Sayuri Arai Dissertation Final Final Final
© 2016 Sayuri Arai MEMORIES OF RACE: REPRESENTATIONS OF MIXED RACE PEOPLE IN GIRLS’ COMIC MAGAZINES IN POST-OCCUPATION JAPAN BY SAYURI ARAI DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Chapmpaign, 2016 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Clifford G. Christians, Chair Professor Cameron R. McCarthy Professor David R. Roediger, The University of Kansas Professor John G. Russell, Gifu University ABSTRACT As the number of mixed race people grows in Japan, anxieties about miscegenation in today’s context of intensified globalization continue to increase. Indeed, the multiracial reality has recently gotten attention and led to heightened discussions surrounding it in Japanese society, specifically, in the media. Despite the fact that race mixing is not a new phenomenon even in “homogeneous” Japan, where the presence of multiracial people has challenged the prevailing notion of Japaneseness, racially mixed people have been a largely neglected group in both scholarly literature and in wider Japanese society. My dissertation project offers a remedy for this absence by focusing on representations of mixed race people in postwar Japanese popular culture. During and after the U.S. Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), significant numbers of racially mixed children were born of relationships between Japanese women and American servicemen. American-Japanese mixed race children, as products of the occupation, reminded the Japanese of their war defeat. Miscegenation and mixed race people came to be problematized in the immediate postwar years. In the 1960s, when Japan experienced the postwar economic miracle and redefined itself as a great power, mixed race Japanese entertainers (e.g., models, actors, and singers) became popular.
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