From Manchukuo to Marriage: Localizing Contemporary Cross-Border Marriages between Japan and Northeast China

This essay examines Japanese-Chinese arranged cross-border marriages and investigates the ways in which participants legitimate and render such marriages comprehensible in light of national and local histories. Marriageability in this context is produced not through conceptions of exotic difference but instead distinct discourses of familiarity. On the one hand, Chinese participants tactically narrate blood ties (xueyuan guanxi ????) to interpret current marriage migration as following relational bonds and thus a natural phenomenon. On the other hand, Japanese participants stress Chinese women's familiarity (shinkin kan ???) with Japan, a familiarity that is claimed to stem from positive historical ties forged by colonialism, and thus effaces Japanese wartime culpability. In short, multiple layered notions of familiarity, shaped by the colonial legacy in East Asia, are at work in rendering these transnational intimate relations possible.