Abstract

This chapter explores the multifold politics of Japanese women imagery. It first critically analyses sociopolitical construction processes of the Orientalist and sexist stereotypes, and subsequently explores how individual Japanese women live the images in their everyday lives. In-depth interviews with Japanese women with international experiences highlight how women’s performances are diverse, fluid and ambivalent, and their identities – the effect and not the cause of the enactments – are shifting and unstable. As such, rather than attempting to define Japanese-women-ness, this chapter provides a feminist ethnography in which a researcher, a Japanese woman herself, encounters the women’s agency to subvert the powerful gaze.