Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how a subset of self-reporting wounded Japanese women find self-transformation, healing and confidence through encounters with Tibetan men at home and abroad through spiritual/romance tourism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how a subset of self-identifying wounded and misfit Japanese women find self-transformation, healing and self-confidence through romantic encounters with Tibetan men, by engaging with Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan culture/language classes, by volunteering with Tibet organizations or through tourism to Tibet and Tibetan areas of South Asia. I conducted interviews with 20 Japanese women who have dated or married Tibetans men or are longtime volunteers for Tibetan causes; 15 Tibetan men who have dated or married Japanese women and two queer Tibetans.

The ethnographic material is diverse, including an overview of how cis-gendered female Japanese manga artists erotically depict Tibetan monks within the yaoi and shōnen-ai genres (Christopher and Laumonier 2023); how the Japanese media, following the lead of CCP tourism promotions in Tibet, sexualizes Tibetan boys; how Tibetan temples, singing bowl businesses and Tibetan monks commoditize ‘Tibetanness’ as healing- and romance-oriented; and how a Tibetan counseling center in Nagano, run by a Japanese pharmacist who is the first foreigner to ever complete the full Men-Tsee-Khang training in Dharamsala, provides healing to majority female clients. This healing involves recreating a ‘Tibetan atmosphere’ through engagements with nature and fostering resilience.

The argument of this paper triangulates into several bodies of scholarship. How misfit Japanese women (Allison 2013) discursively frame Tibetan masculinity as sensual, natural, tantric and naively virtuous—the opposite of effete, digitally-distracted, shilly-shallying Japanese men— updates the scholarship on interracial desire (Kelsky 2001) and interrogates inter-Asian ethnic minority sexualization as a counterpoint to only white desire (Ashikari 2005). How Tibetan Buddhism is gendered, commodified and situated among diverse spiritual therapies extends recent scholarship on spiritual alternativity (Gaitanidis 2022). And how Tibetan monks framing of Tibetan Buddhism as bringing healing to Japan’s hyper-urban, stressed-out millions fits within the literature on ethno-commodification (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) and the Tibetan refraction of mimetic desire (Adams 1996; Lopez 1998).