Filipino Boxers and Hosts in Japan: the Feminization of Male Labor and Transnational Class Subjection¹
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Volume 5 | Issue 4 | Article ID 2404 | Apr 02, 2007 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Filipino Boxers and Hosts in Japan: The Feminization of Male Labor and Transnational Class Subjection¹ Nobue SUZUKI with Sachi TAKAHATA With high hopes for better economic mobility gay, transgender, and cross-dressed) and social security, many Filipinos arrive in entertainers whose services their Filipino and Japan through the arrangements of promoters Japanese clients – often but not exclusively and matchmakers. Despite potentially high women – patronize. [5] Similar to their women rewards, some Filipinos nonetheless feel counterparts, the services of these hosto have ambivalent about the choices they have made recently become the subjects of investigation in coming to Japan. Others try to suppress their by Filipino researchers. Hence, the work these anxieties about the possibly severe physical, entertainers perform has become scrutinized economic, mental, and sexual exploitation and and represented by Filipinos and Japanese who violence from which they may suffer. They are hold various national, material, ethnic, usually aware that their services andgendered, and classed interests. performances are the objects of their customers' desires to enjoy exotic and erotic Historically, Filipino entertainers-qua-bar ambience at the clubs where they work. Other workers in the water trades form rather a new Filipino entertainers may conversely swiftly group. From the early 1900s, many Filipinos sink their ragged bodies onto the canvas, have contributed to the Japanese entertainment barely hearing the count going up to ten and world outside these trades, including the the bell signaling the end of their stints. popularization of boxing. [6] Until the 1980s Filipino boxers often served as models for and In contemporary Japan, the category of tough competitors against Japanese pugilists in "entertainment" work performed by Filipino this athletic arena. Today, the legendary stories women (Filipina) migrant workers has been of Filipino prizefighters have been kept alive narrowly located within "the sex industry." This largely within the memories of old enthusiasts. has been epitomized by the term Japayuki" " Interestingly, most Filipino pugs now come to (Japan-bound) entertainers whom Japanese and Japan to lose to Japanese boxers. Their work foreign observers alike often myopically equate uniquely complicates the usual pattern of with prostitutes. [2] On the other hand, the global sport labor migration where elite, tough, areas of sports and leisure involving old and and hyper-masculine athletes are headhunted new immigrants in Japan have not fully entered to play for top foreign teams (Bale and Maguire scholarly discussions. [3] Concurrent with the 1994). A well-established boxing matchmaker influx of Asian [4] women entertainers from the in Chicago, for example, argues that early 1970s, there has been an inflow of hetero- considering the economics of fights it makes no and homosexual Filipino men who also work in sense to go abroad to recruit "bums," "divers," the "water trades" (mizu shobai) consisting of and "tomato cans," whose ultimate role is to bars, restaurants, and sex joints, that is, sink to the canvas (Wacquant 1998:7). This businesses that rely on customers' patronage. unusual international arrangement inJapan Today these men are commonly referred to as seems to suggest that more than a simple hosto (host) and bakla (in Tagalog, meaning capitalist logic is at work. 1 5 | 4 | 0 APJ | JF I contend that it is not just economic capital by entering the remunerated workforce. that Japanese promoters are after. By boosting Following the world recession in the 1970s, Japanese pugilists' fighting spirits through intensified global competition optimized profits fixing bouts prior to their upcomingthrough the mobilization of the socially championship matches, Japanese are also dominant gender ideology. Capitalists have accumulating symbolic national masculine commonly hired more women, young single capital within the virile fistic world. As the ones especially, constructing them as burgeoning scholarship on popular culture has secondary earners who work to "supplement" demonstrated, an inquiry into boxing and family income before marriage. Branded in this hosting opens up new sites which reveal the way women workers are subjected to low workings of power. Moreover, the interweaving wages with few prospects for advancement of Filipino men's entertainment work also while many men take up superior positions as further complicatesJapan 's increasingly skilled workers, technicians, and foremen. transnational social realities. Women are thus "secondary