Sites of attractiveness: Japanese women and westernized representations of feminine beauty

Abstract

Ever since Japan's entry into global geopolitics, scholars have identified Japanese popular cultural texts as a terrain on which this country's complex relationship to the West is negotiated. Few studies, however, have adequately addressed how such texts—and Western influence in general—might be experienced differently by different groups and/or strata of Japanese society. Inspired by the work of postcolonial feminist scholars who argue that gender, race, class, and cultural identity must be examined in relationship to each other, this study focuses on a group of 29 women with whom the author conducted interviews and extensive participant observation during eight months of fieldwork in a small Japanese community. It examines, in particular, how these women negotiated Westernized representations of feminine beauty omnipresent in the Japanese media. This article argues that even though informants assertively critiqued and actively negotiated media representations, their own conceptions of attractiveness—and their daily relationships to their physical selves—matched those of the Westernized media‐defined ideals. In view of these findings, it concludes with a call for a more systematic and critical assessment of gender in transcultural relations.