GRSJ224/Medicalization of Whiteness Japan

Biomedicalization of Whiteness

European colonial medicine played a central role in the conceptualization of the dark skin tones of colonized people as signs of racial degeneration from the late 17th century until the end of the colonial era, in the early 20th century (Mire, 2014, p, 119) - Repeated attempts to make direct links between climate difference and skin color - Attempts to link dark skin tones with disease and racial degeneration - European colonial medicine makes causal links between tropical climate and racial degeneration, disease and decline (Mire, 2014, p. 119) White was not only attractive, it was healthy – “European corporeal health and moral superiority came to be discursively produced, normalized, and transmitted” (Mire, 2014, p. 120)

Anti-aging and whitening often go hand in hand – part of a “do-it-yourself therapy.” Mire (2014) connects this trend with other historical trends such as “tropical medicine, racial hygiene, their corollary colonial commodity culture” – a result of real and imagined fears and anxieties pertaining to so-called environmentally caused diseases, degeneration and decline (p. 123) This process appeals to different women in different ways: - Locality and modernity - When marketing to Asian women, advertising products often stress both traditional Asian aesthetic preferences for light skin alongside an investment in deracialized universal beauty - Bollywood films and advertisement - Contemporary concern with pigmentation transcends colonial boundaries of race, class, and gender, since now, whites and non-whites can equally suffer from “pigmentation problems” – this is overwhelmingly a women’s problem (Mire, 2014, p. 124) -

Japanese Ads

“The sensation of whiteness (shiro) on your skin” (Helena Rubinstein) The best shortcut to whiteness (Givenchy) Let’s cultivate whiteness, every day (Clinique) What I have touched is a drop of white science (Yves Saint-Laurent) Double action, for the skin of the future which goes beyond whiteness (Dior) Clarins has discovered the white skin (Clarins) A new experience of whiteness (Carita) Whiteness – a widely observed phenomenon in present-day Japan (Ashikari, 2005, p. 75) Whiteness is seen as good, desirable and a compliment – darkness is an insult – that one should say “your skin is dark” to someone’ face is unacceptable (Ashikari, 2005, p. 77) Even though beauty is beauty – we can recognize it no matter what race, black models could not be used in Japan – it is impossible for people to judge a model independently of her race (Ashikari, 2005, p. 83)

“It is not in ‘nature’ that skin colour becomes an important basis for racial or any other social categories in contemporary Japan” – only skin color has become racialized (Ashikari, 2005, p. 84)

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Ashikari, M. (2005). Cultivating Japanese whiteness: The ‘Whitening’ cosmetics boom and the Japanese identity. Journal of Material Culture, 10(1), 73-91. Mire, A. (2014). ‘Skin Trade’: Genealogy of anti-ageing: ‘Whiteness therapy’ in colonial medicine. Medicine Studies, 4(1), 119-129).