Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams
Karen Kelsky, Duke University Press, 2001.

Discussion Questions

      Introduction

      We'll return to the Introduction at the end of our discussion and sum up the main argument of this book.

    
     Chapter One:  "The Promised Land: A geneology of Female Internationalism"    

  •       Kelsky traces the publications of Japanese women who lived in the U.S. or Europe and considers how this experience abroad changed their relationship to Japan and other women in Japan.  She notices that a commonly emerging theme is the idea of the West as a mythic "promised land" that will "rescue' Japanese women.  This writing also tends to construct the author as a privileged "internationalist woman" who can instruct others.  Describe two examples of this kind of writing.

     Chapter Two:  "Internationalism as Resistance"

  • Overall question:  How does Japanese women's "defection to the West" function as a resistance to corporate norms in the 1980s and 1990s, and more broadly, to the expectations for young women in Japan?,
  • What are the different means by which Japanese women travel to the West?
  • How does the ability to speak English and other languages come into play here?
  • What kinds of jobs are Japanese women taking in the U.S., Hong Kong, Singapore and gaishikei (foreign firms)  in Japan?
  • Japanese women are looking for more than good jobs in deciding to live abroad; what else do they seek?
  • How are the Japanese woman and the Japanese man portrayed as having different relationships to the West?
  • How does the notion of an idealized, liberatory, mythic West, in turn, produce essentialized (fixed; natural) images of the Japanese woman and man?  The American woman and man? 
  • Consider this quote (p. 118):  Women's internationalist narratives thus hinge on a reversal of gender privilege: men's very power, they claim, has bound them and rendered them immobile.  Women construct the Japanese national economy as not only narrowly confining, but marginal to the "world."  Men's lonely privilege within it, they argue, has cut them off from the possibilities of the "genuine" privilege that is mediated by the West.
      Chapter Three  "Capital and the Fetish of the White Man"
  • This chapter has several illustrations (book jackets, ads, cartoons).  After you've read the chapter, take a look at the illustrations again.  How do you read them now?  What's funny about the cartoons?  How is the foreign man used to sell products in the ads?  (Note: illustrations from our readings will appear as discussiont points on the final)
  • Why, according to Kelsky, does the figure of the white man have such allure in Japan?  How about the figure of the black man?
  • How does the Japanese man figure in this equation of racial erotics?  How is his West different from the Japanese woman's?
  • How does the idea of the mythic West drive a wedge between Japanese women as well?  
  • How do the cartoons here relate to those I showed in class about postwar Japanese and American women? (I will show them again in our discussion on Thursday so don't worry if you can't remember then!)