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ABSTRACT
In 2014, ASTIGU – a Japanese pantyhose brand – launched ‘ashi wa, kao’ (legs are face), a new series of advertisements featuring a female model whose face is painted black. Although scholars have previously written on blackface and blackness in Japan, they have focused more on subcultural contexts and men’s instead of women’s experiences. Drawing on the campaign’s promotional materials and employing women’s blackface practices as a heuristic device, this essay tracks constructions of blackness and femininity in Japanese advertising. I argue that Japanese women’s wearing of blackface forms affective spaces for consumers to negotiate their racial, gender, and national identities. While ‘Japaneseness’ and femininity are initially based on the bihaku (beautiful white) model, the idea of black masks alters women’s relationships to their bodies and allows them to experiment with racial otherness and alternative femininities. By unsettling notions of race, gender, and nation in Japanese society, I suggest that the dual commodification of bihaku and blackface in these advertisements potentially generates transnational forms of femininity. Building on scholarship on race, affect, femininity, and Japanese mass culture, this essay ultimately investigates how consuming women in blackface traverses gender and racial constructions in Japan, contributing to transnational flows of consumer culture.
Acknowledgment
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference (31 March – 3 April 2016) and the University of California Berkeley Japan Studies Graduate Student Conference (17‒18 April 2015), where it benefited from the participants’ insights. I am particularly indebted to Vicky Hesford, Kadji Amin, Laura Miller, Alex Hambleton, Joy Schaefer, and Liz Schmermund for their invaluable comments on previous drafts. I also thank Carolyn Stevens, John G. Russell, David Kelly, and the anonymous reviewer(s) for their productive suggestions. All remaining errors are mine.
Notes
1 All translations are the author’s except where otherwise noted.
2 Okamoto Tao, also well known outside Japan as Tao Okamoto.
3 Cornyetz uses the term ‘black face’ instead of ‘blackface’ to differentiate Japanese appropriation from staged black impersonation in the United States during the nineteenth century. However, I follow Russell in using ‘blackface’ as located beyond black minstrelsy and in the everyday, in a complex web of practices, relations, and representations. By employing ‘blackface’, I am not collapsing Japanese practices or conflating constructions of blackness in Japan with those in the US. See Cornyetz, ‘Fetishized Blackness’, 113; Russell, ‘Race as Ricorso’, 126–27.
4 As race (jinshu) is not clearly distinguished from ethnicity (minzoku) in Japanese and the two are often used analogously in scholarship, I will discuss them together. See Condry, Hip-hop Japan, 36; Iwabuchi and Takezawa, ‘Rethinking Race’, 2.
5 Although ‘kogyaru’ has been variously translated as ‘small’, ‘junior’ or ‘teenage’ girls, I follow Laura Miller’s translation here. Miller also observes that the mainstream media ascribed the labels ‘kogyaru’, ‘ganguro’ and ‘yamamba’ to young women who instead call themselves ‘gyaru’ (Girl). See Kinsella, Schoolgirls, 7; Miller, ‘Those Naughty Teenage Girls’, 225, 231.
6 I take this translation from Miller, who links yamamba to Japanese folklore and notes that young women have reclaimed the term by calling themselves ‘mamba’. See Miller, ‘Those Naughty Teenage Girls’, 240.
7 Known professionally outside Japan as Ariana Miyamoto.
8 See e.g. Black, ‘Wearing out Racial Discourse’; Condry, Hip-hop Japan; Cornyetz, ‘Fetishized Blackness’; Kinsella, Schoolgirls.
9 ‘Blackness’ refers specifically to discourse on African Americans.
10 Condry, Hip-Hop Japan, 30.
11 ‘Racialization’ might be defined as an analytic tool for looking at how racial meanings are constructed and get ascribed to certain relationships and social practices in specific cultural contexts. I follow David Goldberg in using ‘racialization’ more broadly to refer to ‘race-inflected social situations, those informed or marked by racial characterization’. See Goldberg, ‘Racial Americanization’, 88; Murji and Solomos, ‘Introduction’, 1–3, 12.
12 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 91.
13 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 45.
14 Kinsella, Schoolgirls, 60–61; 67; 110–11.
15 Ibid., 44–47.
16 Uema, ‘Gendai joshi kōkōsei’, 3–4.
17 Kinsella, Schoolgirls, 141–42.
18 Weinbaum, ‘Racial Masquerade’, 121.
19 Examples include Japan’s invisible minorities, such as the Burakumin, Ainu of Hokkaido, and Ryukyuan people of Okinawa, and Japanese residents of Korean (Zainichi) and Chinese descent.
20 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 95.
21 Atsugi, ‘Pansuto teate’.
22 Leiter, Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre, 304.
23 Atsugi, ‘Pansuto teate’.
24 ‘Blacks’ refers specifically to African Americans. See Russell, ‘Playing with Race’, 43; ‘Race as Ricorso’, 125.
