu ?? Get serious! If you want a holiday, have one on April eighth--the 'Flower Festival, when Buddhists the world over celebrate the birth of the Buddha in a Himalayan flower garden" (1993:58). A systematic survey of young men's attitudes regarding the West would be revealing in this regard. In the context of this article, however, I wish to emphasize not sociological "proof" of the accuracy of women's claims about Japanese male insularity but the rhetorical effects of such claims, which allow women to challenge hierarchies of the native over the foreign, of male over female, of the nation over the world, and construct an alternative reality under which all that had been maligned is now revered, all that had been revered now rejected.

Mastery of the "rules" of the West, exemplified by mastery of foreign languages, is not a luxury but an essential means--a capital investment--for the insertion of women into the community of the West, a community that excludes Japanese males. Illustrations that accompany internationalist texts usually show a Japanese woman alone in a crowd of foreigners or speaking fluently to foreigners in English. Japanese men are either absent or depicted as tongue-tied outcasts, incapable of blending in. This is the point at which the West becomes gendered, for it is the Western male who is made to embody Western modernity and to stand in contrast to the "backwardness" of Japanese males.(FN8) I have argued elsewhere that the white Western man stands in Japanese public culture as moderator of commodity desire and adjudicator of racial upward mobility (Kelsky 1997). Women's narratives feature white Western men in the role of teachers, mentors, and guides. A good example is a lengthy essay, which was published in the prestigious economic newspaper The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, written by one of my informants, the president and founder of her own consulting and translation firm. She writes of a volunteer social program in which she participated and the inability of the Japanese members to function without the enlightened leadership of Reed, the American male director. "We Japanese spend all our time and energy on preserving harmony and maintaining relationships," she writes; "if Reed hadn't opened the door for us, we Japanese would still be stuck in one place" (Nakajima 1994:40).

Women's shift of loyalty to Western men carries erotic overtones. Narratives of foreign encounter are filled with sexual metaphors: "English had become my lover"; "I'm in love with foreign cultures." In the distilled utopianism of some of the published autobiographical accounts, the Western man provides the seed in the birth of a new Japan and a "new self" (atarashii jibun). "For me," writes Fuke Shigeko, "New York City is a lover koibito!. But not a lover who gently holds me, no, but one who pushes me ever harder to 'live more, live harder, live the life you want. He knocks hard at the doors of my heart, to where my desires are hidden deep inside. He is a wild, thrilling lover" (1990:290, emphasis in original). Nearly every published autobiographical account culminates in the author's sexual, romantic, or marital union with a white man. Kurihara Nanako, maker of the film Looking for Fumiko (in English, Ripples of Change) (1993), a paradigmatic text in the female internationalist genre, features a photograph of herself and her American partner Scott Twinkler as the frontispiece of her autobiography Finding Myself in New York: Angry Women Are Beautiful! (1994) and in the text describes her union with him as the turning point in her quest to become a filmmaker. Igata Keiko, in her text Someday I Shall Live in England, writes of her lover Rick, "Through him , the first true English man I encountered, I greedily imbibed the values and culture of England. The new world that I had longed to see spread out before me, and I was filled with a deep happiness" (1993:119). Author Takahashi Toshie writes in her book No Demons on the Road to America!, "Through Herbie I encountered a world more exciting than any I had ever known; in truth, he taught me how to enjoy life" (1989:196).

These eroticized discourses of new selfhood resonate suggestively with the 1970s Japan National Railway (JNR) "Discover Japan" advertising campaigns described by Marilyn Ivy in Discourses of the Vanishing (1995). As Ivy relates, the JNR advertising team, led by male advertising executive Fujioka Wakao, targeted young women as travelers/consumers, manipulable markers of cultural inauthenticity for whom travel promises erotic possibility as well as the chance to discover a hitherto unknown "new self," completely different from the everyday self (1995:39). Writer Kokuni Aiko appropriates Fujioka's formulation in her book The London You Don't Know (1990). After regaling readers with stories of encounters with charming English men, Kokuni concludes,. A while back everyone was talking about "Discover Japan" disukaba japan . But when you come to London, you find the chance to "discover yourself" disukaba jibun . You can meet the self that you had never known was there, and have the chance to contemplate the self that you are going to become.... I've complained a lot about London, but still, I love it here. Because no matter what, the air here is free. Here you can believe in your talents that have been hidden up until now; here you can dream. 1990:234-235.

