Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

How do Japanese musicians and ballet dancers build careers in European art worlds? Drawing on mobility capital, skills valuation, and migration infrastructure, this paper examines how skills are socially constructed across contexts — shaping decisions to stay, re-migrate, or return to Japan.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates how Japanese professional musicians and ballet dancers navigate professional mobility within European art worlds, focusing on the interplay between their emergent career strategies and the social meanings attached to skills. Given the increasingly diverse mobility trajectories of young middle-class Japanese, the study argues that understanding contemporary artistic mobility requires attention not only to structural opportunities but also to how skills are differently valorised across contexts — and across professional fields characterised by precarity, clustering effects, and winner-take-all dynamics.

Empirically, the paper draws on qualitative data combining previous research with young Japanese middle-class professionals with overseas education and work experience, and new interview and questionnaire data with professional musicians and ballet dancers active in the Czech Republic. These two groups illustrate the distinctive pathways through which Japanese cultural professionals engage with Central European art worlds, and the varied strategies through which they build careers, navigate precarious labour markets, and develop long-term trajectories within them.

Analytically, the study draws on the concepts of mobility capital and motility to illuminate how artists accumulate and deploy the capacity for movement as a career resource, and on scholarship on the social construction of migrant skills to explain how technical competencies are evaluated differently depending on labour market norms and cultural expectations. These perspectives are complemented by attention to lifestyle migration and transnationalism as frameworks capturing the non-economic, identity-driven, and open-ended dimensions of artistic mobility.

This allows the paper to explore how participants' internationally acquired skills are interpreted, recognised, or discounted within European art worlds, and how these evaluations shape aspirations to stay, re-migrate, or return to Japan. By foregrounding skill as a socially mediated construct embedded within specific migration infrastructure — including institutional recruitment channels, artist visa frameworks, conservatoire networks, and transnational Japanese communities — the paper contributes to Japanese studies by revealing how mobility decisions are inseparable from the negotiation of professional identity across cultural boundaries.