by Julia Meghan Walton
In November 1896, the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune introduced its readers to Onoto Watanna, a “bright” half-Japanese girl who had been “prevailed upon” by the newspaper’s editors to write a “real” Japanese romance (“A Bright Japanese Girl”). However earnest this debut, Onoto Watanna, the “Japanese authoress,” was merely a persona: behind it lay Winnifred Eaton, a young writer of British-Chinese descent, who crafted this identity to market her work amid rampant anti-Chinese sentiment. “Watanna’s” Japanese-American romance fiction and ethnographic journalism would soon make her an early 20th century literary celebrity: her novels, published almost every year from 1899 to 1916, were significant popular successes, and one of her works, A Japanese Nightingale, became the basis of a Hollywood film. While popular audiences mainly forget her work, scholars, including Amy Ling, Dominika Ferens, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Huining Ouyang, have taken interest in the ways Eaton’s career suggests fluidities within structures of racial identity at the turn of the century in the United States.
Building on previous scholarship, this think-piece approaches Winnifred Eaton’s career from the perspective of “passing,” a strategy in which a person categorized as one race successfully presents as another to access the social, economic, or legal advantages reserved for the latter. “Passing,” theorized most fully in the Black literary tradition, describes “a historically and socially constructed practice shaped . . . by the binary organization of racial discourse,” that is, between Black and white (Wald 2000, 15). Though “passing” is most classically used to describe instances of Black-to-white passing, it is generalizable to other instances of “disguise” on the levels of race and ethnicity (as well as class, gender, and sexuality; see Ginsberg 1996, 3). We can therefore learn a great deal by looking at Eaton’s work through this frame. This think piece argues that Eaton’s strategic “passing” as Japanese did more than secure a market: it enabled what I call civilizational equivalence, a rhetorical frame that, even while trading in Orientalist aesthetics, rendered Asian cultures legible, and crucially comparable, to the West. In this reading, the paratexts that authenticated Watanna’s body and the fictions attached to that body are not incidental—they underpin the civilizational equivalence that Eaton consistently suggests in her work.
The Ambivalence of Passing
What evidence did the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune editors provide in support of the Onoto Watanna’s’s Japanese heritage? For one, a portrait of “Watanna” at the center of the spread provides visual identification, and a set of handwritten characters at the bottom righthand corner—the author’s signature “as she wrote it herself,” according to a caption—verifies that identity as Japanese. Together, these traces of the girl’s body give credence to both the biographical statement and the “clever, original” story printed alongside it. If “passing” depends on convincing others to read one’s body as the race one claims to be, we can see that Eaton’s own body was just as important to creating the fiction of Onoto Watanna as her written words: as the Tribune spread suggests, Watanna’s portrait and signature, supposed traces of her racial identity, were essential to Eaton “passing” into social space as Japanese.
We can turn to theorists of “passing” in the Black literary tradition, such a Gayle Wald, Elaine K. Ginsberg, and Gerard Horne, for a useful lens by which to read Eaton’s ethnically “chameleonic” work, to borrow Amy Ling’s term. Most typically, the term “passing” is used to identify instances when a person categorized as Black under legal codes successfully presented as “white” to access the social, economic, or legal advantages reserved for the latter. Popular novels featuring this kind of “passing plot,” such as James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), attest to the centrality of Black-to-white passing as a social issue in the late 19th as well as 20th centuries. Given that passing subverted fantasies of a pure “color line,” literature and theory taking up the issue describe passing as incredibly vexed. This is because, Gerald Horne writes, passing can be read as “paying obeisance at the altar of ‘whiteness,’” because it enacts a kind of “internal violence” on one’s ancestry, and because it is “hazardous, risky and potentially dangerous to one’s health” due to the threat of discovery (Horne 2006, 8). On the other hand, “passing” also challenges this kind of racial essentialism, because, as Gingsberg writes, “both the process and the discourse of passing interrogate the ontology of identity categories and their construction” (Ginsberg 1996, 4). That is, they expose identity categories such as race as constructed, contingent, and available for performance.
Scholars, such as Ferens and Nguyen, have approached Eaton’s work and decision to pass as Japanese with much the same ambivalence as they have read in the act of passing itself. While recent criticism has sought to recover Eaton, some scholars—for example, Shawn Wong—have compared Eaton unfavorably to her sister Edith, who took on the identifiably Chinese nom de plume Sui Sin Far and authored short stories centered in Chinese communities in San Francisco and Seattle. Juxtaposed with the “good sister” Edith, these scholars cast Winnifred Eaton the “bad sister,” her work tainted by its appeal to Orientalist tropes for commercial gain (see Hattori 1999, 228-229, and Nguyen 2002, 33-60 for discussions of this discourse). Even without knowing this development in the criticism, Eaton herself expressed certain doubts about her career. Eaton herself later wrote in her autobiography, “My success was founded upon a cheap and popular device . . . . Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage” (Eaton 1915, 153-4). While Eaton, too, seems to have felt ambivalences like those involved in Black-to-white passing, Eaton maintained her Japanese persona for the rest of her life, a testament to its credibility and commercial success
But what made “Japaneseness,” rather than whiteness, a desirable object of Eaton’s “passing” performance? While the U.S. public associated “Chinamen” with male labor migration, which precipitated the Chinese Exclusion act, Japan, by contrast, entered the Western imagination via japonisme, a late 19th-century fad for Japanese art and design. Later, following rapid modernization and its 1895 victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan emerged as something more urgent than the producer of fascinating aesthetics—that is, what Grace Lavery calls “the Other Empire,” the only non-Western civilization to challenge Western hegemony on its own terms (Lavery 2019). This created the need to understand Japan and Japanese culture, given Japan’s emerging status as the geopolitical powerhouse of the Eastern hemisphere. Eaton’s writing successfully met this need with quaint romances and journalistic writing about Japanese domestic life.
