The Gender Politics of Women's Internationalism in Japan.

Japan is in the throes of internationalization but what this means, nobody knows. Some say it is Japan's first step to true world status, while others insist it's just nationalism in disguise, yet another model of the world with Japan at the center. What nobody seems to have noticed is that internationalization in Japan is a profoundly gendered process. In the article the author suggests that the space of internationalization may be used by women to cross, both figuratively and literally, national boundaries in a subterranean praxis oppositional to the patriarchal nation-state. Japanese women have a history of intimacy with the West to call on in this contemporary project of defection. A number of women have served as informal bridges between the West and a modernizing Japan, including Tsuda Etsuko during the Meiji era, who used her study abroad experience to find the first institution for higher learning for women in Japan. Japanese female scholars and cultural critics are well aware of women's condition of social inauthenticity.