Marrying Transnational, Desiring Local: Making “Marriageable Others” in Japanese–Chinese Cross-border Matchmaking

This article examines cross-border marriages by analyzing the phenomenon in terms of negotiations of marriageability between Japan and China. It focuses on the commercial matchmaking practices between a transnational marriage agency in Tokyo and Dongyang in northeast China. Regardless of the participants’ initial hesitation to engage in transnational matchmaking practices, I argue that it was the negotiation of local marital norms on a transnational scale that rendered participants marriageable to one another. Specifically, I demonstrate how the brokers and participants in these practices negotiated the cultural boundaries of marriageability—by constructing and reproducing essentialized similarities and proximities—within local–global contexts. On the one hand, the Japanese men involved sought to frame Chinese prospects as “almost Japanese brides” so that their marriages would be “almost national endogamous marriages.” The Chinese women, on the other hand, attempted to marry off and into a “proximate” community where many friends had already wed. By both relying on and stretching local marital values, they engaged in flexible imaginings of marital norms on a transnational scale while simultaneously reaffirming them at the local level. Ultimately, this article provides an alternative framework with which to analyze transnational marriages based not on desires for either “difference” or ethnic “sameness,” but on “similarity” and “proximity” in a way that tactically negotiates boundaries of appropriate and inappropriate relationships.