ABSTRACT
While tales about Filipinas in diaspora have attracted a global audience, those living in Japan have been referred to as “entertainers” who work in the “sex industry.” Filipinas in Japan have thus been constructed as the “immoral” Other under the gender regimes of Japan and the Philippines. Based on ethnographic research, I explore the meanings and possibilities of the practices of Filipina wives of Japanese men in public charity events organized by the women themselves in Japan and the Philippines. Dislocated from their subjective identities, Filipina wives in the Tokyo area have deployed images and symbols of socially sanctioned (Christian) wives and mothers in these events. Although ironically participating in Orientalist and sexist discipline in the context of their events, their practices nevertheless constitute a way to create affirmative spaces for themselves on the margins of the two nation-states.
Our main purpose was to counter-attack the media blitz on the plight of Filipino women working in Japan as bar hostesses that was wrecking havoc on [the] Philippine image in Japan.
(Philippine Women’s League of Japan 2004)