Japanese and Nikkei at Home and Abroad: Negotiating Identities in a Global World
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Japanese and Nikkei at Home and Abroad: Negotiating Identities in ...

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In Part IV (Japanese Overseas), Masanori Yoshida, in chapter 10, reports on Japanese women who are married to Indonesian men. Unlike the case of other Japanese and Nikkei marriages, marriages between Japanese women and Indonesian men tend to be very heterogeneous and diverse. Some women met their husbands while they were studying in North America, some met in Japan while their husbands were studying, and others met their husbands in Indonesia while they were traveling. Regardless of where they met, the couples were all living in Indonesia when Masanori Yoshida began to work with them. Yoshida—who maintained contact with his informants for almost ten years—describes how Japanese women are coping in their daily lives, struggling with issues of ethnic identity, language, and food in the multicultural society that is Indonesia, where various ethnic groups, religions, and languages all thrive.

Finally, in chapter 11, James Stanlaw describes the experiences of two Japanese technicians working at a Japanese automobile plant in the United States. While not intending to become permanent residents in the United States, nonetheless their lengthy stay was felt to be a semi-permanent move. Unlike the upper-level Japanese management at the plant—whose support from the main office in Tokyo was generous and unquestioning—the scores of technicians and vocational specialists at the company certainly had fewer perks and benefits. For example, all executives from department head on up were given access to large homes, personal cars, and subsidies to bring over their wives and children. These young men, however, lived in an apartment complex that the company bought and used as a dormitory for their temporary workers from Japan. Besides doing things like maintaining the robots on the production line, the job of these men was to find ways to become American enough to survive their stay in the United States, yet remain Japanese enough to be able to return and re-enter Japan successfully and to start families of their own back home.

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Most studies on Japanese immigration or emigration have focused on specific aspects of this phenomena (especially the aforementioned World