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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.