Yellow Peril, Oriental Plaything: Asian Exclusion and the 1927 U.S.-Japan Doll Exchange

This essay illuminates the role that Asian girlhood has played in the transpacific circulation of racial affects by reexamining the history of the 1927 U.S.-Japan doll exchange from an Asian American feminist perspective. In 1927, just a few years after the 1924 Immigration Act banned Japanese immigration, hundreds of "friendship dolls" traveled across the Pacific Ocean, bearing messages of peace and goodwill. I contend that although the exchange was designed to alleviate racial tensions, the warm welcome that the dolls received was contingent upon Orientalist notions of Asian femininity and the containment of attendant sexual anxieties through an appeal to girlhood innocence. Challenging the black-white binary through which childhood studies often understands race, I show how Asian girlhood calls for a transpacific framework that attends to histories of imperialism, militarism, and commodity capitalism while elucidating the figure of the doll in recent scholarship on Asian femininity and decorative embodiment.