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Paper short abstract

This study examines Brazilian women entrepreneurs in Japan using an online survey, interviews, and action research. Drawing on an intersectional lens, it analyzes how overlapping identities as migrants, women, mothers, and factory workers intersect to constrain entrepreneurial opportunities.

Paper long abstract

In Japan, ethnic businesses have become an important economic and social space for migrants facing limited access to stable employment and career mobility. Among these, businesses run by Brazilian women have expanded in recent years, yet their experiences remain underexplored in migration and entrepreneurship studies, which often treat gender, migration status, and work history as separate factors. Therefore, this paper will examine how intersecting identities as migrants, women, mothers, and factory workers shape the entrepreneurial trajectories, constraints, and everyday practices of Brazilian women entrepreneurs in Japan.

Empirical data were collected through a mixed method approach combining an online survey, semi-structured interviews, and action research conducted with a Brazilian women entrepreneurs’ group. This design allows for an integrated analysis of lived experiences, structural conditions, and collective practices over time.

The findings indicate that entrepreneurial activities are shaped by multiple, overlapping constraints, including gendered care responsibilities, precarious migration status, language barriers, and long-term engagement in factory labor. These factors jointly limit access to human and social capital and institutional support, making entrepreneurship a fragile and labor-intensive pathway. At the same time, the study finds that ethnic businesses function as spaces where practical strategies, mutual support, and forms of agency are cultivated, enabling women to reconfigure work and family life under restrictive conditions.

By highlighting ethnic businesses as intersectional spaces of both constraint and agency, this study contributes to research on migration, gender, and ethnic entrepreneurship, while offering insights for policies and support programs aimed at migrant women’s economic and social wellbeing.