To browse Academia. Interracial romance in the intimate spaces of hostess bars in Japan Although it does not specifically deal with romance, Faier's account of the interracial marriages between Filipina women and Japanese men in rural Japan contributes to the literature of intimacy and commodification of love situated in a migration context. The book views this phenomenon through an analysis of individual desires, mediated by a cultural encounter that materialized into migration, marriage, and family making in Japan.
It explores meanings of performing Filipina-ness while simultaneously being held against the standard of the ii oyomesan, or the ideal image of the traditional wife in Japan. Veering away from hypergamy as a frame for analysis, Faier situates the everyday relational dynamics and performance of intimacy within unequal relations of power, as being in part, influenced by the historical colonial encounters of Japan as the colonizer and the Philippines as the colonized.
In this particular context, she elaborates less on the macro forces that wield power, but link how these shape the more quotidian, daily encounters occurring between the individual subjects of focus, the Filipina women and the Japanese men. The study uses ethnography, which brought Faier to a two-year stay in central Kiso in the rural portions of Nagano, Japan. The village had a community of Filipina wives, which were introduced into the community through mediated matchmaking or kokusai omiai kekkon, and through intimate encounters as entertainers in local Filipina hostess bars.
Situating the migration of Filipina women to Japan as part of the series of migration waves that started from the Philippines to the United States, and to the subsequent rise of the economic and entertainment industry in s Japan, her analysis spans the migrant Filipinas' aspirations that begin in the Philippines, to Japan, and to an imagination of their American dreams in the United States although none of her informants managed to reach the US at the time of her fieldwork. Their experiences commonly suggest a restlessness to move that is also explored in many accounts of migrant Filipino experiences abroad [Aguilar ; Amrith ] , and their unfulfilled dreams of an American life, in contrast to the reality of rural life they arrived at in Japan.
The book is filled with stories of the Filipinas and their Japanese husbands and families. As most of her subjects in the study were former entertainers, she explored how they managed and resisted the initial attachment of unconventional images associated with the nature of their work, and the subsequent ways they remake themselves as proper brides and wives to Japanese men.
