Not Your Yellow Fantasy

Deconstructing the Legacy of Asian Fetishization

Giboom Park

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781636762050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The concepts of yellow feve r and racial fetishization are often considered topics of conversation many individuals do not care about or actively avoid. Yet their influence on how we interact with our world is more profound than we realize.

In Not Your Yellow Fantasy, Giboom Park examines how individuals are consciously and unconsciously perpetuating the spread and continuous influence of racial stereotypes toward Asian Americans in romantic and sexual relationships. While reflecting on the impact of yellow fever on her own life, Park helps us better understand how we are all impacted by the detrimental effects of racial fetishization.

This book explores:

* How and why Asian women came to be perceived as hyper-sexual, mysterious or submissive and docile beings.

* The influence of Asian fetishization and the derogatory "Yellow Fever" fetish on pornography, trafficking, and dating platforms.

* The consequential oppression of women's rights and BIPOC communities as a result of Asian fetishization.

From the persistence of mail-order brides and white supremacy to sex trafficking, the topic of Asian fetishization can no longer be ignored. Now is the time to address its existence and work toward a world of inclusion and equality.

CHAPTER 6

DESIRE AND FANTASY

On the morning of November 11, 2000, three Japanese girls waited eagerly at their local bus stop in Spokane, Washington, trying to stay warm in the bitter cold. They were students from a local Japanese school attempting to go downtown, wanting to explore the country they had only stepped foot in around two months ago.

Shivering in the freezing nine-degree weather, they desperately waited for the next bus when a smiling woman in her forties stopped by them in her warm, cozy Subaru. She charmingly offered to give them a ride, using the fact they had just missed their bus as a kind, persuasive argument. The girls, tired of the cold and trusting of the woman, hopped in.

The woman quickly picked up two men that were waiting in near proximity. In the span of seconds, they handcuffed and blindfolded the three students, taking them to a house in Spokane Valley. One of the students was released along the way by the abductors for an unknown reason, while the other two were taken to the basement of a house.

Thus began what Spokane Police Chief Roger Bragdon described at the time as “one of the most despicable crimes” he had ever dealt with—an insidious crime that shocked the city.

Repeatedly raped, assaulted, and filmed, over the next seven hours, by Dailey and “Eddie” Ball, two offenders who were respectively a former carpenter who had been investigated but not charged on sexual offenses and a leader in a sadomasochist sex club in the area. The two men threatened these girls if they were to tell anyone what had happened, these “shameful” videotapes would be sent to the fathers of the girls.

The girls were later returned to the entrance of their Mukogawa campus. The perpetrators were convinced that these girls would be too ashamed to report what had happened, making them believe what had happened to be the perfect crime. They trusted these girls to remain silent, a trust eventually broken when the police received an anonymous tip for what had happened.

Police later arrested the trio, including Vickery, the female driver who was a store clerk that sold pornography and sexual aids, after receiving this anonymous tip online. The assailants revealed they had targeted specifically Japanese women because they believed they would be too ashamed to report it. “Eddie” was reported to be fascinated with Japanese bondage videos, specifically targeting these girls because he believed them to be more submissive and less likely to report their assaults.

The assault left the survivors “horribly traumatized,” said Takaoka, the executive vice president of Mukogawa. They were afraid of the idea these videotapes would be delivered to their parents like the assailants had promised, prompting one to even express “a wish to die.”228

Sexualization in Mature Media

This now-almost-forgotten crime that left these survivors traumatized two decades ago, is simply one of many crimes that lay in the intersections of Asian fetishization, sexual violence, and elements of sexualization in media.

The offenders developed this overwhelming fantasy of Japanese women, its core built at the elements they saw in bondage videos, and the perception that these girls could be taken advantage of through manipulating their sense of shame. This fetish they had developed from their twisted moral compass became a projection upon innocent girls, disgustingly placing hurt and unwarranted cruelty upon them. Unfortunately, the narrative these criminals so strongly believed to be true of not only Japanese women, but of Asian women as a whole, still holds true in the way Asian women are sexualized in adult media today.

---

228 Patrick-John Garmoe, “Rapists Place Losing Bet on Victims’ Silence,” The Courier, June 4, 2011.

Artwork by Abby Deschenes

One of the most popular forms of adult media that portray this type of fetishization is pornography. One of the most popular fetishes on pornography sites is of Asian women, with a large majority of the videos of them playing passive and submissive eager-to-please roles.

In the web series They’re All So Beautiful, filmmaker Lum interviews people about “yellow fever,” author Sheridan Prasso shares when she was researching for her book, The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient, she found of all fetish porn sites, Asian women fetishes exceeded these sites by far.

According to Pornhub’s data in 2019, one of the most popular pornography websites in the world, four...