© 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. This popularity of multiracial entertainers created a konketsuji boom (mixed-blood boom) in Japanese media and popular culture. Also, Licca-chan, white-Japanese mixed race dolls—the Japanese version of Barbie—were released in 1967. They became immensely popular among Japanese girls because of their cute, “western” features borrowed from heroines in Japanese girls’ comics. In fact, racially mixed people, including multiracial stars as well as comic characters, were represented in major Japanese girls’ comic magazines since they were launched in the mid 1950s. The ii images and stereotypes of racially mixed people shifted considerably from the 1950s into the 1970s. Through a close textual analysis of representations of mixed race stars and characters in major Japanese girls’ comic magazines (i.e., Nakayoshi and Ribon) published during the 1950s and 1960s, my dissertation illuminates the ways in which the meanings of mixed race people shifted from strongly negative to ambivalent, or even positive, in the context of postwar economic growth. Closely looking at the changing U.S.-Japan relations in the aftermath of World War II and in the Cold War context, this project provides insight into the ways in which memories of World War II and of the U.S. Occupation are reconstructed through representations of mixed race people in Japanese media and popular culture in postwar Japan. As this dissertation project suggests, girls’ comic magazines are one of the few pivotal spaces where issues of race mixing in postwar Japan are allowed to be openly and regularly discussed, and where a wide range of multiracial people are portrayed in imaginative ways. As I argue, in the early post-occupation years, the overrepresentation of Black-Japanese occupation babies in girls’ comic magazines inadvertently contributed to foisting the blame of the former Western Occupation onto Black bodies and to reconstructing the image of the West. Subsequently, during the 1960s, the whiteness of mixed race stars and characters, glorified in consumerist media culture, greatly contributed to overshadowing the image of the West as the former enemy and to dissociating racially mixed people from the stigma of being “occupation babies,” intimately entangled with the memory of Japan’s defeat in World War II. My dissertation demonstrates that representations of racially mixed people in girls’ comic magazines played a crucial role in remaking the meanings of mixed race Japanese and reconstructing memories of World War II iii and the U.S. Occupation, in part because girls’ comic magazines have elaborated a distinct aesthetics, ethics, and worldview shaped within girls’ culture. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Part I: Race in Japan .......................................................................................................... 28 Chapter 1: Japanese, Black, White, and Mixed Race ........................................................ 29 Part II: Mixed Race Stars in Japanese Girls’ Comic Magazines ....................................... 71 Chapter 2: Haruko Wanibuchi ........................................................................................... 84 Chapter 3: Emily Takami ................................................................................................ 106 Part III: Mixed Race Characters in Japanese Girls’ Comic Magazines .......................... 131 Chapter 4: Black Skin, Blackface: Black-Japanese Mixed Race Characters in Girls’ Comics ......................................................................................................................................... 137 Chapter 5: (In)visible Whiteness: White-Japanese Mixed Race Characters in Girls’ Comics ......................................................................................................................................... 165 Conclusion: Mixed Race Imagery and Memories of Japan’s Defeat in World War II ... 198 References ....................................................................................................................... 218 Notes ................................................................................................................................ 238 v INTRODUCTION I really hated being hāfu [half]. I idealized the Japanese. I idealized Americans. Because they had a place to belong. I was jealous. ⎯Anna Tsuchiya1 I enjoyed special treatment, but experienced loneliness because I could not fully belong regardless of my partial Japanese lineage and full cultural comprehension. Had I been a visitor to Japan, I would have thoroughly enjoyed being pampered, but being a resident who had no plans of leaving my motherland, I longed to be fully accepted as a legitimate member of Japanese society. ⎯Teresa Kay Williams2 Due to intensified globalization, the number of mixed race people has been growing worldwide.3 Although there is a widespread perception that Japan is racially homogeneous, it is no exception. Watching television and flipping through a magazine, one would never have a day where she or he does not happen on racially mixed people in the Japanese media today. There are many multiracial Japanese actors, singers, comedians, and fashion models in the Japanese entertainment industry. Angela Aki is a singer-songwriter born to a Japanese father and an Italian American mother. Her song Tegami [Letter] became a huge hit in 2008. Aki’s popularity is demonstrated by the fact that she performed at NHK Kōhaku Uta Gassen (Year-End Song Festival) six times in a row.4 Anna Tsuchiya is an American-Japanese mixed race fashion model, singer, and actress starring in several popular Japanese films, such as Shimotsuma Monogatari 1 [Kamikaze Girls] (2004) and Sakuran [Derangement] (2007). A comedian, Antony, is popular with the younger generation, entertaining them with his joke about his “unique” experience as “half” African American and “half” Japanese. Also, Yū Darvish is a Major League Baseball player who has Japanese and Iranian heritage. Undoubtedly, mixed race people have become ever more popular in Japanese media culture today. It seems that multiracial Japanese people are celebrated and that multiraciality is taking on new meaning in Japanese society. In the Japanese media, mixed race people are often glorified as talented, beautiful, and global-minded. They would appear to embody the ideal of “multicultural Japan” in the contemporary context. In September 2013, French Japanese newscaster Christel Takigawa delivered a speech to the International Olympic Committee in Buenos Aires on behalf of Tokyo’s Olympic bid. In her speech, she spoke about the Japanese concept of omotenashi⎯the spirit of selfless hospitality. Japanese people were so impressed by her speech in French, and the Japanese word “omotenashi” became a buzzword among television programs, newspapers, and the internet. It seemed that she was fully accepted as a representative of Japan, and many indeed believed that Tokyo won the bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games because of Takigawa⎯a “beautiful,” “intelligent” mixed race Japanese woman who meets global standards and represents Japan’s future.5 On the other hand, crowned Miss Universe Japan in 2015, Ariana Miyamoto⎯the daughter of a short-lived marriage between an African American sailor in the U.S. Navy and a Japanese woman⎯was criticized for not being “Japanese enough.”6 Like Christel Takigawa, she is a Japanese citizen, grew up in Japan, and speaks Japanese. Nevertheless, a lot of comments on social media, such as Twitter, Girls Channel, and 2channel,