GROUNDED IN JAPAN

The rhetoric of the published texts discussed above is, while universalizing, not universal and, while hegemonizing, not hegemonic. It is contradicted by different women from a variety of subject positions, both outside the internationalist domain and within it. The vast number of Japanese women who, because of their age, class, ethnicity, or location, are placed outside of the urban professional sphere might respond to this internationalist rhetoric as nothing more than privileged talk, entirely distant from the immediate demands of day-to-day life. Meanwhile, a number of Japanese feminist activists object directly to internationalist discourses, rejecting the West as a model and seeking solidarity with Asian women, often against the depredations of both Western and Japanese capital expansion in Asia (see AMPO 1996; Buckley 1997; Saito 1997). It is critical to note here that although internationalist women echo many of the claims of first-wave Western feminism, particularly the effort to gain access to the Enlightenment category of individualism (Fox-Genovese 1982), they consistently reject what they understand to be the goals and methods of Western, as well as Japanese, feminists. They insist that activist tactics have no hope of working in Japan and that they can only "suffer in Japan or go abroad." Thus, many Japanese feminists (and there are a variety of feminisms in Japan) and internationalist women often find themselves in direct opposition, and some feminist writers have written scathing attacks on internationalist rhetoric. Feminist Matsubara Junko writes, in typically vivid fashion,.

When I was younger, my English was poor, but I was so pleased with myself just for being able to associate with foreigners. No, it was more than that. I actually felt a sense of superiority when I was with a foreigner. I had a stage in which all I did was criticize Japanese men in my mind, and I planned on living abroad. I imagined having a cute little "half" baby, and I was just thrilled. Looking back now, I can't believe what an ignorant, stupid woman I was. 1989:202.

International journalist Hisada Megumi wrote a fictionalized parody of "new self" rhetoric entitled "Horseback Riding, English, Beautiful Young Men, and Everything British: She Loves It All" in the working women's magazine Nikkei Woman:. Keiko likes England. That is, Keiko doesn't just like England; she loves every single thing associated with England. She loves Mother Goose and London Bridge. She loves the misty Thames River and the sound of Big Ben.... She loves England so much that she believes that only in her imaginary English world is she truly alive.... Wearing her flower-print cotton dress with the hand-woven lace collar, Keiko tells her friends, "I'm crazy about England. I'm in love with England." ... And if her English teacher isn't quite as handsome as Hugh Grant, the way he behaves so chivalrously toward her quite sends Keiko's heart a-flutter....

As long as Keiko stays in her English dream world, Keiko never has to grow up. She can be a child forever. But someday soon Keiko is going to wake up and find out that she is an unmarried office lady nearing 30. And then, just like all those other Japanese women, Keiko is suddenly going to realize that she is all alone in her tiny, lonely little craft pitching in the rough Dover Straits. 1993:130.

The grand image of the lone exile fleeing an oppressive Japan for glorious liberation in the West has been replaced by the pathetic figure of an aging, unmarried, and possibly deluded OL paddling a dinghy beneath the forbidding white cliffs of Dover. Hisada rejects the fantasized community of the global West in favor of the communalism of the nation, for it does not do to be too much alone. Perhaps the best example of the conflict that can arise between domestic feminist activists and internationalist Japanese women is the film Looking for Fumiko (Ripples of Change) by filmmaker Kurihara Nanako, mentioned above. In the film, Kurihara, who resides permanently in New York, travels back to Japan to interview five women formerly active in the Japanese women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Continually contrasting the freedoms of life in the United States with the implied failures of these five women who remain in Japan, Kurihara, as Linda White observes, uses "an invisible West ... to evaluate and gaze down upon the positions of Japanese women and the ribu "lib" movement" (1997:12). Some of the feminist women whom Kurihara interviews, however, respond with barely concealed outrage at the implicit condescension of her questions and stoutly defend their life choices as based on deeply held values of community, family, and activism in Japan.

