The Othering of Japanese “War Brides” in Postwar Japan

Their Representations in Asahi Shimbun and Popular Media from the Late 1940s to the 1970s

抄録

This article examines how Japanese “war brides” have been imagined and represented in various media in Japan in the postwar era. These women married servicemen, mostly American GIs, working for the Allied Forces during the occupation period of Japan and the succeeding years in the 1950s, as well as in the early 1960s. The empirical data used here include their coverages in Asahi Shimbun, a major newspaper in Japan, from the late 1940s to the 1970s. In addition, other primary and secondary sources that have taken account of them in one way or other are picked up and analysed. While the data examined here may be limited to a certain degree, it is suggested that the “war brides” had consistently been imagined as Japan's “others,” or the outsiders of Japanese society, by various media throughout the time under study, as their deviance and extraordinariness tended to constitute the major theme of their media representations since the 1950s and thereafter. It is also contended that, from the mid-1960s to the 1970s, Japanese media even imagined them as strangers who had lost their Japanese-ness due to their long-term absence from Japan.