Passing and/as Equivalence
Eaton’s career undoubtedly responded to a public fascination with Japanese culture using existing Orientalist aesthetics (in the American sense, that is, associated with the Far East, as opposed to what Said theorizes as the European Orientalism of the Near East [see Orientalism 1979, 1]; American Orientalism is commonly identified with writers such as Pierre Loti, Lafcardio Hearn, John Luther Long, and Jack London). However, it would be wrong to conceptualize Watanna as a passive “reflector” of a turn-of-the-century Zeitgeist. Eaton’s writing, authorized through her chameleonic identity as “Watanna,” also performed interesting ideological work. Namely, in an era of pervasive discourses of civilizational hierarchy, “civilizational equivalence” frequently appears as a thematic in her writing. We can notice, for example, that for Eaton, the flattening effects of Orientalist aesthetics may have contained a certain productive kernel: while the U.S. popular imagination valorized Japan over China, American Orientalism suggested the likeness of Chineseness and Japaneseness under a shared aesthetic and moral order. We might read this suggestion, for example, in Eaton’s Chinese‑Japanese Cookbook (1914), co‑authored with her sister Sara Bosse. The preface to the collection presents Chinese and Japanese cuisines as of a similar family kind, inviting the reader to forgo “repugnance” and experience these cuisines’ equally “delectable” qualities (Eaton 1914, 1).
More consequentially for American readers, Eaton’s work most often reflects another equivalence, that between “Japan” and “the West.” We might read this impulse within Eaton’s popular novels, such as Miss Numé of Japan (1988), A Japanese Nightingale (1901), and The Wooing of Wisteria (1902), which depict romances between white American men and Japanese women. Through, interestingly, the tropes of Orientalist hyper-femininity, Eaton’s novels make the implicit case for Japanese women’s appropriateness, even superiority, as women, making them coherent subjects of interest, affection, and understanding for their male Western lovers—and Western readers more broadly. Further, in her ethnographic journalism and domestic sketches, Eaton proposes cultural parallels that insist on comparability of values, affections, and forms of modern life. For instance, Eaton rhetorically equates Japanese and American attitudes toward Christmas and New Year celebrations (“An Oriental Holiday” 1898, 12-13).
Eaton’s writing about Japanese women constituted one important avenue through which she critiqued Western anti-Asian attitudes. As her “passing” career took off, Watanna wrote frequently about Japanese women, arguing against stereotypes casting them as victims of Japanese patriarchy. For example, in her article “The Japanese Woman: Not a Slave, but the Autocrat and Idol of the Home” (1903), Eaton argues that Japanese wives are treated with “consideration and respect,” recoding domesticity as a form of public spirit and modern virtue (Eaton 1903). This kind of defense, while suspicious to modern readers, interestingly engages a discourse called the “standard of civilization”—the assumption that civilizations could be organized hierarchically as more or less “advanced,” and which positioned women’s social status, among other things, as a measure of this advancement—pervasive around the turn of the century. In other words, by elevating Japanese womanhood, Eaton performs a civilizational claim for parity. Illustrations that accompanied Eaton’s fiction often reinforced this point by centering her Japanese heroines as her stories’ ethical and affective focus, normatively feminine yet also charmingly modern.
Conclusion
Eaton’s performance undeniably depended on Orientalizing aesthetics, yet many discussions of Eaton’s work obscure the historical stakes of the work she produced while “passing.” Eaton’s passing-as-Japanese not only exposes how racial “performance” could operate outside the Black/white racial binary at the turn of the century. By repeatedly tying Japan and the West within a shared civilizational frame, as I have argued, Eaton also proposed that readers imagine equivalence where they might have presumed hierarchy: the photographic accompaniments and signatures that frequently accompanied her work posed Eaton herself as symbol, cipher, and lynchpin for this work, making Japaneseness visible in Westernness and vice versa. This places Eaton’s work in conversation with mid-century American studies, expanding the archive of liberal equivalence work associated with postwar U.S.–Japan alignment.
For the field Asian American studies, this dynamic in Easton’s work begs certain shifts in method that address the recurring problem of reaching beyond invocations and critiques of “authenticity.” For one, Eaton’s work highlights the role of paratexts as important site of racial meaning; attention to portraits, signatures, captions, imprints, and publicity materials stands to provide new insights into race relations in terms of its textual infrastructures. Further, Eaton’s oeuvre begs us to ask of other texts in the Asian American archive: what work of comparability does a text (and its paratexts) perform, and with what effects? In Eaton’s case, this reframes our attention not toward identity, but toward problems of comparative racial and civilizational formation—that is, of the ways in which “Westernness,” “Americanness,” “Asianness,” and “Japaneseness” were imagined in conversation with each other. In doing so, Eaton’s work urges us to approach Asian American literature not as a record of identity expression, but as a site where these formations, transpacific in scope, are actively engineered, sustained, and reimagined.
Julia Meghan Walton is a PhD Candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her research interests include Japanese women authors, 20th and 21st century Japanese American literature, and gender and sexuality studies.
Edited by Eleanor Eriko Tsuchiya Lenoe.
Featured Image: “Onoto Watanna,” via Wikimedia Commons.
