Building a life on the soil of the ultimate other

Abstract

This chapter focuses on WeChat's two main communicative channels, individual chat and Moments, to illustrate their impacts on the sense of belonging among Chinese migrants in Japan. Informed by in-depth interviews and digital ethnographic observations between May 2018 and January 2021, the chapter illustrates how the “individual chat” function helps to construct a transnational identity among Chinese migrants outside the officially sanctioned discourses of Chinese or Japanese national identity. At the same time, Chinese migrants highlight transnational migrant mobility by categorising their contacts and crafting targeted Moments contents to differentiate themselves (the transnational subjects) from those immobile subjects in China. The chapter argues that WeChat allows Chinese migrants in Japan to negotiate, construct and express a multi-layered sense of self and belonging so as to reflect their personal desires and transnational experiences.