Oxford School of Global and Area Studies

How do the Japanese men and Chinese women who participate in cross-border matchmaking—individuals whose only interaction is often just one brief meeting—come to see one another as potential marriage partners? Motivated by this question, Marriage and Marriageability draws upon multi-sited ethnography in Japan and northeast China, tracing the practices of Sino-Japanese matchmaking from transnational marriage agencies in Tokyo to branch offices and language schools in China, from initial meetings to marriage, visa application processes, and beyond to marital life in Japan. Engaging issues of colonial history, local norms, and the very ability to conceive of another or oneself as marriageable, the book rethinks cross-border marriage not only as a form of gendered migration, but also as a set of practices that constructs marriageable partners and imaginable marriages.