Indeed, contradictions arise within the ranks of internationalist women as well. In contrast to the authors of published autobiographies, informants with whom I spoke in Tokyo did not align themselves with internationalist rhetorical projects in any static or unitary way.(FN9) Younger women who had studied abroad in particular narrated a homelessness of multiple marginalities and displacements, which did not permit any simple resolution. This was partly a result of their residence in Japan. They described a Japan that remains, despite (or because of) faddish kokusaika ("internationalist") rhetoric, invested in essentialized boundaries demarcating Japanese from Other and male from female, and many made clear that they were not there by choice but had been forced to return against their will for lack of a foreign working visa. Once returned to Japan, they found that female internationalist exhilaration was not shared by their families, friends, and colleagues, who still overwhelmingly imposed expectations of women's life course centering on marriage and full-time motherhood (Ogasawara 1998). Informants' accounts were poignant and alternated dramatically between proud recountings of obstacles overcome and goals achieved and sad and thoughtful reflections on the disappointments, uncertainties, and fears they confronted daily in the interstices of clearly defined and socially accepted female identities and roles. Once women remove themselves from the highly age-regimented life course expectations that continue to characterize Japanese society, they find it nearly impossible to return successfully. With each passing year a woman's chances of finding meaningful full-time work in a corporation decreases, despite her international expertise or bilingualism.

The metaphor they employed was of the train track: repeatedly they told me, "There is only one set of tracks you can follow as a woman in Japan, and once you jump the tracks, you can't get back on." The confusion and despair that can result from "jumping the tracks" (and the intense age-related pressure that follows) are suggested by the following story told to me by an informant about her sister-in-law, who had studied for two years in Hong Kong:.

She met a Chinese man there, but her parents refused to allow her to marry him. After that she went to Africa and spent two years working in a refugee camp. She was already 30 when she left. . . . Now she's back and working at an NGO in Tokyo, but her salary is so low that she has to live with her parents. And she's faced with this choice: marry or pursue a career? Her parents pressure her constantly, relentlessly, to get married. . . . She's already 33 now, and to hit 35 and still be single in Japan means that companies probably won't even hire you! It's so hard for her in Japan that she's thinking of going abroad again and looking for work in an NGO in England or the U.S. I feel bad saying it, but really, if she stays in Japan much longer, she's going to have a nervous breakdown.

Sakakibara notes that while almost 90 percent of the male former study abroad students he interviewed in Japan expressed satisfaction with their present careers, almost one-third of the female returnees found their current situations unsatisfactory or "frustrating," and over half of the women claimed to have experienced serious readjustment difficulties in all realms of life (1984:153, 160). My informant Tanabe Minami was perhaps the most poignant example. A passionate, dynamic, deeply intelligent young woman of 23 when I met her, she had just returned from two years of study abroad at the University of California at Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program. She spoke intensely of postcolonial feminist and race theory, the writings of bell hooks, and her own positionality as an Asian woman in a racially divided United States. Yet upon her graduation from college, Tanabe could find no work but a position as an OL in a small trading firm in Osaka, with no opportunity to use even her English skills, let alone her academic achievements. Two years later she managed to find a position in a cash-strapped feminist NGO devoted to Asian women's issues, but in doing so she sacrificed a living wage and any kind of benefits. Forced to live at home, Tanabe told me when I last saw her in summer 1997 that she dreamed of going to graduate school in the United States (to study the politics of "imperialist Japanese feminism" in Asia) but could foresee no opportunity to do so in her current financial circumstances.

Tanabe Minami's choice between meaningless but secure work and near poverty for a cause she believed in represents the dilemma facing many returned women (although it is vital to remember that her experience parallels that of many young U.S. women who, engaged by feminism in college, commence lives upon graduation that constrain or even contradict their emergent feminist ideals).(FN10) Alice Lachman's research has shown that other Japanese women newly returned from abroad circumvent disappointments and disillusionments by establishing wide-ranging support networks in Tokyo, around the country, and globally through the use of letters, newsletters, e-mail news groups, and visits (Lachman, personal communication, March 12, 1997). I found that they also actively participate in international volunteer projects focused on human rights and the environment, including Amnesty International and Greenpeace.