25 Fukushima, ‘Ambivalent Mimicry’, 28, 34.
26 Ibid., 23.
27 For a history of how blackness is used in Japanese mass culture, see Russell, ‘Consuming Passions’, 126–27.
28 Russell, ‘Consuming Passions’, 151–52; Kelsky, Women, 145.
29 Miller, Beauty Up, 35. See also my later discussion on bihaku.
30 Russell, ‘Consuming Passions’, 165; Russell, ‘Playing with Race’, 44.
31 Russell, ‘Consuming Passions’, 166–67.
32 Cornyetz, ‘Fetishized Blackness’, 114, 116.
33 Ibid., 122.
34 Condry, Hip-Hop Japan, 30.
35 Ibid., 29.
36 A Japanese popular music genre, well known from the late 1940s to the 1970s and emphasizing ‘the melodramatic, the maudlin, and the sentimental’, enka continues to evolve in the music industry today. See Yano, ‘The Marketing of Tears’, 60.
37 Before the rise of Jero in the last decade, black artists like Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Boyz II Men have been fairly popular in Japan.
38 See Doerr and Kumagai, ‘Singing Japan’s Heart’, 601; Fellezs, ‘This Is Who I Am’, 334; Russell, ‘Race as Ricorso’, 143; Kiuchi, ‘An Alternative African American Image’, 516.
39 Yano, ‘The Marketing of Tears’, 60.
40 Doerr and Kumagai, ‘Singing Japan’s Heart’, 610.
41 Fellezs draws on Vijay Prashad’s notion of ‘polyculturalism’, which opposes color blindness and multiculturalism and does not conceptualize race in terms of the black–white binary or distinct and monolithic cultures. See Fellezs, ‘This Is Who I Am’, 334.
42 Condry recognizes the importance of young women consumers in motivating new trends in Japanese mass culture, such as popular music. See Condry, Hip-Hop Japan, 157.
43 Kinsella, Schoolgirls, 131; Miller, ‘Those Naughty Teenage Girls’, 229.
44 Kinsella, Schoolgirls, 143.
45 Miller, ‘Those Naughty Teenage Girls’, 229.
46 Black, ‘Wearing out Racial Discourse’, 250.
47 Creighton, ‘Soto Others’, 212.
48 Oguma, A Genealogy, xxx.
49 Miller, Beauty Up, 35, 37.
50 Ibid., 37; Kinsella, Schoolgirls, 134
51 Uno, ‘The Death of “Good Wife, Wise Mother”?’, 294.
52 Atsugi, ‘Products’.
53 Kinsella, Schoolgirls, 108–110.
54 I will discuss the relevance of TAO’s background in the next section.
55 Permission to reprint images of the ashi wa, kao advertisements and Ashi-jo was denied on the basis that Atsugi’s contract with the models restricted these materials to within Japan only.
56 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 64.
57 Atsugi, ‘Pansuto teate’.
58 Transit Advertising Awards Citation2015, ‘Ashi wa, kao’.
59 ‘Eki ibento’.
60 E-mail message to author from Yamasaki Kaoru, Atsugi marketing department, 16 December 2015.
61 Murthy, ‘Social Media’, 1065.
62 @chizu512, Twitter post, 6 April 2014, 1:11 a.m. http://twitter.com/chizu512.
63 Kanehara Mai, @MaiKanehara, Twitter post, 4 April 2014, 8:15 a.m. http://twitter.com/MaiKanehara.
64 Noro Kazumi, @kaza14jp, Instagram post, 2 April 2014, 10:45 a.m. http://tofo.me/kaza14jp; @miya623yyy, Twitter post, 5 April 2014, 11:08 a.m. http://twitter.com/miya623yyy.
65 @590228Red, Twitter post, 6 April 2014, 1:57 p.m. http://twitter.com/590228Red.
66 @73n_cos, Twitter post, 5 April 2014, 1:32 a.m. http://twitter.com/73n_cos; @okko0907, Twitter post, 5 April 2014, 11:55 a.m. http://twitter.com/okko0907.
67 Norika, @daibenminkoku, Twitter reply, 27 May 2014, 9:29 p.m. https://twitter.com/astigu/status/471059131525103616.
68 Jameson, ‘Reification and Utopia’, 141.
69 ‘TAO no kao’.
70 @ASTIGU, Twitter post, 25 February 2014, 7:48 a.m.; 26 February 2014, 8:56 p.m.; 27 February 2014, 7:35 a.m.; 6 March 2014, 7:45 a.m.; 18 March 2014, 7:29 a.m.; 27 March 2014, 7:32 a.m.; 1 April 2014, 7:15 a.m. http://twitter.com/ASTIGU.
71 Cornyetz, ‘Fetishized Blackness’, 115.
72 Kinsella, Schoolgirls, 110.
73 Hāfu is a wasei eigo (English loanword) derived from the word ‘half’ to indicate a person who has mixed heritage. Although new terms, such as daburu (double), have emerged, hāfu appears to be most widely used in practice. See Creighton, ‘Emergent Japanese Discourses’; Hosokawa, ‘Hāfu’.
