Paper short abstract:

In the last years,the traditional presence of Japanese business expatriates in Barcelona has given way to a new kind of migrant (individual, entrepreneurial, free) who is leading a change in their growing visibility as a community and in the discussion of how Japanese culture is represented in Spain

Paper long abstract:

Despite its small number, the community of Japanese residents in Barcelona is the largest in Spain, and it has traditionally linked to business expatriates and highly qualified workers sent by Japanese companies to their production plants in Catalonia. This has made them as a temporary community, almost self-sufficient (real estate market, consumption, education, leisure, social life) and highly disconnected from the rest of Catalan society. However, the decline of Japanese companies in Spain since the mid-2000s, together with the new models of global mobility and the construction of more open societies, has implied a radical change in the configuration of the Japanese community in Barcelona, and a new kind of migrants has appeared in the last decade. This is an immigration we still know very little about, which follows its own individual patterns, mostly driven by a personal project, life plan or artistic or intellectual endeavour, and that seeks to refocus a career that enables them to live a new life abroad. This context frames a new phenomenon: the growing visibility of the Japanese presence in Barcelona in cultural festivals and public celebrations, that has happened simultaneously to the formulation of the city as an intercultural reality in the political discourse of the Barcelona's City Council. Drawing on ethnographic data from my research with this new group of Japanese residents, the paper analyses the complex overlapping of discourses and practices that has flourished around the celebration of the 'Matsuri Barcelona' festival –especially in the resignified social context of the ‘new normal’ during the pandemic of the Covid19– in a constant struggle between local-brokers and Japanese residents, and manga-anime fairs and traditional cultural festivals, in which the idea of ‘cultural appropriation' has become key in the discussion of who is authorized to legitimately represent Japanese culture.