More importantly, however, I found that as women aged, they ceased to maintain allegiances to the more utopic and uncritical forms of internationalism. The personal life stories of individual women in their forties consistently told of a radical break, a rupture between "before" and "now" in response to the West. According to different women, and at different times in their lives, disillusionments with Western governmental policy and the apparent failure or hypocrisy of liberal political rhetoric (particularly during the Gulf War, ongoing at the time of my fieldwork), experiences of racism and sexism at the hands of Western male superiors in foreign firms, a questioning of the merits of individualism, particularly within personal relationships, and reevaluation of the virtues of "Japaneseness" (often expressed in explicitly self-Orientalizing racial terms) led to skepticism and a distancing from the enthusiasms of earlier years. Even Nakajima Arika, the informant who wrote the essay for The Nihon Keizai Shimbun quoted above, looked back on the essay in a later interview about six months after the first and reflected, "You know, white men are overrated. I used to think all I wanted to do in life was marry a white man and move to Canada. I wanted to actually become Canadian. But now I don't think so. Now I think, I want to stay in Japan and make it here. If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere." In one discomfiting moment with an informant in her early forties, a grant coordinator at the United Nations University, I found myself on the receiving end of a stern lecture about U.S. atrocities against Iraqi civilians during the Gulf War. Accustomed as I was by that time to often uncritical praise of the West, I congratulated my interlocutor on her "astuteness": "Not many Japanese would take such a critical stance," I intoned. "And I suppose you think Americans would?," she shot back, leaving me red faced and stammering at my unacknowledged reproduction of U.S. patriotism.

Yet I would argue that rarely did these older informants "embrace" Japaneseness; rather, they "acquiesced" in it (Kelsky 1996b). Although they radically rejected claims that the West was "better," telling instead of their processes of rediscovery of their racial/national identity as Japanese, this identity comprised a subjectivity that could be described as not only but also Japanese. Nagata Hiroko, about 42 years old and a successful public relations manager in a U.S. securities trading firm when I first met her, told me of her "transformation," which took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.(FN11) She had been eagerly exploring the Impressionism exhibit and studiously avoiding the Asian art collection because she was, in her words, "crazy for white people's culture." Then, by mistake, she turned a corner and found herself face to face with an enormous, ancient Korean mural of the Buddha.

As she recounted, "It was as if, seeing the round, peaceful face and narrow eyes of that Buddha, I for the first time realized a different side to my identity. . . . That's when I came to racialize myself as Japanese, as Oriental." While this identity was explicitly racialized (she invoked features such as round face and narrow eyes), Nagata did not retreat to an inward-looking nationalism but, rather, discovered through it a newfound international commitment, this time to Asia. Shortly after our interview she quit her high-paying job to take on the position of public relations officer for an overseas aid NGO in Tokyo, at starvation wages. Her job has taken her to Laos and other Southeast Asian countries each year. She told me in a letter after my return from the field that her new life goal was "to work to become a human being who knows the joy of life and fosters true equality." She has told me that she considers herself not a citizen of any one nation but a citizen of the world, combining the best elements of many cultures.

Nagata seems to be enunciating what Stuart Hall has named the diasporic identity: an identity that "lives with and through, not despite difference and hybridity" (1994:402). Yet in my view this invocation of "hybridity" should not be read as a humanist resolution to the hierarchies and histories of modernity and universalism that underlie the larger presence of internationalist impulses in the world. Japanese women's internationalism is an example of what Bruce Robbins has called "discrepant cosmopolitanisms," and while it shows that the concept is "neither a Western invention nor a Western privilege" (1992:181), it also suggests the degree to which it remains embedded in ongoing Western political projects. As anthropologist John Russell has asked, Is women's new awareness of themselves as "Oriental" still embedded in the white culture they now reject? Whose authenticity is privileged in claims of racial and cultural identity? (personal communication, October 10, 1996). In the remainder of this article I want to turn from questions of hybridity and selfhood to the political consequences of women's narratives when they begin to circulate in transnational spaces, implicating other modernities.

