Most people I encounter for the first time at my workplace, a prestigious small liberal arts college in the United States, first assume that I am a graduate student or a staff member. If it is revealed that I am a teacher of some sort, they assume that I am a post-doc or a lecturer. I am a young-looking (albeit not young) Asian woman on a tenure track position at my institution.
One of the most awkward incidents of mistaken identity took place at an off-campus restaurant during the final week of a spring term. As I was having lunch with my male colleague, a professor from another department, whom I had met once before, approached our table to say hello. He then asked: “Where are you spending this summer?” I replied that I would be spending my summer in Japan, and my friend responded that he would be spending his summer in Taiwan. The professor looked puzzled and asked where “the kids” were going to be. The two of us looked at each other, and realized that he was talking about some “kids” who belonged to the both of us! “Um, I am so-and-so from the Asian Studies department,” I responded, with an awkward smile. The professor looked almost offended and walked away without saying a single word.
When such incidents occur, I usually roll my eyes and move on. However, I occasionally indulge myself in lighthearted whining on my Facebook. Once, one of my sympathetic friends commented, “Why do they not think you are a professor?” In response, I stated: “Because I don’t look like one.” My friend then followed up with, “What is a professor supposed to look like?” This may actually have been a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway: “Just Google Image the word ‘professor’ 
Google Images is a perfect instrument to visualize (and reinforce) stereotypes. The top rows represent the archetypal images of a concept, followed by secondary and tertiary images. When ‘professor’ is typed in the search bar, what happens? Please see it for yourself. This summer, I realized that the people of Japan would not see me as a professor, either (try Google Image 教授). Interestingly, whenever I told people that I was the professor they were looking for at various events, their reaction was the opposite of what would happen in the United States. In Japan, people would often show excitement, and would quickly proceed to praise me for being such an unlikely-looking college professor in a foreign country. Indeed, Japanese people tend to be apolitical about gender-, age-, and race-based stereotypes. Stereotypes are such a normative part of life in Japan that it is not a source of embarrassment or guilt. However, in the United States, especially on college campuses, stereotypes are so demonized that people refuse to acknowledge harboring such biases.
Some time ago, I directed a ten-week language and culture study program for my institution in my native country of Japan. Through this experience, I had the opportunity to observe Japanese people’s perceptions of race, gender, and sexuality from the vantage point of an individual who exists in the two cultures. This experience was both eye-opening and depressing, to say the least. Upon the conclusion of the program, I decided to write an essay about my discoveries in both Japanese and English – however, one is not an exact translation of the other, since my objectives are slightly different for my intended audiences.
Before arriving in Japan, I was slightly concerned about the experience of my African-American students. Would people stare at them or say inappropriate things? To my delight, this was not an issue, at least to my knowledge. But my delight was not as far-reaching as I had hoped. A particular form of racism haunted me for the duration of the program, which manifested itself in a starkly different form than disapproving stares and ignorant comments. This form was embodied by Japanese individuals’ uninhibited fetishization and consumption of the “exotic” corporeality of my students. This fetishization and consumption took place through acts of photographing, staring, and commenting – all of which were directed at the appearances of my students. This happened to my students every time we were invited to a social event.
A more restrained version of this frequently happened to my students in public spaces too, but there was something about those “cultural exchange” gatherings that completely unleashed the Japanese people’s wild side. If I were to compare the “everyday fetishization” to window shopping, the “cultural exchange” events resembled a store-closing sale of a high-end boutique, where the customers transform into Best Buy shoppers on Black Friday, grabbing brand-name clothes and purses like there is no tomorrow.
With regards to being on the receiving end of this “shop ‘til you drop” mode of courting, one of my former students, Tommy, who recently finished his one-year-long exchange program in Japan, wrote to me about the incessant praises on his tallness, green eyes, brown hair, and general handsomeness as well as requests for photographs from the local students. This especially occurred during the university’s weekly “International Coffee Hours:”
It's hard to know how to respond to being so unabashedly fetishized, particularly when the other party seems so well intended and you can't escape the feeling that even in the context of this foreign country you're maybe too privileged to complain. But it's definitely a source of discomfort for a lot of international students, and contributes to the tendency to hang out with other foreigners. (Granted, there are those who love this newfound celebrity status.)
