International Marriage Analysis

Due to the effects of globalization, the world “witnessed a rapid increase in the number of marriages that cross borders and/or involve partners with different nationalities.” This phenomenon often referred to in Japan as “international marriage” (kokusai kekkon), has been covered incessantly in the country’s popular media. Since the immediate postwar era, the Japanese media have adopted an increasingly positive tone towards international marriages but shown a vastly different treatment of these marriages depending on the Japanese spouses’ gender. By focusing on the two most prevalent patterns of international marriage in Japan, “Japanese women with Caucasian husbands” and “Japanese men with Asian wives,” this paper posits that Japan’s postwar

War brides, Japanese women who married foreign servicemen (mostly American GIs) “during the occupation period of Japan and the succeeding years” up to the early 1960s, were largely depicted by the media in a negative light. Masashi Iwasa (2016) attributes this to the postwar Japanese society’s “conservative attitude toward miscegenation,” as well as a “general hatred toward Americans.” Given the socio-cultural importance of women as good wives and wise mothers in the ideal “Japanese family,” their fraternization with American men were perceived as “a symbol of Japan’s defeat and humiliation” and provoked a public outcry. The war brides’ presumably better economic position than most of their countrymen further underscored the inferiority of Japan to their “former enemy and current occupier.” Considered as threats to “Japanese men’s masculinity, patriarchal authority…and the purity of the Japanese ‘Yamato’ race,” war brides “were lumped together” with and labeled as “prostitutes and traitors.” As such, the war brides’ international marriages drew widespread criticism in the Japanese media, reflecting the patriarchal condemnation of their perceived

This propelled what Michael Furmanovsky (2012) terms an “aspirational female-driven consumer boom,” during which a young post-war generation of Japanese women pursued a “lifestyle based around fashion and pop culture.” As women’s magazines, movies and other aspects of “the celebrity-based entertainment media” continued to shape notions of modernity, “America” (and “the West”) became objects of desire and consumption. Moreover, “glamorous media images of Western romance” further cemented Western masculinity’s “privileged place in the Japanese imaginary.” Perceived as not only “modern” but also more romantic and gender egalitarian than their Japanese counterparts, Caucasian men became dream lovers in the minds of Japanese women—fueling the latter’s fantasies of international