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Paper short abstract

This presentation deals with retirement aspirations of permanently residing and designated visa-holding Filipinas in Japan. It compares the quality of their social bonds, and its influence on their decisions to remain in Japan, return to homeland, or carve out a retired transmigrant future.

Paper long abstract

The growing number of Filipino migrant women who have acquired permanent residency demographically hints at their settlement in aging Japanese society. The current study is concerned with the conditions under which aging Filipinas would return to the Philippines. Building on the interviews and focus group discussions with Filipino women with permanent residence and on designated visa status in Tokyo whose lives have been followed from 2010 to the present, the current study relates their migration experiences to the shifting social, economic, and health inequalities between the Philippines and Japan over the years (from the 1980s to the peak of their migration as entertainers, to family formation in the 1990s, to the current decade in which Filipinas are in their 50s-60s). Employing a life course analysis to compare Filipinas of different legal and residency status in Japan, this study examines the social health or the quality of familial and social bonds they have formed over the years, and the extent to which these influence decisions and aspirations to remain in Japan, return and reintegrate into the Philippines, or carve out a retired transmigrant lifestyle.

The study argues that these ageing mobility patterns do not always indicate a deliberate transfer of care burden from Japan to the Philippines, or vice-versa. Rather, these trends suggest that integral to their social health is a continuous assessment of the value of family, kinship, and community life in their aspiration to be socially healthy while ageing. The retirement goals are diverse according to social health challenges, structural conditions and individual strategies of homing for sustaining social wellbeing. This study concludes with some implications for policymaking in the areas of health and social protection.