Conveying Tommy’s complaint to the people of Japan is a challenge. In Japan, race is a self-evident, relatively apolitical concept, and people tend to view and discuss race in the same candid manners as talking about one’s shirt. Therefore, they have no qualms about giving positive attention to “foreigners” based on their exotic looks, and it never crosses their mind that such race-based flatteries could make the recipients thereof uncomfortable. To them, this seems no different than complementing their fellow East Asians on their good looks. With that being said, being subject to fetishization is not the worst thing that can happen to most Americans in Japan. Some people may even agree with Tommy in that the phenomenon simply signifies the position of privilege and it is not an issue. However, I would like to illuminate the phenomenon’s unintended negative consequences.
Out of all the student participants of the summer program, about one-third were Asian-Americans - they happened to all be women. In many occasions, I noticed that my Asian-American students instantly turned invisible during those “cultural exchange” events. When it came to the idea of “Americans” or “Americanness,” the mental search engine of the Japanese attendees seemed to display pages and pages of “whites,” followed by several rows of “blacks,” then several images of “brown people/anyone who does not appear East Asian,” and no more. They did not acknowledge my Asian-American students who stood there, awkwardly observing their “exotic” peers being idolized.
On a more serious note, during our 10-week program, three students were unexpectedly kicked out of their homestay houses. They were all Asian-American women, and were kicked out by their host mothers.
When I say that it was the host mothers who banished my students, I mean what I am saying. According to the knowledge that I accumulated this summer, it is usually the mother/wife of the family who initiates the process of becoming a host family. She is the default caretaker-chef-conversation partner of the guest - if she is not an enthusiastic participant of the program, the agency would not approve the family’s participation. In fact, many of my students frequently reported about the famous “absent father” syndrome in their homestay households. Although each of the incidents of banishment cannot be simply reduced to an “ism,” I dare say that their ethnicity and gender of my students played a role in these tragic partings.
Each time the host-guest relationship began to sour, the host mother contacted the homestay agency to complain about the student. The list of the complaints was long but the gravity of each sin was underwhelming: her Japanese is not as good as expected; she does not help out around the house; she is not tidy; she does not finish every dish served; she used a towel that belonged to a family member, and so forth. If I were in the host mother’s shoes, there is no question that I would be frustrated. However, would I coldly banish a 19-year-old girl, who is not fluent in the local language well and has no family or friends to move in with? No. In the end, the agent was unable to convince the host mothers to continue caring for the students, so my institution put them up in a hotel until the agent found them new homes.
This caused me to start thinking about the economy of the homestay service industry in Japan. It is quite obvious why a potential guest approaches the homestay agency prior to arriving to Japan: they want a place in Japan to stay for a reasonable fee, possibly homemade meals, and an exposure to the local culture and language. What do the potential host families receive in exchange for opening up their homes for a total stranger who is not readily familiar with the language and customs of Japan? It certainly is not money, since the agency does not pay the family much more than the actual cost of food and utilities.
During one of my meetings with the homestay agent, Mr. T, he revealed something flabbergasting. In response to my concern about the strange coincidence that all the students who had experienced a downfall with their host mothers were Asian women, Mr. T let me in on the industry’s standard practice in an attempt to deny the possibility of racial discrimination. He said that his company and its competitors routinely survey the potential families’ racial preferences for their future guests, and typically, half of them indicate preference for white guests (and some even say “white guests only”). Mr. T was trying to “prove” that the host families were not racists, because they did not insist on receiving white guests.
As dumbfounded and infuriated by the revelation that my institution had been unknowingly complicit in such a racist practice for years, this information was an important piece of the puzzle I was trying to solve: What really went wrong for the students?
