VENTURA : Grad Student to Study Barbie Dolls in Japan

Margaret Miller never played with Barbie dolls as a child, but she will be leaving for Japan this month to study the doll’s influence on girls there.

Miller, 28, an anthropology graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, has been awarded a two-year Rotary Club Foundation scholarship to study how beauty concepts develop in Japan.

Miller, a Ventura High School graduate, plans to observe 7-year-old girls playing with the Barbie dolls and a similar Japanese doll, called Licca, that was modeled after Barbie with blue eyes and blond hair.

As part of her study, she also plans to do research on college-age young women and their movie idols to further understand how Japanese beauty ideals are formed.

Miller is receiving her master’s degree in anthropology next month, and her Japanese studies are field work for her doctorate. She got the idea for the research when she was visiting Japan in 1986.

“I was struck by the number of Caucasian women in the media who were blond and blue-eyed,” she said.

“That struck me as very strange in a country of women who don’t look like that.”

The Japanese Licca dolls, she said, not only look like Barbie, but they even have a boyfriend doll named Ken. Despite the doll’s appearance, Japanese girls think of the dolls as Japanese, she said.

Miller, who was born in Ventura, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Scripps College. She began her graduate work at UC Santa Barbara in 1990.

Barbie dolls were not part of Miller’s toy ensemble when she was a child.

She said her father thought the doll was a potentially negative influence and didn’t allow her to play with them.

“I don’t particularly admire Barbie,” she said. “I think she’s pretty vapid.”