Drawing on multiyear and multisited ethnographic research, Chigusa Yamaura offers an incisive analysis of the practices of cross-border matchmaking between men from Japan and women from Northeast China. Although this topic is not new, what is novel about Marriage and Marriageability is the distinctive perspective that Yamaura adopts to examine the phenomenon. Diverging from the mainstream literature of cross-border marriages, which highlights how marriage becomes a means of migration, Yamaura deliberately chooses to bring the discussion of marriage back into the analysis of cross-border marriages by scrutinizing the dynamic ways in which cross-border marriages were constructed, created, and perceived by the potential grooms and brides, as well as the migrant-sending and receiving societies.
This distinctive analytical point of view is motivated by a simple yet understudied question: how do men and women coming from two culturally, socially, economically, and linguistically distinct societies come to perceive one another as suitable and marriageable partner? This becomes an intriguing and conceptually important question particularly when the potential partners only have brief interactions in one or a few short matchmaking meetings and when the relations between Japan and China have been unstable and increasingly complicated.
To answer this question, Yamaura attempts to unravel the conditions of possibility for these cross-border matchmaking and marriage practices by exploring the colonial histories, local norms, and conceptions of marriage and marriageable partners, as well as the subjectivity, negotiations, and strategies of the potential partners in Japanese-Chinese cross-border marriages. She starts by investigating how the establishment of the Manchuria state in the 1930s laid the foundation for the subsequent long-standing relations between Japan and Northeast China. She then traces the practices of transnational commercial matchmaking by conducting an immersive ethnography in a few matchmaking companies in Tokyo and two cities in Northeast China. Through interviews and conversations with brokers, Japanese men and Chinese women looking for foreign spouses, relevant stakeholders in the matchmaking industries, and local people in the two cities in Northeast China, Yamaura meticulously unpacks how the marriageability of Japanese men and Northeast Chinese women are constructed locally, transnationally, and sociohistorically.
Contrary to the “exotic becomes erotic” logic underpinning many East-West cross-cultural marriages, Yamaura observes that the perceived marriageability of Japanese-Chinese cross-border spouses are constructed upon ideas of proximity, similarity, and familiarity. She also redirects our attention to the often overlooked group of unmarried persons. Given the enduring social importance of marriage in both Japan and China, men and women who have passed the prime marriage age but are still unmarried are often stigmatized. To escape such stigmatization, they turn to the international marriage market to look for a spouse, or, in Yamaura's words, to “marry off”—to marry for the sake of no longer being single (p. 115). By juxtaposing married and unmarried persons in both the local and transnational contexts, Yamaura implies that there is a hierarchy of married and marriageable persons in both societies: men and women who have a local spouse, those who failed to get a partner locally but managed to find one in the international marriage market, followed by those who remain unmarried and are still struggling to find a spouse even in the international marriage market. Successful or not, attempts to engage in cross-border matchmaking to look for a spouse signify the participants’ tactical agency of avoiding transgressing local norms related to marriage. Although the participants form marriages through nontypical means (i.e., commercial matchmaking), they are paradoxically reaffirming the very local norms. While it is widely assumed that women are victims of the patriarchal marriage system, Yamaura reveals that men might also be oppressed by the same system (as seen by Japanese men's strenuous efforts to secure wives) and that women are also actively involved in commodifying practices as they engage in cross-border marriages.
The existing literature on cross-border marriages mainly focuses on female marriage migrants and debates whether they are instrumental opportunists who marry for migration, money, and citizenship, or vulnerable victims of international human trafficking. Yamaura's analysis thus adds a much-needed perspective on men's subjectivity and experiences. It also helpfully points out the important role and meaning of marriage in propelling men and women to engage in cross-border matchmaking and the role of state in regulating and constructing ideas of legitimate marriage of cross-border couples.
Yamaura's analysis could have benefited from a more critical engagement with some prominent existing concepts such as migrant precarity, liminality, and intimate citizenship, especially when examining the liminal in-betweenness of women who are trapped between marriage and divorce and moving and staying because of immigration barriers. Such engagement could help readers make sense of how the findings should be understood in relation to the existing literature. A question arises as to how Yamaura's positionality might have influenced the data collection process and interpretation of findings. An expanded methodological discussion on Yamaura's reflexivity would be helpful for students and future ethnographic researchers.
All in all, this book serves as a useful reference for scholars and students studying cross-border marriages and, more broadly, gender, marriage and family, and migration and transnationalism. It also makes a contribution to the growing scholarship on the rising trend of cross-border marriages within Asia.