PERFORMING MODERNITY

Because of the social pressures on women to renounce international allegiances in favor of a return to the communal fold, internationalized women are often forced to seek sustenance and legitimation of their cosmopolitanism from foreign sources. The process of women's internationalism entails above all a disciplining of the body, mind, and voice in accordance with the "rules" of a predeterminative West, in a version of what Homi Bhabha has called "mimicry" (1994): "In America I had to learn to express myself," "I was forced to think for myself," "I finally learned to be independent," "I stopped letting others decide for me." Foreigners, either encountered in Japan or on temporary trips abroad, play the role of audience for the performance of internationalism; they alone can evaluate the performance and legitimate the personal and professional aims that motivate it. As I was told by a 29-year-old married nurse who struggled to continue her studies abroad against family pressure, "For me to go abroad periodically is how I reconfirm to myself that I am on the right track. I meet Americans and other people, and they tell me it's fine to leave your husband to study. So I make sure I go abroad regularly, and when I come back to Japan I feel recharged." Internationalism as performance is based on codes of shared knowledge: it requires that women demonstrate the range and correctness of their understandings of Western environments and be affirmed as correct. It is what Vincanne Adams has called a mimetic process, in which women reflect back images of themselves and their "oppression" which are already part of Western cultural understandings (1997:94-95; see also Pigg 1996).

The mimetic nature of internationalism can be seen in a conversation published as the final chapter of a 1990 book on U.S.-Japan relations written by writer and scholar Kato Kyoko and journalist Michael Berger. Kato opens the dialogue by forcefully arguing a standard women's internationalism narrative, concluding with the assertion that because of their innate sensitivity to international protocol, women should always represent Japan in trade negotiations with Americans. Berger at once agrees: "Certainly. Unlike a Japanese man, once a Japanese woman recognized the Western style of doing things, she would immediately comply" (Kato and Berger 1990:270). Kato responds, "We're tough, aren't we?!" Berger says, "You certainly are!

Japanese men, on the other hand, are all brittle inside because they've been so spoiled by their mothers." Kato goes on, "You know, Mr. Berger, for Japanese women, American men are very easy to negotiate with." Berger inquires, "Easier than Japanese men?" Kato exclaims, "Oh, the two can't possibly be compared!" Both laugh (Kato and Berger 1990:270-274).

We have returned to the shaming of the Japanese male but this time in a performative mode. It is an exchange shot through with erotic innuendo. Berger is coyly delighted with Kato's faith in the Western male; Kato mirrors back to him what he most wants to believe about himself, about the United States, and about Japanese men. The "immigrant woman" (in this case the figuratively or rhetorically immigrant woman) turning her back on her own kind to grasp freedom and opportunity in the United States is one of America's most resonant foundational images. Lauren Berlant has described immigration discourse as a "central technology for the reproduction of patriotic nationalism . . . because the immigrant is defined as someone who desires America" (1996:413, emphasis added). She goes on to note that "immigrant women especially are valued for having the courage to grasp freedom" (1996:413). This "freedom" is inevitably eroticized, symbolized through the (interracial) love marriage. As Dearborn has observed, "Intermarriage between white men and ethnic women becomes a symbolic literalization of the American dream . . . an assertion of melting-pot idealism, of the forging of a 'new man, of Cinderella success, of love 'regardless of race, creed, or color, of the promise of America itself" (1986:103). Japanese and other Asian female immigrants embody a particularly potent version of this intermarriage fantasy (Lye 1995:272); it is the same fantasy that has propelled Amy Tan and Jung Chang novels to best-seller status as fell-good parables for a multicultural age, an age in which white men are both increasingly uncertain of their desirability and anxious to prove their racial sensitivity.(FN12) In this context Japanese women's internationalist discourses enable an eroticized assimilationism that makes the United States a model for the world and an object of universal female desire.

Matsui Machiko, in her study of Japanese study abroad students in the United States, celebrates Japanese women's advantage over their "Oriental" male counterparts based on women's exclusive ability to assimilate into the white mainstream through marriage with Americans, an opportunity, she implies, out of reach for Japanese men (1994:137-138). Likewise, my informant Ishizaki Reiko, a 24-year-old woman who had studied for two years at the University of California at Santa Barbara, explained to me, "Japanese guys feel more inferiority than girls do that are racially despised by the world. With Japanese girls, you are popular just for being a Japanese girl. For us, it's almost an advantage. But Japanese men have no standing tachiba ga nai . Race becomes a problem for Japanese men, but for women race is 'excused yurusareru ." It seems, however, that in Japanese women's case race is not so much excused as fetishized.

