Replicating the White Self and Other

Skin Color, Racelessness, Gynoids, and the Construction of Whiteness in Japan

Bibliographic Data

ID12352174
AuthorsJohn G Russell (Gifu University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume37
Issue1
Pages23-48
Publication date2017-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJapanese Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1037-1397 • E-ISSN: 1469-9338
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10371397.2017.1297183
OpenAlexW2606816605
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited15

This article explores representations of whiteness in contemporary Japanese culture. Specifically, I argue that although representations of caucasian whiteness pervade Japanese media and popular culture, they have largely remained racially unmarked, scholarly and popular discourse presenting caucasian whiteness in cultural not racial termes, where it finds expression in notions of an idealized, fetishized, cosmopolitan westernness. As a result, the discourse of whiteness in Japan has largely escaped the kind of sustained critical commentary in Japan and the United States that characterizes the discourse of blackness and other explicitly racially marked Others as well as the literature on whiteness studies, which has yet to fully engage constructions of whiteness outside the (post)colonial experience and the Euro-Americocentric black/white binary. I discuss how representations of whiteness provide a template through which Japanese reflexively construct both the foreign White Other and the ‘white’ Japanese Self, the evaluation of these selves often being ambiguous and conflicted. I conclude that as Japan’s exposure to whites and non-whites increases and as its own internal diversity becomes more visibly salient, Japanese have begun to contest and more critically interrogate (re)presentations of themselves and to renegotiate their place within given racial and aesthetic hierarchies

Art · Skin color · White (mutation · Chemistry · Computer Science · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Psychology · Artificial Intelligence

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