Yellow Cab (stereotype)
Yellow cab (イエローキャブ, Ierō Kyabu?) is a term referring to an ethnic stereotype of Japanese women, and by extension other Asians, suggesting that they are sexually available to foreign men. The term combines the use of "yellow" to refer to Asians and the image of a yellow taxicab which can be "ridden at any time." It specifically refers to wealthy women who travel overseas or to foreign enclaves in Japan seeking to meet foreign men. The term is alleged to have been coined by English-speaking foreigners who encountered such women in the late 1980s, but was quickly appropriated by the Japanese media as a way of sensationalizing and censuring the women's behaviour. The Japanese term is a gairaigo (i.e., transliterated from English).
Read more about Yellow Cab (stereotype): Social Context, Controversies
Famous quotes containing the words yellow and/or cab:
“They are very proper forest houses, the stems of the trees collected together and piled up around a man to keep out wind and rain,—made of living green logs, hanging with moss and lichen, and with the curls and fringes of the yellow birch bark, and dripping with resin, fresh and moist, and redolent of swampy odors, with that sort of vigor and perennialness even about them that toadstools suggest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Pockets: What color is a giraffe?
Dallas: Well, mostly yellow.
Pockets: And what’s the color of a New York taxi cab?
Dallas: Mostly yellow.
Pockets: I drove a cab in Brooklyn. I just pretend it’s rush hour in Flatbush and in I go.”
—Leigh Brackett (1915–1978)