Japanese men, by contrast, like the Asian American men described by Ebron and Tsing in a recent article, are seen as representatives of too much tradition in a regime of modernity that defines the traditional as "outside, ineffective, and already having lost the game" (1995:397). The West has already established the racial hierarchy of tradition and modernity that sets up its own mimetic appropriation in Japanese women's domestic strategies of resistance and created the conditions for an act of revenge against the Japanese nation-state that is potentially devastating in its intimacy. The transnational West, a West that, in Ashis Nandy's words "is now everywhere" (1983), complicates any simple domestic formulation of female marginality/male centrality such as that from which women's narratives gain their rhetorical (and political) force.

CIRCULATING DESIRES

The point I wish to emphasize about this union between Westerners and Japanese women as enactment of multicultural utopia and solution to the problem of Japanese male sexism and insularity is that it is recirculated back to Japan through a variety of means. The Kawachi editorial cited earlier employs as its central legitimating authority not the experiences of actual Japanese women but Time and Newsweek articles written by U.S. men about gender discrimination in Japan.(FN13) I have in my files an English conversation textbook entitled Heart to Heart, written by two American men and illustrated by a Japanese female cartoonist, which features as its central plot line, animating each successive lesson, a budding romance between a white American man and a Japanese woman (Pereira et al. 1992). The romance, and the textbook, culminate with Clint's marriage proposal to Keiko (resplendent in a formal kimono) and the engaged couple's relocation to the United States. In their climactic dialogue (which features blank spaces in which students must insert the proper vocabulary word chosen from a list), Clint declares to Keiko, "Anyway, gaijin "foreigner" or not, I've always been myself . My life is my own and so I can never allow any group or person to control it" (Pereira et al. 1992:62). Keiko responds, "I've probably been influenced by you, and I, too feel the same way. I want to live my life as I see it! . . . I want to continue working for a better international understanding among people . . . and not just to make Japan a richer country" (Pereira et al. 1992:62-63). With that, Clint proposes. Through the use of this textbook, one imagines the English conversation classroom itself becoming a venue for the erotic union of Japanese female students' internationalist dreams and white men's agonistic desires (a speculation borne out by quantities of anecdotal evidence from the Tokyo English-teaching scene).

Ironically, ethnographic fieldwork is another means for the transnational circulation of discourses about the West. As Clifford (1992) has pointed out, the mimetic quality of this exchange of desire and modernity within global cosmopolitanism has immediate implications for ethnographic fieldwork. He has written that thinking of the informant as a traveler "shakes things up" (1992:100) and requires that anthropologists see the representational challenge as being the portrayal of "local/global encounters !and co-productions" (1992:101). During fieldwork my informants' performances of internationalism absorbed me in their dialogic impulses. Some informants undoubtedly approached interviews with me as the opportunity to share the testimony of an "authentic" Western female. As a native of the United States, as an American woman (and incidentally one who occupied at least superficially similar age, class, and professional positions as my informants), I was repeatedly called on to affirm internationalist claims and share in a discourse of allegiance to the West. For a number of reasons, however, I failed in this role. Not only did I bring with me to interviews a profound skepticism about the emancipatory promise of the United States, but my own marriage to a Japanese man, when it was revealed (as it inevitably was in the course of repeated interviews and social interactions), proved to have a jarring effect; it disrupted the establishment of a taken-for-granted agreement about the universal desirability of white American men and the universal abjection of Japanese. The spectral presence of my husband Taro in my fieldwork project influenced my ability to build "rapport" with some of my informants in ways that seemed (and continue to seem) both productive and unproductive. In a positive sense, the "problem" of my marriage caused sexualized hierarchies to be made explicit and open for discussion, and in some cases it seemed to provide informants with a means to express ambivalence about the "dogma" of Western (male) desirability.

