Paper short abstract:

This study focuses on children born of Japanese fathers and Chinese mothers who had consensual relationships in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War and who migrated to Japan after 1972. It explores the life-long impact of their origin on their experiences, identity and belonging.

Paper long abstract:

While children born of war―children born of local women fathered by enemy soldiers, occupation forces and peacekeepers in various locales and historical contexts―have received academic and media attention in recent decades, the issue of children born of Japanese fathers and Chinese mothers in China during and in the aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese War (Sino-Japanese CBOW) has long been neglected in both China and Japan. Some Sino-Japanese CBOW were born of rape, and others were born of marriage as a result of intimate encounters and consensual relationships during the war. This study focuses on the latter who migrated to Japan after the normalisation of Sino-Japanese relations in 1972, based on oral history interviews and unpublished legal documents. These individuals were born in a state of legal limbo and were profoundly affected by repatriation measures, a series of political campaigns under Mao as well as post-war geopolitical conditions. They developed a strong attachment to their absent father's memories and country, and some eventually acquired Japanese nationality and―in their own words―'returned to their ancestral homeland'. This study is the first investigation on the life-long impact of their origin on their experiences, identity and sense of belonging as well as on how they responded to various policies that were adopted at different post-war periods. This paper focuses on the factors that drove them to 'return' to Japan and on their identity and sense of belonging in their old age after their 'return' to Japan.

Paper short abstract:

This research revisits the economic reform policies applied to post-war Okinawa and examines a process of proletarianisation of local citizens. It tries to untangle a triangle power relationship among the US, Japan, and Okinawa on the postwar economic reform policies and examine the responses.

Paper long abstract:

This research is a part of an interdisciplinary project, "Reeducation Revisited" which carries a transnational and comparative analysis on reeducation politics found in the Post-World War II period in the US, Japan, and Germany. My research takes into account the 1945-1972 Okinawa when it was under the control of the US. More specifically, the research tries to examine how the restoration of labor activity in Okinawa occurred and how local citizens experienced this transition of industrial structure in the Post-World War II period. The study tries to provide a new approach to the study of labour in Japan.

　The purpose of the proposed research is to untangle and understand a triangle political power relationship of the US, Japan, and Okinawa on how the postwar economic reform policies were planned, selected, and implemented. The study looks at materials of the US government, the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands and the Japanese government for historical analysis on the triangle politics. The study uses content analysis as a methodology and analyzes secondary sources of the life history of workers in Okinawa to examine their experiences. It tries to understand the process of proletarianisation of local citizens amid the social transition in the complicated power relationship.

　I have been interested in the history of proletarianisation of Okinawans and its relation to the development of the Japanese capitalist society. My interest developed through an issue of proliferation of non-regular workers in Okinawa. While there are studies on precarious workers of the developed countries, there is not much study done examining why Okinawa has such a particular number of them. Instead of using culturalism to explain such situation, I argue that labour issue in the study of Okinawa needs a historical analysis of the social structure of labour activity.

Although this will still be an on-going research project by the time of the 16th EAJS conference, I will present the results as much as possible. Moreover, I would like to provide the participants with a new consideration of the epistemology of the study of Okinawa/Ryukyu within Japanese studies and its implications.

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with the role of "race" in the construction of beauty ideals in cosmetic advertisements. The material analyzed will span from the 1960s, when modeling became a popular occupation for "mixed-race" people, to the moment when this trend started to fade in the 1980s.

Paper long abstract:

The objective of this paper is to investigate the representation of the "foreign looking" body in beauty advertisement material ranging from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. Starting point for my investigation will be an analysis of Shiseidō advertisements. The make-up company was one of the most influential players in shaping discourses about beauty, and its 1966 summer campaign is widely known for having kickstarted the popularity of "mixed race" models (Aoki, 2016).

In the mid-sixties "mixed race" people born during the American occupation started being well represented in the modeling industry. This trend peaked in the early 1970s: in the following period, we see the re-emergence of the theme of "tradition", followed in the 1980s by advertisement that appeals to an increased diversification of consumer identities (Yamamura, 2016).

The impact of media on the perception of "mixed race" has been recognized by previous studies, most notably Shimoji (2018) and Iwabuchi (2014). "Konketsuji", as they were referred to at the time, had been at the center of a moral panic and victims of discrimination in the immediate post-war. However, in the subsequent ten to twenty years, the media created a "positive" image that often did not reflect the life conditions in which "mixed" individuals outside the TV screen found themselves in (Shimoji, 2018).

Glamourizing representations of "foreign looking" bodies have been mostly neglected by research so far, since the focus has been on relativizing the supposedly positive media images that are widespread in the present day by unearthing a history of pathologization (Ifekwunigwe 2004). The present paper aims to fill this gap by using multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) to understand historical visual advertisement. The underlying assumption is that historical glamourizing discourses are in need to be analyzed, as it is likely that they had an impact on the way "foreign-looking" bodies are represented in the present day. By comparing how different looking bodies were represented and strategically used in different decades, we might have a better understanding of how ideas about "beauty" and "race" intersected in post-war Japan, creating discourses that have survived to the present day.