Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900 (review)

According to popular belief, the first interracial kiss on American television occurred in the mid-1960s on the notorious episode of Star Trek in which Captain Kirk is compelled by mind-manipulating aliens to seduce Lieutenant Uhura, his black female communications officer. The claim is a puzzling one, given the fact that scenes of white men kissing Asian women—sans external coercion—in television dramas and televised theatrical films had long preceded it. Certainly these exchanges would fit the category "interracial," yet such apparent lapses find their answer in Leupp's insightful interrogation of the West's protean constructions of racial otherness and the strikingly ambiguous positioning of Asians within them. This would seem particularly to apply to the West's construction of the Japanese Other.

In Interracial Intimacy in Japan, Leupp charts the dynamics and fluidity of conceptions of race and gender and their impact on defining interracial relations between Japanese women and Western men. While there has been no shortage of studies of contacts between Japanese and Europeans and several sociological studies of mixed-race children, there have been few sustained studies of interracial intimacy in premodern Japan. More important, in focusing much of his analysis on constructions of race and gender in Japan and the West, Leupp's work makes a valuable contribution to the growing discourse of race, racism, and race relations in Japan.

Leupp has set before himself a difficult task. He acknowledges the impossibility of producing a comprehensive history of intimate relationships between Westerners and Japanese, noting the fragmentary and often asymmetrical nature of contemporary sources from the period covered in his book. Substantive documentation does not begin to emerge until the nineteenth century, and then primarily as a white male discourse on Japanese women. On the other hand, there is a wealth of material on Western constructions of race, including an extended discourse on the perils of miscegenation. Presenting both a diachronic and synchronic juxtaposition of Japanese and Western views of such relationships, Leupp provides a valuable critique of the evolution of Western and Japanese attitudes toward race and race mixing through an examination of the historical and social contexts in which they occurred, the social response to interracial unions, and their representation in literature and contemporary culture. In the end, he offers a well-documented analysis of Japanese attitudes toward interracial relationships that challenges perdurable images of Japanese as racist xenophobes while confirming the centrality of race and place in the West.

"It seems," Leupp writes, "at best safe to generalize that the concept of intermarriage between Caucasians and Japanese, while disconcerting to western Victorian society, did not produce the degree of revulsion which such commentators as [Louis] Agassiz expressed about black-white 'miscegenation'" (p.134). Unlike sexual relationships between blacks and whites which historically have been viewed as taboo—often quite literally as a form of bestiality—and portrayed as motivated by raw desire and animalistic passions (described variously in the modern vernacular as "jungle fever" and "white fever"), those between whites (males) and Asians (females) have generally been represented in a more romantic, if equally distorting, light. Relations between white men and Japanese women in particular have occupied and continue to occupy a central position in the Western imagination, as is evident in a casual inspection of its high and popular culture, from Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème, John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly to Sayonara, Shogun, and, most recently The Last Samurai, all of which more or less evoke traditionally phallocentric Orientalist tropes of white Occidental male mastery and domination of exotic, sensual, passive, childlike Oriental women. Conversely, while there is a vast literature on Japanese attitudes toward the Occidental (primarily) white male Other, less is known about Japanese attitudes toward sexual intimacy with non-Caucasian Others.

Significantly, Leupp's discussion of the discourse of interracial intimacy in the Western imaginary reveals that relations between Europeans and Japanese have not necessarily always...