is a disparaging term for Japanese women who travel overseas or to foreign enclaves in Japan seeking to meet foreign men. The term combines the use of "yellow", a color/racial classification category for people of East Asian origin, and the image of a yellow cab which can be "ridden at any time". The term was spread to Japan by Shōko Ieda's 1991 book Yellow Cab, and was quickly appropriated by the Japanese media as a way of sensationalizing and censuring the women's behaviour. Later, Yellow Cab was exposed as a fraud, and Japanese media reports were criticized. Social context Women described as "yellow cabs" can often be observed in so-called "border regions" consisting of highly transient, ethnically and culturally mixed populations. One scholar studying the "yellow cab" phenomenon listed the Roppongi district of Tokyo, United States Forces Japan bases in locations such as Yokosuka, Yokota, Misawa, Iwakuni, Sasebo, and Okinawa as possible locations in Japan, and Hawaii, New York City, and the West Coast in the United States. Sources disagree as to the question of power in these relationships. One argument analyses the phenomenon in terms of consumer patterns: the women are in the financially superior position due to the strength of the Japanese yen and their own disposable income, and are using their power to purchase sex; one such woman even described her foreign boyfriends as "pets". The opposing argument puts the phenomenon in the context of a larger "romanticization and eroticization" of the West and specifically of English speakers by Japanese women, and asserts that it is actually the Western men in such relationships who have power. However, the phenomenon is not limited to the West; some women also seek out local tour guides in Bali and Thailand as "holiday lovers". Women engaged in these activities sometimes assert that it is no more than a female reflection of the much larger phenomenon of Japanese men's sex tours to foreign countries; some scholars agree with this self-assessment, bluntly referring to such women as "female sex tourists". In terms of the women and their relation to Japanese society, some authors describe the women's taking-on of foreign partners, especially men of African descent, as "socially, economically, and politically liberating" and a threat to Japanese men; others point out that the pursuit of foreign men was neither a permanent rejection of Japanese patriarchy nor of Japanese men themselves, and that many women