Whenever I helplessly watch my non-Asian students being ambushed by a pack of Japanese “consumers” during a “cultural exchange” event, I cannot help but think that it resembles a blind date of which only one party knew the purpose of the gathering. In a similar vein, I had a growing concern that the Japanese homestay service industry was basically a procurer that exploits the foreign visitors’ actual needs and Japanese people’s fantasies – however, the first party is kept in the dark about the latter’s motivation. In fact, Japanese college students are not the only ones who unapologetically fetishize my non-Asian students. During our social events with the host families, I heard several host mothers saying so-and-so was kakkoii (good-looking) about their own male guest (i.e. her pseudo-son) or someone else’s. If the matching process of host families and guests were freestyle like the International Coffee Hours, would the three host mothers have chosen an Asian girl?
Curiously, if these host families had not been matched with one of my students but had instead been assigned a random foreign traveler, they would not have had a chance to envision their potential guests. Hosting one of our program participants means that the host families are inadvertently introduced to other host families and their guests through multiple gatherings. What if some of the host mothers were viewed as luckier than others, and the “unlucky” ones unconsciously developed a tiny speck of resentment towards their less visually striking students? What if this tiny speck multiplied by the minute? What if hosting an Asian-American girl to the host mothers was as unexciting as taking care of a niece - a niece without the native knowledge of Japanese language and customs?
Intrigued by my own wacky hypotheses, I decided to check out the agency’s homepage to learn more about the company. Central to their homepage was a 3-minute-long, elaborate promotion video. What does the promotion video promote? The value of intercultural communications or the generosity of opening up one’s home for a stranger? Actually, the video appears to promote nothing but a Japanese wife’s fantasy of temporarily and faultlessly replacing her husband with a white man. The story is told from the singular perspective of a young, beautiful wife, and it opens with a scene wherein she is taking down the decorations from the previous night’s farewell party for her young, English-speaking white male guest of three weeks. Soon her husband wakes up, thus interrupting her indulgence in melancholy, and she pours him a cup of coffee. White she is at it, her (secret) recollection of the guest continues. The narration in her voice goes, “I was surprised to see my daughter so quickly becoming attached to him,” and the scene switches to a sepia-color, slow-motion flashback: the man throws the girl up in the air and catches repeatedly, as she joyfully giggles. Next, the wife and the man sandwich the girl, swinging her by the hand, and the happy laughter lingers. Meanwhile, the husband in soft focus trails the adorable trio.
Of course, I am not saying that most, or even some, prospective host mothers decide to host foreign guests for the actual possibility of having a fling with them. Yet fetishization of the foreign corporeality is a normative part of life in Japan, to which no one who lives there can be oblivious, and the homestay industry seems to be enticing potential host mothers with the idea of consuming a foreign man in the comfort of their own home.
I am sure that my Asian-American students could have been more organized and willing to help out with housework. But, to me, the gravest “sin” they committed was being born Asian females. If they had been tall, attractive “foreign” boys, there is a great chance that my students would never have had to experience brutal rejection and temporary homelessness by the women my students once called okaasan.
In the Japanese version of this blog post, I pleaded my readers to update their mental Google Images, pointing out that Americans are a people of extremely diverse racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic backgrounds, and beyond. I also asked them to not fetishize other human beings, no matter how well-meaning their intentions were. In this essay, I would like to remind readers that my people’s skewed ideas about “Americans” partly originate from underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in the American media. Furthermore, this points to the fact that Asian-Americans are perpetual foreigners in many Americans’ mental Google Images. If this essay can help you upgrade your mental Google Images, that would be terrific. While you are at it, I would like to make one more request: next time when you realize that you had unconsciously demoted a woman of color in your mind, please do not find consolation in the fact that no one noticed your bias. In other words, please don’t make it about you - make it about her for just one second. Every hour of her life is the International Coffee Hour, and to accomplish what she has accomplished, she probably had to stand twice as tall and speak twice as loudly as her peers. Fortunately, there is plenty of goodness in the world: I am surrounded by family, friends, and colleagues who believe in me, and the three students had a wonderful time with their second Japanese host families.