Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Muslim migrant women in provincial Japan negotiate aspirations for love, livelihood, and religious life, and how these shape their views of mobility and metropolitan futures within Japan.

Paper long abstract

Muslim migrant women in Japan frequently navigate multiple aspirations related to family formation, economic stability, and a sense of belonging. In regional cities such as Sendai, many women describe daily life as safe, affordable, and socially supportive, yet these conditions do not always align with longer term hopes for partnership, career development, or religious community. Metropolitan areas such as Tokyo and other major urban centers often appear as offering broader possibilities, even as they also carry risks and uncertainties.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in depth interviews, this paper explores how Muslim migrant women living in provincial cities make sense of mobility within Japan. It examines how decisions about whether to stay, move, or remain open to future relocation take shape through everyday considerations of love, livelihood, and religious life. Employment opportunities, marriage prospects, access to halal food and religious spaces all shape how women evaluate provincial and metropolitan settings. In weighing these factors, women often articulate a contrast between the familiarity of provincial life and the promise they associate with metropolitan settings.

By attending to how women talk about staying, moving, and imagining elsewhere, the analysis highlights how aspirations and constraints unfold and shift over time. Rather than treating mobility as a single act of relocation, the paper approaches it as an ongoing process rooted in everyday reasoning and negotiation. It contributes to scholarship on migration, gender, and religion in Japan by shifting attention away from metropolitan centers as default sites of analysis and toward the experiences of Muslim migrant women living in regional contexts. In doing so, it shows how imagined futures shape present decisions, attachments, and senses of belonging within contemporary Japan.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This study examines how furusato (“hometown”) was formed in 1960s–70s Japan through a live national TV show showcasing regional culture and mobilizing residents. It reveals furusato as a social practice created through media, migration, locality, and shared emotion.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how rural Japan came to be articulated as furusato (“hometown”) in the 1960s and 1970s, and analyzes the social relations and community processes through which this representation was collectively produced. While furusato is often understood as a nostalgic cultural trope internal to Japan, this study shifts attention to the institutional and social mechanisms through which it was made visible and emotionally resonant. As a primary source, it focuses on NHK’s live entertainment program Furusato no Uta Matsuri (Hometown Song Festival), broadcast from 1966 to 1974. Each week, well-known announcer Teru Miyata introduced festivals, folk performing arts, and elements of daily cultural life alongside guest singers, drawing nationwide viewership ratings of 30–40 percent. Large groups of residents participated, presenting their communities on a national stage.

The program communicated the vitality of the furusato to audiences who had migrated to cities during Japan’s period of rapid economic growth. At the same time, it staged regional pride before a dispersed national public, giving local actors a rare opportunity for visibility. A defining feature was the sense of unity cultivated among Miyata, performers, singers, and audiences on site—a form of mediated co-presence that complicates assumptions about passive television spectatorship.

With NHK’s cooperation, we analyzed the 35 surviving episodes. We also conducted interviews with Miyata’s secretary and former directors. Furthermore, with the cooperation of Miyata’s family, we examined production materials preserved by his partner, including scripts, interview notes, schedules, venue layouts, municipal publicity documents, local newspaper reports, and correspondence among NHK regional stations, municipalities, preservation societies, residents, migrants, and viewers.

Rather than approaching television as a representational surface, the study adopts a sociological perspective that understands media as a field in which social relations, local identities, and feelings of furusato are produced. By tracing how municipalities, Chambers of Commerce and Industry, preservation groups, and residents sought to shape how their communities would be seen, the paper argues that furusato was not only emotionally imagined, but actively organized and negotiated through media, migration, locality, and collective emotion.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Examining anti-migration sentiment in Japan, this paper traces African migration, Black culture, Hāfu identities, and racism, focusing on media controversies around African migration in Japan.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines anti-migration sentiment in contemporary Japan through the lens of the Black and African communities, situating current debates within a broader historical and cultural context. While Japan is often portrayed as ethnically homogeneous, African and Black migration has played a significant role in challenging dominant narratives of national identity and belonging, especially in the context of race. By examining the history of African migration to Japan, this paper highlights how global labour flows, education, and transnational networks have shaped Black presence in Japan, both physically and symbolically.

The paper also investigates the visibility of Black and African culture in Japan, including music, fashion, and everyday cultural exchange, and how these forms of visibility intersect with experiences of racism and exclusion. Particular attention is paid to the concept of Hāfu (half-Japanese), exploring how mixed-race identities complicate rigid understandings of “Japaneseness” and expose racial hierarchies embedded within society. Through this lens, the paper examines how Black hafu individuals navigate social belonging.

A central component of the analysis is a case study of media turmoil surrounding African hometowns in Japan.

Overall, this paper argues that anti-migration sentiment in Japan cannot be fully understood without addressing race and the lived experiences of Black and African communities. By foregrounding African migration, Black cultural presence, and Hāfu identities, the study contributes to Japanese studies, migration studies, and critical race scholarship by challenging myths of homogeneity and highlighting the racialised dimensions of belonging in Japan.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The current study focuses on the hitherto overlooked Israeli diaspora in Japan, and analyses their ambivalent view of Japan as an alternative home, against Japan’s growing ethnic and national diversity and the ongoing instability in their homeland.

Paper long abstract

Once perceived as a mono-ethnic society (単一民族), contemporary Japan is increasingly recognized as a country of immigration (Liu-Farrer, 2020, 2022, 2024; Nurcan, 2025), characterized by growing ethnic diversity. Recent scholarship has examined a broad spectrum of groups—ranging from Brazilian return-migrants to Korean, Turkish, and Filipino enclaves (Ishikawa 2021); from care workers to highly skilled professionals (Hof 2024), and from Syrian refugees to Russian-speakers (Golovina 2023, 2025) and “white Europeans” (Debnár 2023). These studies illuminate the internal dynamics of these communities, their interactions with Japanese society, and their intergroup relations. Building on this discourse, the current paper explores the hitherto overlooked Israeli diaspora in Japan. Although relatively small—comprising approximately 800 individuals as of June 2024—this community is highly diverse, with a history spanning over a century. While these Hebrew-speaking Israelis differ in their circumstances of arrival and experience in Japan, as well as their socioeconomic backgrounds, motivations, and levels of Japanese proficiency, they share a common experience as non-Asian foreigners. They share a common language and national background, and a complex, often ambivalent, affinity for their homeland. This connection has been further strained by recent domestic turmoil in Israel: the constitutional crisis led by the Netanyahu government and the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war on October 7, 2023, both of which have triggered an unprecedented outflow of people. The current study focuses on long-term Israeli residents in Japan – economically motivated migrants, expatriates, and those married to Japanese partners. Drawing on in-depth interviews and longitudinal recurrent field study, I analyse their aspirations and efforts to live and thrive in Japan while navigating a dual sense of belonging to the home country and the host country alike. Utilizing theories of home and homeliness (Mallett 2004, Dovey 1985, 2005), I analyse their ambivalent view of Japan as an alternative home vis-à-vis Japanese society on the one hand and occasional or even imagined encounters with Palestinians in the Japanese public sphere.

The paper identifies three strategies that enable Israelis to maintain Japan as an alternative home in times of growing instability in their homeland