"Taking cover under her more innocuous theme of the recent internationalization of Japanese women's lives and careers, Karen Kelsky bluntly asks one of the great taboo questions in Japanese studies: why do so many Japanese women, if given the chance, prefer white husbands over those of their own ethnicity? What are the historical and psychological reasons for a powerful attraction enshrined in popular culture since "Madame Butterfly "but until now never critically examined, certainly not from a modern feminist perspective? Kelsky's provocative answers to these questions make her "Women on the Verge" the first study we have of Japan's eroticization of the West, in a world already so full of books that would tell us how the West has eroticized Japan."--John Whittier Treat, Yale University

Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Note on Japanese Names and Terms xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Promised Land: A Genealogy of Female Internationalism 35
2. Internationalism as Resistance 85
3. Capital and the Fetish of the White Man 133
4. (Re)flexibility in Inflexible Places 202
Conclusion: Strange Bedfellows 227
Notes 249
Bibliography 259
Index 283

Karen Kelsky is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon.