For it has well been said that the most wonderful aesthetic products of Japan are not its ivories, nor its bronzes, nor its porcelains, nor its swords, nor any of its marvels in metal or lacquer—but its women.[1]
Since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been an enduring relationship between Western imaginings and the Japanese woman. Dressed in kimono and made up as a geisha, she has often been used in illustrations and cartoons as an archetypical gendered symbol of her country, often to the exclusion of all other symbols. Even when writing on the modernisation of Japan in 1899, as P.L. Pham notes, J. Stafford Ransome 'found space amongst pictures of shipyards and engineering buildings to include pictures of Japanese women posing in kimonos.'[2] In more general descriptions of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as those by Basil Hall Chamberlain, Douglas Sladen, Robert Grant Webster and W. Petrie Watson, the 'state of Japanese womanhood'[3] or, more accurately, how the Japanese man was seen to respond to and treat Japanese womanhood, was often used as a metonym for the state of Japanese civilisation. The common estimation was that, rather than the Japanese man, the quintessentially feminine Japanese woman deserved the exceptional kindness and chivalry of the Western man.
For over a century now, Western fiction writers have made ample use of this framework based on race and gender assumptions. As Jean-Pierre Lehmann explains, the universally acclaimed qualities of the Japanese female, those of 'charm, grace, beauty and femininity,' combined with Western suspicions of a tolerant, enthusiastic native sexuality (as opposed to outlawed or repressed sexuality at home) to provide:
ample material for the romantically inclined, resulting in numerous literary and musical works, all with suitably exotic titles: A Japanese Marriage, The Geisha, A Flower of Yeddo, The Lady of the Weeping Willow Tree, Mi-ki-ka, Poupée Japonaise, ... Madame Chrysanthème and Madame Butterfly.[4]
An extension of the contemporaneous Western fascination with the aesthetics of Japonaiserie (a term coined by Baudelaire in 1861), this exotic Japan romance genre was pioneered by French writer Louis Marie Julien Viaud (1850-1923), otherwise known as Pierre Loti. The genre most commonly employs the notion of the 'journey's hero'—a Western man bearing 'power over land, women, peoples'[5]—who undertakes to explore Japan's 'erotics of epistemology.'[6] Inevitably, however, these explorations cling to and preserve the myth of Western hegemonic dominance over the Orient, making the genre no less a product of orientalist discourse than the more formal writings 'on Japan'. Yet, the concept of exotic female perfection is by no means the only myth about Japanese women constructed and perpetuated by Western fiction.
This paper is an historical overview of these Western myths of Japanese women, ranging over nearly one hundred and twenty years of Western fiction since the late nineteenth century. Nearly always represented according to the eurocentric requirements of the time, the Japanese woman had a slow symbolic maturation from an exotic, yet simple, maidenly innocent in the late nineteenth century to a sophisticated, often deviant, femme fatale by the 1990s. The orientalist ideology underpinning this process of characterisation, however, rarely faltered. Indeed, commercial popularity, as well as a distinct lack of author enthusiasm for problematising it, has regrettably ensured that 'the Japanese woman' remains a fetishised symbol in contemporary Western fiction 'on Japan'.
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http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersection...ue7/morris.html