One informant wrote me after I left the field, "I've enjoyed our conversations; they've made me reconsider the ideal of 'Pax Americana in my life." When this influence seemed less salutary was when I was confronted with not-so-subtle urgings from informants to disavow my husband or neutralize his disruptive effect by constructing him as "Americanized" and an "exception" to the "rule" of Japanese male backwardness. In the interest of building rapport with informants, I reluctantly participated for a time in the exceptionalizing of my husband in ways that permitted the categories of U.S. and Japanese male to remain intact, mutually exclusive, and hierarchically ordered. As time passed, however, such moves became untenable on many levels, both professional and personal. Eventually, I stopped participating in such rapport-building strategies, and my inability to perform in this reflexive process became my primary fieldwork dilemma, one that was never satisfactorily resolved. The flatness of my responses dumbfounded several of my most highly West-identified informants, leading to a permanent estrangement in one case. This estrangement grieved and troubled me. By refusing to collaborate, was I undermining informants' much-needed and deeply invested oppositional efforts? What were my responsibilities as a "native" Western ethnographer?(FN14) To what extent was I liable for my citizenship in fieldwork or my domestic arrangements?

I still have found no satisfactory answer to these questions. These fieldwork experiences led me to believe, however, that an important form of accountability necessary to an engaged transnational ethnography is accountability for the "nativeness" of the Western, particularly the white, ethnographer in her or his practice of representation, in both of its meanings of representing the West in the field and of representing the field in the West.(FN15) While there has been growing attention to the position of ethnographers who, because of their racial or cultural subject position, identify themselves and are identified with those they study (cf. Abu-Lughod 1991; Daniel 1984; Kondo 1990; Narayan 1993; Ohnuki-Tierney 1984; Rosaldo 1989; Visweswaran 1994), until now the "native" ethnographer has only been problematized as he or she who is native to her or his non-Western field site. The Western anthropologist, however, is the native of that West/modernity/universalism that circulates transnationally; he or she is both "native informant" for subjects' knowledge and identity projects and conduit for the circulation of these projects back to the Western metropolis. To fail to account for this can only be to again reinscribe the unmarked universality of the (white) Western(er), in anthropology as elsewhere.

]

CONCLUSION

Naoki Sakai (1989) and others have been at pains to show that universalism and particularism are not in fact in opposition but mutually reinforcing and mutually embedded in one another's political possibilities. As Palumbo-Liu argues, the "minority" that seeks "equality" vis-a-vis the dominant "must appeal to universal values of independence as a strategic necessity, even as it forces the recognition of its particularity," while at the same time the universal "solicits the minor's consensuality as evidence of its non-particularity, of its universality" (1995:198-199). Thus, "we witness an on-going process wherein the dominant culture is constantly yet inconsistently engaged with and modified by the minor and vice-versa" (Palumbo-Liu 1995:199).

Mary John describes the explicitly gendered nature of the "pull of the universalist and unmarked attractions" of the West (1996:18) on the intellect and identity of highly educated and ambitious non-Western women:. Some of the more ambitious among us have pushed for inclusion within the deceptively unmarked spaces of the new international class; given the often impossible complexities of our personal identities, we can experience the promise of modernity this class holds out, its "independence" from gender and culture, as a special lure. T he subsequent move to a U.S. academic institution is then but a culmination of processes already in place at home, where the geographical West represents the obvious goal in the pursuit of excellence. 1996:10, emphasis added.

John continues, "We grow up repudiating the local and the personal in favor of what will get us ahead and away" (1996:11). She observes later, "everything can collude" to bring such women westward (1996:19). Insofar as internationalist Japanese women constitute a highly educated, bilingual, elite employee resource for U.S. firms or educational institutions, they are well situated to serve the current relativizing impulses of universal multiculturalism. All the while that expatriate Japanese women work/study in the United States, the U.S. companies/universities that employ/educate them gain not only bilingual, bicultural workers/students but also the opportunity to celebrate and sell their "diversity" to shareholders/alumni and the consuming public hungry for nonthreatening multicultural images. When my informant Nagata Hiroko quit her high-paying job in high finance to work at an Asian-focused NGO, she was rejecting one version of the global professional-managerial class but inserting herself into another, the transnationally circulating class of highly educated first world professionals who administer both high finance and humanitarian aid, who mediate both dystopic commodity capitalism and continuing utopian dreams of human progress.

