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- Convenor:
-
Susanne Klien
(Hokkaido University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Gordon Mathews
(The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
- Stream:
- Anthropology and Sociology
- Location:
- Bloco 1, Piso 1, Sala 1.11
- Sessions:
- Thursday 31 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel explores recent trends in Japanese youth to migrate to remote rural areas or foreign countries in their quest for a personally fulfilling life. Panel presenters will discuss their respective ethnographic findings from a broad range of sites in and beyond Japan.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores recent trends in Japanese youth to migrate to remote rural areas or foreign countries in their quest for a personally fulfilling life. Mobility can be understood as a way of making sense of and relating to the world - this goes for mobile individuals who reorient themselves career-wise as a way of regaining meaning in life as well as for short-term tourists, mid-term volunteers seeking gratification by making a social contribution or start-up entrepreneurs on remote islands. The panel will bring together scholars from the US and Japan who will discuss individuals who have relocated to Northeast Japan since the Great East Japan Earthquake, Japanese migrants in the United States who seek balance and meaning through the engagement in alternative healing practices and lifestyle migrants who relocate to remote rural areas in their attempts to pursue lives that enhance their career prospects and contribute to their overall life satisfaction.
The focus of the panel is on the process of identity negotiation: Individuals often narrate that they have relocated to 're-establish themselves' by pursuing projects they consider meaningful; yet interviewees tend to refer to their previous lives, places of living, lifestyles and former jobs. This panel draws on the notion of 'lifestyle mobilities' (Cohen, Duncan and Thulemark 2013) that focus on the blurred boundaries between travel, leisure and migration and are exemplary of neither 'here' nor 'there' (White and White 2004) as migrants may be geographically distant from friends and family, thus being in a liminal stateWe aim to ethnographically explore individual narratives about migrants' present transregional/transnational lifestyles that are characterized by collapsing binaries of work and leisure, multiple moorings with regard to place and identity and a high extent of satisfaction with regard to life quality, yet also make evident that they struggle with considerable insecurity and precariousness. Questions at the core of this panel are mobility as a means of overcoming a sense of missing meaning and precarity that exceeds the economical and negotiations of identity by individuals that engage in mobility that is not merely geographical.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 31 August, 2017, -Susanne Klien (Hokkaido University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the narratives of individuals who choose to move to remote rural areas as part of their professional careers. I ethnographically examine how individuals negotiate lifestyles between multiple moorings with regard to place and identity and collapsing binaries of work and leisure.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the narratives of mid-career individuals who choose to move to remote rural areas as part of their professional careers. Previously, urban-to-rural migration was usually associated with processes of dropping out and slowing down of counterurbanizers. However, the Lehman Shock, the Great East Japan Earthquake and increasing diversification of lifestyles in post-growth Japan have resulted in mobility becoming a more acceptable option for professionals from a wide range of backgrounds. I discuss trajectories of migrants from urban areas who have relocated to remote rural areas in order to pursue their careers and lifestyles in ways they could not in their previous urban lives. Many respondents report high satisfaction with their present lives both socially as well as professionally, yet also talk about the pressure to achieve their goals and a sense of insecurity as they have no concrete mid or long term plans, but tend to envisage themselves in a place different from their present place of residence. I argue that ethnographic data obtained in Shimane Prefecture in September and November 2016 indicates a shift in post-growth Japan to mobility as an ingrained way of life for many professionals, both within Japan as well as from Japan abroad. I ethnographically analyze how this shift to mobility that was motivated by both career and lifestyle factors affects individuals' values, mindsets and social networks and how individuals negotiate lifestyles between multiple moorings with regard to place and identity and collapsing binaries of work and leisure.
Flavia Fulco (Tohoku University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes narratives of people who have relocated to Northeast Japan after the 2011 The Great East Earthquake and Tsunami. This area represents an attraction for people that seek to "reinvent" their life in a more personally satisfying way by embracing a more precarious lifestyle.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes the narratives of people who have relocated to Northeast Japan over the last five years. In 2011 The Great East Earthquake and Tsunami hit three Japanese Prefectures (Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate), leaving 400 km of coastline completely destroyed.
While many residents left their hometowns in the aftermath of the disaster, looking for more stable realities in different places, new migrants are gradually moving to the disaster areas. Given the complex nature of this phenomenon, it is still difficult to analyze it through the figures. In fact, people who relocate don't usually do it from one day to another, neither they intend to move permanently from the beginning. Therefore, most of them are still registered in the place where they were living before.
The relation between tourism and migration (Cohen, Duncan and Thulemark 2013) is complicated in this case by the volunteering experience. Usually people that relocate to these areas, did not initially visit as tourists, but they started by knowing these areas while working on some kind of volunteer activity. It is often through this activity that they develop a closer relation with locals and eventually decide to extend these trips. Through the act of helping someone, people involved in this phenomenon seek to give a new meaning to their life experience while participating in the recovery process of towns that need, in most cases, to be rebuilt almost completely.
In this study, the decision to move to a rural area to achieve a more fulfilling lifestyle is related to the need of taking part in a more socially involving practice of recovery and community rebuilding. Before the disaster, the region of Tohoku was facing depopulation and lacking opportunities, especially for younger generations. Hence, these areas are not perceived just as towns to rebuild as they were, but as opportunities to reverse the trend of rural decline. This effort to buck the trend represents an attraction for people from other areas of Japan that in some cases left full-time jobs to embrace a more precarious lifestyle, seeking to "reinvent" their life in a more personally satisfying way.
Silke Werth (University of California Santa Barbara)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the layers of meaning of "mobility" through the narratives of Japanese who moved to the US to redirect their lifecourse. For them mobility becomes the core of life and livelihood as they study physical therapy to align self-fulfillment and gainful work through helping others.
Paper long abstract:
Bodies and minds are intrinsically intertwined and for many moving one's body becomes symbolic for moving on in life, be it through travel, migration or physical exercise. In this paper I explore the different layers of meanings of "mobility and movement" through the narratives of two Japanese in their mid-thirties who migrated to the United States to redirect their life courses by mastering movement-based alternative forms of healing. Mobility for them thus goes beyond changing their address; it becomes the essence of their life and livelihoods. The alternative medicine practice of choice bases on "structural integration," and by attempting to realign the bodies and minds of their patients to ease discomfort, they try to realign and re-embody their own priorities, livelihoods and community. For them and in the skills they learn, healing starts by journeying back to uncover potential sources of imbalance, which adds another layer and direction of movement. Helping others is not just affective labor, but becomes a way to help themselves and to push back against isolation and lack of creative agency they had felt in their previous roles in their home society. It is also a form to overcome a sense of missing meaning and precarity that is not merely economical. Engaging in the discussions of culture and self from the standpoint of embodiment, this paper explores what drives these Japanese in their thirties to leave their secure employment at home to venture into insecurity of unknown territories, languages and practices they had never experienced first hand. By elaborating on the connections between self-fulfillment and gainful employment through the lens of care, this paper thus offers a compelling example why it is important to think beyond the visible in discussions of global and local movement of people, ideas and practices.