Since the 1980s, there has been an underground exodus of women from Japan to the West, where they seek education, employment, and romance or marriage with Western men. The author considers women’s narratives of attraction and repulsion that explain the unions of Japanese women and White men, which depend on a wholesale rejection of Japanese men. As a White, Western, female anthropologist married to a Japanese man, the author then explores the fraught politics of studying this population of Japanese women and the impossibility of rapport in an ethnographic environment in which the author’s personal circumstances contravene some of her informants’ foundational narratives of identity and desire.
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