ABSTRACT
In this essay I will examine the personal accounts of a marginalized population of professionally ambitious Japanese women to demonstrate how they deploy discourses of the modern, or “narratives of internationalism,” to construct an “emancipatory” turn to the foreign/West in opposition to gender-stratified corporate and family structures in Japan. In 1993 and 1994 I interviewed sixty working women in Tokyo who had gained international experience through study abroad, work abroad, or employment in foreign-affiliate firms or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the United Nations. My informants included bilingual secretaries, translators and interpreters, securities traders in British and American brokerage firms, grants officers in the United Nations University in Tokyo, and free-lance journalists. Most of these women were single and aged between 23 and 45, and had invested a great deal of time and energy to the mastery of English or other Western languages, and achievement of international expertise. About seventy percent had study abroad experience ranging from six months to four years. Most had been or were currently romantically involved with a white Western man, and as I shall show, professional and erotic (heterosexual) desires were often closely intertwined in their lives.
