Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the ways in which male Vietnamese migrants in contemporary Japan labor to negotiate their sexualities and masculinities during and after migration, and thereby contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of labor migrants' lived experiences.

Paper long abstract:

Despite Japan's reputation as a country with low-to-no immigration, the number of labor migrants in the country has been rapidly increasing within the last decade. While migrants' economic and labor practices in contemporary Japan have constituted a relatively wide spectrum of both academic and non-academic interests, the sexual and gender dimensions of migration have attracted less attention. In other words: many studies tend to look into facets that are easily observed and measured, but not aspects that are subjectively and deeply felt in migrants' everyday lives such as sexualities and gender identities.

This paper aims to provide a more nuanced picture of the experiences of labor migrants in Japan by investigating the ways in which they negotiate their sexualities and gender identities throughout the course of migration. Drawing on life-history interviews with Vietnamese male migrants in Japan and returned migrants in Vietnam, the paper seeks to identify multi-level social structures and institutions in both host and home societies that condition migrants' negotiations of sexual and masculine practices and identities. Such negotiations are indeed a kind of additional labor curtailed by a political economy of migration, in which notions of sexualities and genders, as well as hierarchies of race and class could have significant influences. The paper also takes into account the experiences of returned migrants and shows how migration to Japan could be utilized as a strategy to cultivate capitals and increase migrants' social positions and employability in the home country. By paying attention to the sexual, gendered and temporal dimensions of migration, this paper suggests a more comprehensive approach to the understandings of labor migrants' experiences, the (trans)formation of migrants' identities and senses of belonging, as well as the effects that migration could have in both host and home countries.