Cross-Border Matchmaking between Japanese Men and Chinese Women: The View from Japan
Department of Japanese Studies Departmental Seminar:
"Cross-Border Matchmaking between Japanese Men and Chinese Women: The View from Japan"
Dr Chigusa Yamaura, Wolfson College, University of Oxford
Monday, October 15, 2018 3 pm – 4.30 pm
AS8-06-46
This talk will explore Japanese experiences and views of cross-border matchmaking between Japanese men and Chinese women. I will ethnographically show how Japanese participants came to see these marriages as acceptable options and how they experienced and dealt with the stigma attached to these unions in Japanese society.
I argue that Japanese participants sought not to transgress local norms, but rather attempted to conform to and rely upon existing discourses of marriage, gender, and national identity in attempts to render their unions socially acceptable. In particular, participants sought to portray these marriages as acceptable pairings of similar fellows” by selectively masking inequalities; such attempts, however, faced the social limits of normality within Japanese society.
Ultimately, examining Sino-Japanese matchmaking practices reveals how marriage more broadly is constituted within multiple inequities in Japan—between Japan and its others, men and women, the married and unmarried, and the putative normal and abnormal.
Dr Yamaura is a Sociocultural Anthropologist specializing in contemporary Japan and China. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology with a certificate in Women’s Studies from Rutgers University. Dr Yamaura’s research ethnographically explores the intersection of intimate lives—and in particular gendered life-course expectations—with larger socio-political ideologies. Her first project explores cross-border matchmaking practices between Japan and northeast China, asking how participants came to perceive one another as potential marriage partners. Her second project addresses the cultural politics of childcare provision in Japan, examining how the discourses and policies surrounding childcare reveal shifting social ideologies concerning motherhood, children, family, and the nation state. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies and Anthropological Quarterly, and a book based on her first project will be forthcoming with Cornell University Press.