To browse Academia. Interracial romance in the intimate spaces of hostess bars in Japan Although it does not specifically deal with romance, Faier's account of the interracial marriages between Filipina women and Japanese men in rural Japan contributes to the literature of intimacy and commodification of love situated in a migration context.
The book views this phenomenon through an analysis of individual desires, mediated by a cultural encounter that materialized into migration, marriage, and family making in Japan.
It explores meanings of performing Filipina-ness while simultaneously being held against the standard of the ii oyomesan, or the ideal image of the traditional wife in Japan.
Veering away from hypergamy as a frame for analysis, Faier situates the everyday relational dynamics and performance of intimacy within unequal relations of power, as being in part, influenced by the historical colonial encounters of Japan as the colonizer and the Philippines as the colonized. In this particular context, she elaborates less on the macro forces that wield power, but link how these shape the more quotidian, daily encounters occurring between the individual subjects of focus, the Filipina women and the Japanese men.
The study uses ethnography, which brought Faier to a two-year stay in central Kiso in the rural portions of Nagano, Japan. The village had a community of Filipina wives, which were introduced into the community through mediated matchmaking or kokusai omiai kekkon, and through intimate encounters as entertainers in local Filipina hostess bars.
