Comments on: Japanese women on the move

By: Youna Kim

Youna Kim — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:09:56 +0000

Some of your questions/comments are addressed in my book (2011), Chapter 5 and Chapter 7.
Often, existing studies have noted a general phenomenon that many migrants of older generations tend to look back with nostalgia to their national homes and live with little social interaction with the broader communities of their host society and with less developed skills in the language of their host culture; therefore, as both a cause and a consequence, their long-distance diasporic nationalism is more likely to be encouraged, promoted and sustained via the transnational ethnic media, various genres and narratives in everyday life. However, relatively less is known and visible about younger generations; the ways in which today’s digital migrants, much more educated and skilled knowledge diasporas or hyper-mobile transnationals, may also create and sustain regular and purposeful networks that can possibly generate, and be intimately linked to, forms of self-narration for the formation of daily national identity and diasporic nationalism in both physical and virtual modalities.
Paradoxically, as bodies are dis-embedded from one nation and move to another, physically confronting cultural difference and struggling for representational space, ideas of distinctiveness of a particular culture and ethnically distinct places become even more salient and important, or even strategic, with no less a powerful tendency towards cultural differentiation. What might unexpectedly be happening in such transnational encounters is a reactionary assertion of national identity via the development of ethnic particularism, or mythical essentialism underpinned by historically embodied difference and uniqueness with some degree of power to determine that difference to distinguish themselves from dominant ethnic groups and defend their own fragile boundaries.

By: Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:50:49 +0000

Thanks, Youna, for your post and congratulations on your book! It would be interesting to hear what your participants have to say about cosmpolitanism a few years down the track. I think your findings not only speak to identity dilemmas of Japanese women in the UK but also to what it means to be a contemporary young adult. One thing that struck me about the participants on Japanese on the Move was the fact that there were quite clear generational differences: for our older participants and those with families of their own, identity wasn't much of an issue. I wonder whether that has to do with life stage or the length of stay abroad or the prevailing zeitgeist when they left their home country or arrived in their new one? I suppose we need more longitudinal and cross-sectional research to find out. Have you considered going back to your interviewees and see what has become of them? Whether they feel more 'settled' or less shallow-cosmpolitan now?

By: Khan

Khan — Sat, 12 May 2012 06:43:26 +0000

Kawaa chala hans ki chaal
Apni chaaal bhi bhool giya
(Anonymous proverb in Hindi/Urdu, no date, probably centuries old)
My translation: ‘The crow tried to fly like swan
In this act of imitation, he forgot his own way of flying’

Fantastic, a very thought provoking post indeed. Thanks very much Professor Youna for sharing your study and many congratulations for your latest publication. By quoting the above anonymous proverb, I want to contextualize my comment/ reflection on ‘thin cosmopolitan’ spaces available to Japanese female Diaspora identity in western context as clearly visible in their ‘language of paradox’. I think interactional spaces and popular perceptions have strong link with the media as well as the socio-economic positions actors occupy in their new context.
Being an Asian studying in west, I came across the media constructed stereotype about Muslims and in particular Pakistani Muslim. Often I and my interlocutors negotiate new positions for us. And in the process of negotiation, I find the spaces for new subjectivities are interlaced with many reified presumptions, notion and ideas on both the sides. I agree with you that the categories are considerably fixed and they do create dilemmas but I take as challenge to create new possibilities by challenging these assumptions unlike the crow!
Khan