Japanese and Nikkei at Home and Abroad: Negotiating Identities in ...

Spain, whose last names are Japón, discovered a connection they had to seventeenth-century samurai who were sent to Europe on a secret mission by a powerful Japanese warlord (see Abraham and Serradilla-Avery, chapter 5). However, while these samurai were traveling abroad, changing political conditions made it impossible for them to return to Japan. After four hundred years, news of the discovery of the descendants of this tragic mission was announced in Japan. Since then, Japanese tourists and the media have been coming to Seville in droves. Children of these “hidden” samurai are now developing a sense of Nikkei-ness through their personal contacts and Japanese media events. Although their cultural values are Spanish and their physical appearance is not especially Asian, they have developed a sense of nostalgia for the times of the samurai and created their own historical romance of an exotic past. Global tourism, the intertwined economies, and the international media are now influencing how people relate to one another and how Nikkei-ness, in a sense, now exists beyond time and space.

The Japanese economy is also influencing lifestyle choices for Japanese women. For example, Thang, Goda, and MacLachlan (2006) argue that Japanese women going abroad constitute a new type of transnational migrant. These days Japanese women do not go overseas because of economic hardship. Instead, the relatively healthy Japanese economy provides an opportunity for them to go abroad to study English, to take long-term tours or trips, or to look for job opportunities not available to them in Japan. Sometimes, while overseas, they meet their future husbands. Yoshida (chapter 10) studied the complicated cultural and ethnic identity situations that result when Indonesian men marry Japanese women. These Japanese women often face especially difficult times because of the multiculturalism of Indonesia. Some of the women Yoshida interviewed met their husbands in Japan while their husbands were studying or working there, and their language of communication usually continues to be Japanese. Others met in North America while they were studying English. These couples communicate with each other in English or alternate with one speaking Japanese and the other English. However, regardless of the languages used, the wives have had to learn