Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants

292 Pages·2006·8.023 MB·English

by  Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain

Pure Beauty
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Pure Beauty
Judging Race in Japanese American
Beauty Pageants
REBECCA CHIYOKO KING-O’RIAIN
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Chapter 3 originally appeared as “Miss Tomodachi Meets Mainstream America:
Japanese American Beauty Pageants as Cultural and Symbolic Productions,” in
East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, edited by Shilpa Dave, Tasha
Oren, and Leilani Nishime (New York: New York University Press, 2005); reprinted
with permission of New York University Press. Portions of chapter 4 originally ap-
peared as “Multiraciality Reigns Supreme? Mixed Race Japanese Americans and
the Cherry Blossom Queen Pageant,” Amerasia Journal 23, no. 1 (1997): 113–28;
reprinted with permission from the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press.
Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani-
cal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King-O’Riain, Rebecca Chiyoko.
Pure beauty : judging race in Japanese American beauty pageants / Rebecca
Chiyoko King-O’Riain.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4789-7 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4789-5 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4790-3 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4790-9 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Beauty contests—United States. 2. Japanese Americans. 3. Japanese
American women. 4. Race awareness—United States. I. Title.
HQ1220.U5K56 2006
791.6'2—dc22
2006019972
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
vii Preface
1 Introduction: Negotiating Racial Hybridity in Community
Beauty Pageants
21 1. Race Work and the Effort of Racial Claims
37 2. The Japanese American Community in Transition
59 3. Japanese American Beauty Pageants in Historical
Perspective
74 4. Cultural Impostors and Eggs: Race without Culture
and Culture without Race
116 5. Patrolling Bodies: The Social Control of Race through
Gender
148 6. The “Ambassadress” Queen: Moving Authentically
between Racial Communities in the United States
and Japan
186 7. Percentages, Parts, and Power: Racial Eligibility Rules
and Local Versions of Japanese Americanness in Context
227 Conclusion: Japanese Americanness, Beauty Pageants,
and Race Work
235 Notes
239 Bibliography
255 Index
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Preface
WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER, Toku Yoshimura, immi-
grated to the United States as a picture bride in the early
1900s, she was not the typical picture bride and yet her
destiny may not have worked out as she had wished. She left Mifune
village in Kumamoto prefecture to join a husband she had never met,
except in photographs. Rumors of her strong will and advancing age
(she was nineteen at the time) eventually made their way across the
ocean but not before she had opted not for the man she was married to
through photographs, but instead his younger, better-looking cousin.
As an accomplished seamstress, she made her way into the sewing in-
dustry in Gardena, California, and had a family of four children; the
eldest, Chieko, died in late childhood and left my grandmother, Toshi,
to take on the mantle of eldest daughter.
Toshi, also a rebel of sorts, married Yoshio Kobata of Kobata Broth-
ers Nursery in Gardena, and theirs was the wedding of the year. Their
fi rst child, my mother, was so adorable that she won the Nisei Week
Beautiful Baby Contest—and my fate as a researcher of Nisei Week
was cast.
When the family was relocated during World War II to Rohwer,
Arkansas, as were almost all Southern California Japanese Americans,
vii
viii Preface
my mother started her formal schooling in an internment camp. My
grandfather was drafted from camp and became part of the Military
Intelligence Service. He was sent to Fort Snelling in St. Paul, Min-
nesota, to translate documents from Japanese into English for the
U.S. military.
Although my grandmother was relocated to St. Paul at the end of
the war, she left her husband and he returned to the family business
in Gardena. Toshi proceeded as a single Japanese American woman
and raised her two daughters on her own until she married a Japanese
American veteran of the 442. Although their house on Race Street and
subsequent education at University of Minnesota High School made
my mother and my aunt into “true Americans,” they always felt a tie
to Gardena (and their father), where they made occasional trips in
the summer.
My parents met at Carleton College in Northfi eld, Minnesota, and
my mother became the fi rst of her generation in our extended family
to marry out to a hakujin (white) man. My dad, born in Borger, Texas,
never could get his family to participate in our lives, and I was born
into a family with two very active sets of Japanese American grand-
parents (one set in California and one in Minnesota) and a vague no-
tion that my dad was different. Growing up in a small and dispersed
Japanese American community in Chicago did not prepare me for my
eventual journey backward along my mother’s, grandmother’s, and
great-grandmother’s pathways.
I, too, went to college in Minnesota, barely surviving the broom-
ball and eyelash-freezing winters to be near my grandmother, now liv-
ing in White Bear Lake. After college and teacher training, I moved to
Japan and was sent to —of all places— Kumamoto prefecture, ten miles
from where my great-grandmother was born. After teaching English
in Japan, I went on to study sociology at the University of California
at Berkeley, which brought me full circle back to California, where it
had all begun for my mother and her mother before her.
My move to Japan was considered strange by my grandmother, who
had worked so hard to get away from her own mother and from a
“parochial” Japanese American community in Gardena. “Why,” she
complained, “would you want to go to Japan or California?”
As a mixed-race Japanese American woman, I was always aware
of myself and my appearance. My great-grandmother’s preoccupation
with her daughters’ appearance transferred down into an obsession
Preface ix
with clothes, shoes, and handbags in my own mother (and, dare I say
it, myself). While my grandmother was meant to “look well” to adver-
tise her mother’s sewing abilities, she was also trying to become more
American, more middle class.
In a Chicago suburb surrounded by whiteness and Jewishness, I
knew I was Japanese American and didn’t know that much about “being
white.” I just knew that we went into the city to buy Japanese food at
Star Market, collected Japanese dolls (my dad’s passion, not Mom’s),
and met other Japanese American families for New Year’s celebrations.
I was just like them, Japanese American.
When I went off to college in Minnesota, however, I was clearly
not Japanese enough. The ASIA student club was dominated by fi rst-
generation Koreans and Chinese, with a few Japanese Americans from
Hawaii. As one of a small number of students of color on campus, I knew
I wasn’t Asian enough to be in the club but knew also that my Japanese-
language-studying boyfriend didn’t just see me as white either.
Teaching in the JET program in Japan, I was a gaijin (foreigner)
along with all the other foreign English teachers imported to bring
internationalization and English to our Japanese secondary students.
When I met the “long-lost family”—my great-grandmother’s young-
est sister and her family—I retied the links in our family between
the United States and Japan that had been broken during the war.
But despite my Japanese family, name, and some language skills, I was
not, nor would I ever be, really Japanese. I was too washed out, too far
culturally from the “real Japanese” of Japan. Even so, my colleagues
in the Japanese secondary school treated me differently from my pre-
decessor, a white man from Washington State. I was often told that “I
should know better” about cultural norms that I had no idea I was vio-
lating. Why? Because down inside they considered me to be Japanese.
The harshness of the cultural judgments, made differently in different
eras and places in my life, have come to inform this book in subtle and
important ways.
In California I encountered racial eligibility rules for the fi rst time.
I joined the Hapa Issues Forum at UC Berkeley, and for the fi rst time
had friends and colleagues who were also mixed Japanese American,
fi ghting misunderstanding and discrimination not only in the white
mainstream but also in the Japanese American community. I learned
much from them about the right to stand up and say that we are mixed
and yet have rights to be accepted. We were welcomed as mixed-race