Thus while the West represents a space for female agency and achievement, it is also a site for the imposition of new regimes of compulsory consumption and political appropriation. As Grewal and Kaplan (1994) have shown, women (and men) in transnational spaces engage with multiple, "scattered" hegemonies simultaneously. Responses are always contingent, tentative, and temporary. I want to emphasize in closing that narratives and practices of internationalism are necessary and important means of resistance for some ambitious Japanese women within the gender-stratified structures of domestic Japanese corporate culture. What they reveal, however, is that in postmodern, transnational landscapes, people's fondest dreams of escape and redemption are always vulnerable to the recuperative effects of transnational political and economic processes, for informants and ethnographers alike.

FOOTNOTES

1.This article is based on dissertation fieldwork conducted in Japan between March 1993 and June 1995. Fieldwork was funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and the Japan Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

2. These writings are the most recent installations in a longer history of women's "internationalist" writings, many of which, not insignificantly, have been written in English for a U.S. audience. Earlier examples include Mishima Sumie's My Narrow Isle (1940) and The Broader Way (1953), Matsuoka Yoko's Daughter of the Pacific (1952), and Kawai Michi's Sliding Doors (1952).

3. My thanks to an anonymous Cultural Anthropology reviewer for pointing out the multiplicity of modernities possible.

4. Tajima Yoko, for example, has written that to Japanese men, women are simply gaijin ("foreigners"), alien, unknowable, and antithetical to male concerns (1993:19). Similarly, scholar of comparative literature Mizuta (Lippett) Noriko hypothesizes that contemporary Japanese female authors so often use foreign settings and characters because women themselves are foreigners (ikokujin) within Japan and as such find foreignness "deeply intertwined as metaphor for the strangeness and exclusion of women's lives" (1993:31).

5. However, Toyoda (1994) insists that such a backlash did occur in the form of the "yellow cab" controversy, in which Japanese men attempted to paint all internationally active women as sexually loose and promiscuous in their relations with foreign men (see also Kelsky 1994, 1996a).

6. Also see Iwao 1993 and Lebra 1992 for a discussion of women's success in so-called katakana professions, newer fields often with a foreign or foreign-language component, such as design, illustration, or copywriting.

7. This figure is particularly remarkable in light of the fact that female participation in domestic government is extremely low compared to that in these same nations.

8. Douglas MacArthur is often acknowledged as the man who first "gave" Japanese women the right to vote and the source of women's rights in Japan; as birth control activist Baroness Ishimoto Shidzue recently stated, "General MacArthur was really very nice to Japanese women. The first thing he said in 1945 was to give them equal rights" (Chapman 1993:20). But see also Matsui, who argues that female professors provide important role models for Japanese women studying abroad (1994:137).

9. This is discussed at greater length in Kelsky 1996b and 1996c.

10. My thanks to Dan Segal for pointing out this U.S. parallel.

11. Nagata's account is also given in Kelsky 1996b.

12. As Aihwa Ong has written of this genre, "Perhaps for Western readers the satisfaction of these stories derives from their depiction of Chinese women fleeing an unremittingly oppressive society into full emancipation in the West" (1995:350).

13. Other recent examples include the long run of Miss Saigon in Japan, which was received with enormous acclaim by (based on fieldwork observation) overwhelmingly female audiences, and the recent best-selling (and award-winning) novel Ichigensan, written in Japanese by an American, David Zoppetti, which tells the semiauto- biographical story of a passionate, redemptive love affair between a U.S. study abroad student in Kyoto and a lovely, blind young Japanese woman (1997).

14. My husband encountered similar pressures to disavow our marriage. At the American Express office in Marunouchi in Tokyo, for example, he was accosted by a young, bilingual Japanese woman behind the counter who, seeing us together briefly in line (after which I departed to do some shopping), demanded to know if we were married before she would process his request for a cash advance. "Oh, you're going to regret it!," she crowed upon hearing the response; "Don't you know that Japanese make the best women? And Westerners make the best men!" After then regaling Taro (still waiting for his cash advance) with stories of her "wonderful" Italian boyfriend, she finally concluded ominously, "You may think it's fine now but in ten years you're going to be sorry you didn't marry a Japanese woman!".

15. This category of Westerner is uneasily racialized, for while white and Western are not collapsible, certainly, for all Westerners, whites are most easily able both to efface their race and to make themselves and be made to represent the West.