1 March 2001
Jonathan Krause

The Western view of Oriental women

The last few months have seen the British media closely following the story of Lucie Blackman, a young English woman who travelled to Japan to earn money as a hostess in one of the entertainment districts of Tokyo. I believe that her subsequent disappearance, the ensuing search for her whereabouts and the recent discovery of her body tell us just about all we need to know about the west's view of oriental women.

I have barely believed my own ears or eyes in recent months over the media's (totally unchallenged) coverage of this case. Traditionally liberal, serious newspapers such as The Guardian and The Observer managed to bring up all the racist and misogynist stereotyping of East vs. West that I thought had been discarded in the last century. Let's pretend that the tables were switched; that a young woman from China, Thailand or Japan had come to London on a tourist visa, illegally getting a job on the edges of prostitution and then suddenly vanished. Would this make the news at all? I doubt that it would even raise a paragraph of concern in any major paper and certainly wouldn't make the National TV news. This isn't just an assumption - how many of us have seen those sad blurry pictures in Chinese and Japanese shops in Soho of missing women?

Why? Why does the disappearance of blond haired middle-class white women in Tokyo merit so much attention but her counterpart coming from east to west is ignored? There have been reports in London based Japanese newspapers on more than a few occasions of similar horrors. There was a case two years back of a young female student who asked for directions of a group of young men. She was gang-raped and when they had finished with her thrown into a canal, left for dead. Heard about it? Thought not. It is not unreasonable to draw the conclusion that those who decide what is newsworthy or not consider the life of a white western woman to somehow be more valuable and interesting than her far-eastern equivalent. You'd be mistaken to think that all those who decide on such issues are solely male.

What can be done to turn the tide? For a start whenever you hear someone'jokingly' refer to an oriental women in a way that would be unthinkable to refer to a white women, challenge it. I've been astounded that people, on hearing that I have a Japanese wife think that is alright to make jokes about marriages of convenience, buying a bride, etc. Unless they are confronted with their own words they'll never stop to think about their implications and what they are telling me about their mindset. For the thing is, people really don't realise until you tell them - and if we don't tell them, who will?