The gender politics of Women’s Internationalism in Japan

Abstract

Japan is in the throes of "internationalization," but what this means, nobody knows. Some say it is Japan's first step to true world status, while others insist it's just nationalism in disguise, yet another model of the world with Japan at the center (Yoshimoto 1989:22). What nobody seems to have noticed is that internationalization in Japan is a profoundly gendered proc ess. In this essay I suggest that the space of internationalization {kokusaika) may be used by women to cross, both figuratively and literally, national boundaries in a subterranean praxis oppositional to the patriarchal nation state. Women so inclined (and such women remain a minority) exploit the claims of kokusaika in "narratives of women's internationalism" which posit that the foreign/West holds for women hopes for professional and personal "emancipation," and the discovery of "new selves" through Western life styles and romance.1 This essay will trace this discursive defection to the West from its ori gins in domestic gender debates through its circulation in transnational realms. I will show that the practices of internationalist Japanese women discursively work a rigid national binary between "backward" Japan and a "progressive" modern West while at the same time inhabiting ambiguous, hybrid, "transnational" spaces that radically destabilize Japanese ethnicity and implicate them in Western agendas of universalism and modernity. Analyzing these practices in the light of recent work on "transnational femi nist practices" (Grewal and Kaplan 1994), I will show that women's evolving relations to the West and Western men have important implications for our understandings of feminism, modernity, and postmodernity, and raise troubling questions about ethnographic representations on transnational borderlands.