Personal Statement

Throughout my experience of studying at two women’s colleges both in Japan and America and working in the business field in Japan, I became intrigued by the fact that many women seemed to simultaneously hold two opposite images of modern and traditional women. I discovered that despite greater numbers of Japanese women in the workplace, many of them believe that these jobs are the best way to enter into a rewarding and financially stable marriage. Although many women no longer consider themselves as property of men, the traditional image of a submissive woman still remains within both men and women. I have seen many women struggling with how to deal with these traditional images and their own identity.

For my research, I am especially interested in how biased images of “femininity” were created in modern American society through media and culture. I would like to focus on representation of wedding ceremony and explore a process of transformation of images from princesses to brides looking at various women’s life stages.

As an MA student of American Studies at Doshisha University, Japan and Smith College, Massachusetts, I studied about representation of Jewish identities in Broadway Musicals from the 1940s to 1960s. I learned how Jewish Americans represented themselves in Broadway musicals as both assimilated and non-assimilated Americans. Their expression of “Jewishness” gradually changed within the atmosphere of society from the 1940s to 1960s. I analyzed Oklahoma and South Pacific as 1940s musicals, and Westside Story and Fiddler on the Roof as 1960s musicals. In the earlier shows, Jewishness was more invisible. Within the context of World War II, Jewish immigrants emphasized their whiteness and tried to show their assimilation as “Americans”. In contrast, in the 1960s musicals, they celebrated their Jewishness. The atmosphere of the civil rights movement and their confidence in their identity as “Americans” encouraged them to embrace and dramatize Jewishness on stage.

After I receiving my MA, I started working at an IT consulting company in Tokyo, Japan and Munich, Germany. Although my final goal is to become a teacher and researcher in higher education, I wanted to experience working in the business sector before entirely devoting myself to the academic world. I believe my experience working in both academic and business fields prepares me to be an effective educator, especially since many of my future students will themselves go into business fields after they graduate.

What my hope to achieve by participating in this course is learning methodology of public history. Although I see myself as a historian, I am very interested in interdisciplinary approach for my research. Since my research interests are wedding culture in gender perspective, I need to analyze a lot of objects in material culture which are like wedding dresses, princess toys, museums and theme parks. From this course, I am looking forward to learn how objects and consumer culture speak to American society and create gender identity.