74 Okamura, ‘How to Look Like a “Haafu”’, 2.
75 Yamashiro, ‘Hafu’, 570.
76 Although Miyamoto has been billed as the first hāfu Miss Universe Japan, Shimada Jun, who won the pageant in 1970, may have been hāfu as well. See Yamagoe, ‘Watashi ga nihonjindenainara’; ‘Shimada Jun’.
77 Hosokawa, ‘Hāfu’.
78 ‘Misu yuniba Miyamotosan’; Fackler, ‘Biracial Beauty Queen’.
79 Miyamoto also challenges beauty and feminine ideals in Japan, such as having bihaku skin and being cute (kawaii) – the same things Mori Riyo, who sported a tan at the time she won Miss Universe in 2007, was criticized for. Ines Ligron, who trained Mori, rejected cuteness (kawairashisa) for ideals such as intellect (chisei), fortitude (tsuyosa), and healthy beauty (kenkōteki na utsukushisa). See ‘Misu yunibāsu’.
80 Creighton, ‘Soto Others’, 212–214.
81 That said, the Japanese media still distinguish other Asians from the Japanese majority by reverting to Asian stereotypes for the former while retaining the mukokuseki aesthetic for Japanese people.
82 For an in-depth analysis of the Burakumin as ‘invisible race’, see De Vos and Wagatsuma, Japan’s Invisible Race.
83 Takezawa, ‘Toward a New Approach’, 11.
84 Ibid., 11–12.
85 The blackface practices of women from these minority groups may complicate this statement, but that is beyond the scope of this essay.
86 Teng contends that during the mid-nineteenth century, Eurasians – descendants of European and Asian parents – ‘[bridged] the distance’ between Asia, Europe, and the United States by having occupations supporting both ends and a social status that was in between Asian and white. See Teng, Eurasian, 9–10.
87 Saraswati, ‘Cosmopolitan Whiteness’, 17.
88 Miller, Beauty Up, 35.
89 Ibid.
90 Weinbaum, ‘Racial Masquerade’, 120.
91 Ibid.
92 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 95–97.
93 Miller, Beauty Up, 27.
94 Miller, ‘Those Naughty Teenage Girls’, 234.
95 Young, ‘Throwing’, 149.
96 Miller, Beauty Up, 34, 37.
97 Atsugi, 11 no biishiki.
98 Miller, Beauty Up, 37.
99 Atsugi, ‘TAO’.
100 Ibid.; Donna, ‘TAO’.
101 @ASTIGU, Twitter post, 10 May 2011, 10:23 a.m. https://twitter.com/ASTIGU.
102 @ASTIGU, Twitter post, 11 July 2011, 8:10 a.m. https://twitter.com/ASTIGU.
103 @ASTIGU, Twitter post, 7 July 2011, 10:42 a.m. https://twitter.com/ASTIGU.
104 Atsugi, ‘Pansuto teate’.
105 Besides, WWD Japan already revealed TAO’s identity. See ‘TAO no kao’.
106 In Japan, the term ‘idols’ refers to ‘highly produced and promoted singers, models, and media personalities’. See Galbraith and Karlin, ‘Introduction’, 2.
107 Atsugi, 11 no biishiki.
108 Although ‘foreign’ should include any country other than Japan, it is often collapsed with the West as a fantastical trope that does not specifically distinguish the US from Europe. See Kelsky, Women, 7.
109 Ibid., 3–4, 26.
110 Carter and Hunter, ‘A Critical Review’, 195.
111 See Freeman, ‘Is Local: Global’, 1018; Keohane, ‘Spheres of Influence’, 181.
112 Grewal and Kaplan, ‘Postcolonial Studies’, para 3.
113 Jameson, ‘Reification and Utopia’, 132.
114 Berlant, Female Complaint, 5.
115 Ashi-jo’s hybridity is further emphasized when ASTIGU introduced shiro (white) Ashi-jo, a new character wearing whiteface, a white wig and suit, and black stockings, which supposedly portrays the same slogan, ‘ashi, wa kao’, as black Ashi-jo. Although white Ashi-jo emerged at the tail end of the campaign, in late September 2014, its meanings are no less complex than black Ashi-jo, which requires further research. See @ASTIGU, Twitter post, 21 September 2014, 3:54 p.m. http://twitter.com/ASTIGU.
116 @ASTIGU, Twitter post, 6 April 2014, 2:20 p.m. http://twitter.com/ASTIGU.
117 @ASTIGU, Twitter post, 6 April 2014, 2:03 p.m. http://twitter.com/ASTIGU.
118 @ASTIGU, Twitter post, 6 April 2014, 4:18 p.m. http://twitter.com/ASTIGU.
119 Norika, @daibenminkoku, Twitter reply, 6 June 2014, 8:42 p.m. https://twitter.com/ASTIGU/status/452706817814978560/photo/.