Paper short abstract:

The community of Japanese residents in Barcelona is currently undergoing a radical transformation of its socioeconomic composition, reflected in new forms of public visibility, in a process in which the question of who is legitimately authorized to represent Japanese culture becomes a crucial issue

Paper long abstract:

The community of Japanese residents in Barcelona is currently undergoing a radical transformation of its socioeconomic composition. In the last decade, it has gone from being mostly made up of business expatriates sent by Japanese companies to their production plants in Catalonia, to now including a significant proportion of lifestyle migrants looking to set up personal entrepreneurial, professional or artistic projects in their new life abroad. Thus, what had hitherto been a temporary community of senior company executives and their families, that was almost entirely self-sufficient as regards services (real estate market, consumption, education, leisure) and socially invisible, has been transformed into a widely-scattered community that enjoys strong links to the rest of society, both through work and social relationships. Underlying this process are structural changes like the decline of Japanese companies in Spain since the mid-2000s, new models of global mobility, and the construction of growingly open societies. This has all implied the development of new forms of doing community, among which visibility in the urban space through Japanese cultural festivals and public celebrations is playing a key role. Drawing on ethnographic data, the paper analyzes this phenomenon by exploring the case of the 'Matsuri Barcelona' festival and the complex overlapping of discourses between Japanese residents, local government, official Japanese representatives and local manga-anime brokers entailed in the event's organization and celebration, in a process in which the question of who is legitimately authorized to represent Japanese culture ultimately becomes crucial.