Japanese lifestyle migrants in Southeast Queensland: Narratives of long-term residency, mobility and personal communities

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Contemporary Japanese migration and overseas residency are being increasingly understood through the lens of lifestyle migration, whereby those who leave Japan prioritise lifestyle factors ahead of other considerations. Studies of Australia’s Japanese communities in particular have tended to focus on such migrants and advance this concept. This study employs biographical-narrative and case study elements to further the study of Japanese lifestyle migration to Australia in two ways. One is by examining cases from a cohort in Southeast Queensland that has yet to be a focus of investigation: those who arrived during the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the transformations of post-bubble Japan. The other is by supplementing existing understandings of Japanese phenomena with an emerging conceptualisation of lifestyle migration in Western Europe. This alternative framework observes that narratives of lifestyle migrants are shaped by themes of escape and pursuit and rhetoric of personal transformation, while also proposing that the act of migration is not a final outcome but is embedded within an ongoing lifestyle trajectory. By analysing participants’ narratives and examining their reasons for migration, their mobility histories and self-defined personal communities, this thesis argues that existing characterisations of the particular cohort and of Japanese lifestyle migrants in general are too narrow. Decisions are not straightforward individual matters framed by escape and pursuit, but can be directed by more complicated individual and household trajectories influenced by a variety of mobility experiences that are not simply geographical. Patterns of post-migration mobility are similarly diverse and not straightforward continuations of lifestyle projects. Finally, the analysis of participants’ personal communities reveals that their important familial and non-familial relationships exist because of and in spite of normative expectations, geographical closeness or distance, cultural similarity or difference and activity or latency.