Yellow Cab (stereotype) - Controversies

Controversies

There was coverage of the "yellow cab" phenomenon as early as 1987, but public attention to it received a major boost from Shōko Ieda's 1991 book Yellow Cab, which featured interviews with and reporting on young Japanese women overseas. (Her research assistant George Sarratt later denounced major portions of the book as fraudulent.) Television broadcasts on the phenomenon especially focused on relations between black men and Japanese women, and the stereotypically perceived danger of being infected with AIDS; Japan's TV Asahi aired a segment on the subject in 1992 which included several staged scenes; Tokyo Broadcasting System followed up with a 90-minute documentary in 1993.

The use of the term by Japanese men has been described as "reverse orientalism". However, the controversy itself was used by women's media to engage in critique of Japanese male behaviours; such critique was often characterised by "relentless denigration" of Japanese men, as in Makiko Iizuka's 1993 book, The Guys who Can't Even Hitch a Ride on a Cab. In contrast, women labelled as "yellow cabs" have also been known to reappropriate the term as a mark of pride; in particular, Amy Yamada is "notorious" for using her work to "flaunt" her image as a "yellow cab", a trend that was apparent in her work even before the emergence of the "yellow cab" stereotype, as in her 1985 book Bedtime Eyes, which won that year's Bungei Prize. Japanese hip hop artist Hime, the self-described voice of the "Japanese doll", also turns the stereotype on its head, stating that being a "yellow cab" means that the woman is in the "driver's seat".

In response to the negative media coverage, Japanese female professionals in the New York City area organised the "Group to think about yellow cabs" (イエローキャブを考える会, Ierō Kyabu wo Kangaeru Kai?); they asserted that the image of Japanese women overseas had been damaged by the media and that the phenomenon was nowhere near as widespread as the media coverage attempted to portray it to be, and sought to combat the negative coverage. The protest group also questioned whether the term was truly widespread in the United States, as the documentaries claimed; one telephone survey of 200 people they conducted in the New York area did not find a single individual familiar with the use of the term "yellow cab" in this sense.

The group continued to be active until late 1993; they were later criticised for their "legacy of denial and disavowal of the possibility of Japanese women's racialized desire for foreign men". Scholars studying their activities described their attempts to deny or downplay the phenomenon as an "image battle", and one which they lost; women returning to Japan from studying or working overseas often reported that they suffered insulting insinuations about their sexual behaviour. The reporting on the phenomenon in Japanese media was generally supplanted in the mid-1990s by a "new panic" regarding women's sexuality, specifically the enjo kōsai (compensated dating) phenomenon.