Producing Japaneseness in Everday Life: Gendered biographies, locality and community-making among Japanese women in southeast London

Abstract

This thesis examines the diverse lives of Japanese women migrants who live in southeast London. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork to question how social identities are shaped and framed by various relationships in and through migration, with particular foci on gender, life course and locality. The Japanese women who live in southeast London network extensively with their compatriots, reproducing a distinctive ‘Japaneseness’ and capitalise it in their everyday lives. While social and cultural reproduction —particularly as this relates to their children—is central within this, their practices are also telling of their own agency in navigating the different registers of their gendered identities. They may be mothers, but they are also daughters, roles that carry with them a range of expectations and that are enacted and performed in different locations and that have enhanced significance at different points in their lives, with both intra- and inter- ethnic communities. Underpinned conceptually by an understanding of migration as an ongoing process, the study builds on existing research on Japanese women’s migration—which highlights the diversity of this population—to demonstrate their complex and multiple community making practice and belonging in which they accumulate and deploy locally-specific values and capitals. By bringing the concepts of translocalism and biographical approach together, this thesis therefore contributes to the understanding of how gender, ethnicity and migration intersect in the everyday lives of these women. Furthermore, in disentangling their complex multi-layered lives and everyday identity negotiations, it speaks further to considerations over agency through the life course and the ways in which social world are both constitutive of and constituted by wider social structures.