Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan (review)

Lieba Faier has written a highly nuanced account of the encounter between Filipina migrants and Japanese in rural Japan. Most Filipina migrants initially went to Japan to work in hostess bars, and many continue to do so even after having married Japanese men. Faier asks what social and economic conditions made possible not only Filipinas' imagination of a life in Japan but also the peculiar form of Japanese desire materialized in Filipina hostess bars. Her primary interest, however, is in the complex negotiation of Filipinas' place within rural Japan. To this end, she brings to bear the global historical context for Filipina migration to Japan, Filipinas' dreams of migration to America, rural Japanese reflections on their position within Japan and the world, and observations, commentaries, and gossip involving Filipinas about their roles as wives of Japanese husbands. The result is a theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically rich account of the ways in which global and local forces shape migration experiences in rural Japan.

Faier deftly brings together aspects of the global historical context important for understanding the encounter of Filipinas and Japanese in rural Japan today. She does so in a way that positively informs, rather than dilutes, her ethnographic research in Japan. The global context involves the role of the United States in the rise of bar culture around military bases in the Philippines and the U.S. role in rebuilding postwar Japan, both of which contributed to the eventual development of Filipina migration to bars in Japan. The presence of the United States as the symbol of cosmopolitanism and development in Filipino and Japanese imagination helps us understand why some Filipinas view Japan as a place where they got stuck, en route to the United States, or wherever they imagined might be a bigger and better place. While migration involves mobility, Faier shows that it also involves stoppages and unrealized goals.

Faier also provides the necessary background for understanding the attitudes of rural Japanese toward the presence of Filipinas. Rural Japanese see this presence as representing their participation in the more cosmopolitan lifestyles of urban Japanese, for whom internationalization, including international marriage, is widespread. At the same time, Filipinas point to the marginal status of rural Japanese. Urban Japanese men and women are more likely to find Japanese spouses as well as a much broader range of foreign spouses, including Westerners, or those perceived to have higher status. Rural Japanese men's dependence on Filipina marriage partners is indicative of their trouble in domestic as well as international marriage markets.

Whether or not rural Japanese men are pushed to marriage with Filipinas for lack of other options, it is notable that many Japanese have accepted Filipinas into their families as wives and daughters-in-law, overcoming not only the negative attitudes Japanese more widely have held toward developing countries in Asia but also the stigma attached to those who have worked in hostess bars. Rural Japanese have come to judge Filipinas according to cultural norms of good Japanese wives (ii oyomesan) rather than prejudging them according to racial, ethnic, or national background. In one sense, this suggests a positive openness to difference and perhaps a new flexibility in how Japaneseness is defined. In several cases, Japanese asked Filipinas judged to be good wives whether they would consider naturalizing as Japanese. On the other hand, the Japanese cultural standards imposed on Filipina wives and mothers, and to a considerable degree embraced by Filipina women themselves, clearly constrain them to modes of behavior that many young Japanese women themselves do not feel happy fulfilling.

Pressured by Japanese expectations of good wives, as well as by religious frameworks they grew up with in the Philippines, some Filipina wives have tried distancing themselves from hostess bars after marriage. Certainly the small handful of more middle-class Filipinas who came to Japan as wives and have never set foot in a hostess bar have...