workers" compared to men while they continue to This essay offers preliminary thoughts on the perform nurturing unpaid work at home. [7] meanings of Filipino entertainment inJapan . Central to my discussion is the feminization of In my study, it is men who are feminized by Filipino men's labor in Japan's entertainment performing "secondary" or "inferior" tasks in world in the final years of the twentieth century the masculine fistic trade. Conversely, male bar and early in the twenty-first century.workers entertain women, and some men, with Contemporary representations of Filipinos in their care-giving, emotional labor, something Japan as morally degenerate "sex workers" and that is ideologically relegated to women. [8] "loser" boxers together work to constitute these Furthermore, these hosto are hyper-eroticized workers as "inferior" and therefore "feminine" and assumed to be under their female and male vis-a-vis Japanese masculine nationality. Such customers' sexual subjection, revising the constructions have emerged at the time of common pattern discussed in the literature on Japan's rise to global superpower status and Filipina entertainers and sex workers (see post-bubble economic and national struggles below). Yet, the works of these pugilists and since the late 1980s. As Kelly (1998) has put it, hosto do not involve a simple swapping of male popular culture works to endorse national and and female roles. As shown below, it implies far sometimes imperial sentiments among "locals" more complex power struggles between by producing compelling sites for underscoring different groups of women and men, including inter-societal differences and masking intra- those between men. Thus, the notion of societal differences. feminization used in this paper has little to do with being biologically male or female. Rather, In this essay, I push Kelly's argument further I investigate the symbolic ways in which using two important theoretical thrusts that socially prevailing ideas about gender derive from the gendered and nationalized differences are mapped onto Filipino male characterizations of Filipino entertainers in entertainers' bodies. contemporary Japan. One is to rework the notion of the feminization of labor. Previous The other theoretical point I pursue here is that studies of domestic and foreign labor have the work of Filipino men inJapan has been discussed the feminization of work anddiscussed through differences not only between recruitment of women into the labor market. "First-World" Japan and "Third-World" Women's realities however suggest that they Philippines but between elite Filipino writers in are, in fact, masculinized and/or "bisexualized" their homeland and researchers in Western 2 5 | 4 | 0 APJ | JF societies – who join in the Japanese discourse – to increase in the late 1980s. Figure 1 shows and laboring-class Filipinos abroad. Hence, that Filipinos by far outnumbered other these Filipino entertainers have beennationalities in the 1980s and 1990s, though disciplined simultaneously by Japanesethe number of matches has fallen since its peak gendering and nationalist power and by in 1996. In 1981 there were only seven transnational class subjection by international Japanese-Filipino matches, but at the peak in researchers in this emerging deterritorialized 1996 Filipinos boxed in 150 fight cards. [9] discursive space. More remarkable are the Filipinos' low success rates. For example, in 1998 out of a total of 220 To explicate the feminization and transnational matches in Japan, Filipinos participated in 100. class subjection of Filipino male labor, I Filipinos won only seven of these bouts (Boxing mobilize two sets of data that have been Magazine 1999:56). In the worlds of boxing and collected throughout the 1990s. The first of other professional sports, fixing frequently these is ethnographic field research conducted occurs (Schilling 1994:80-84; Vail 1998; among hosto and other Filipino residents in Wacquant 1998) and Filipino pugs' losses to Japan and with pugilists and gym owners in Japanese have been fairly common in recent Japan. Further data come from archivalyears. But historically this was not always the research. Because this essay offers an analysis case. of the symbolic feminization of Filipino workers, I primarily draw on the latter type of data. In the section on Filipino hosto, I juxtapose these men's dominant images with an interview with a hosto, "Mama Cherry" (pseudonym), and other materials obtained through field research. Since my goal is not to provide a grand generalization of these men workers but to illustrate the complexity of migrant ethnic workers' experiences amid significant discursive forces, Cherry's case may not be representative in a quantitative sense. Nevertheless, the descriptions that follow resonate with other entertainers' views and are therefore