2 - In the Antlion’s Pit

Summary

In the early twentieth century, Chinese who migrated to Japan as petty traders, especially peddlers from Fuqing, in Fujian Province, often cohabited with or formally married Japanese women, and in many instances returned to their native places accompanied by their Japanese wives and Sino-Japanese children. As lurid stories began to circulate of women's hardships in their new locations, the Japanese government in the 1920s and 1930s implemented operations to "rescue" these "abducted" women, thus imposing on them a narrative that deprived them of agency, further reduced Chinese migrants to the image of criminal invaders of Japanese territory, and posited the Japanese state as the patriarchal protector of national honor against a rapacious China. Rescue operations, however, were confounded not only by local resistance, Chinese civil war, and the topography of Fujian's coastal hinterland, but also by the responses of women whose more nuanced comprehensions of their situations often challenged the official narratives. Chapter 2 takes up the heretofore unexamined history of this cross-border tug-of-war.