| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores representations of whiteness in contemporary Japanese culture. Specifically, I argue that although representations of caucasian whiteness pervade Japanese media and popular culture, they have largely remained racially unmarked, scholarly and popular discourse presenting caucasian whiteness in cultural not racial termes, where it finds expression in notions of an idealized, fetishized, cosmopolitan westernness. As a result, the discourse of whiteness in Japan has largely escaped the kind of sustained critical commentary in Japan and the United States that characterizes the discourse of blackness and other explicitly racially marked Others as well as the literature on whiteness studies, which has yet to fully engage constructions of whiteness outside the (post)colonial experience and the Euro-Americocentric black/white binary. I discuss how representations of whiteness provide a template through which Japanese reflexively construct both the foreign White Other and the ‘white’ Japanese Self, the evaluation of these selves often being ambiguous and conflicted. I conclude that as Japan’s exposure to whites and non-whites increases and as its own internal diversity becomes more visibly salient, Japanese have begun to contest and more critically interrogate (re)presentations of themselves and to renegotiate their place within given racial and aesthetic hierarchies.
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