Hosting Migrants in Kyoto City: Different Migrant Cohorts and Mutual Support

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, the population of Filipinas married to Japanese men has increased in Kyoto. Numerous women had initially entered Japan as entertainers, later found partners, and built families in the city. The growing numbers of resident Filipinas led to the organization of the local Pag-asa Filipino community. Considering migrants as city-makers, we explore how Filipina residents together with residents springing off earlier cohorts of migrants have contributed to the emergence of new socialities, among others by providing the (infra)structure for newly arriving migrants to access substantial citizenship rights and to foster ties with local residents. We look at these encounters, ties, and relationships forming on the premises of the Kyoto City Multicultural Exchange Networking Salon in terms of socialities as this allows us to avoid reifying the cultural essentialism that undergirds both Japanese nationalism and multiculturalism, while acknowledging the social and institutional constraints within which these socialities emerge and are made sense of. Empirically drawing upon data collected among the Kyoto Filipino community, we use the conceptual lens of hosting to capture how multiculturalism is made in Kyoto City, while challenging dichotomous conceptions of the host versus the migrant.