ICS Seminar Series - Associate Professor Jun Nagatomo
Date: Thursday 28 August, 2014
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EB.2.21, UWS Parramatta South campus
Associate Professor Jun Nagatomo
Ethnic Community Reconsidered: The Case of Japanese Lifestyle Migrants in Sydney
Above: Associate Professor Jun Nagatomo and Professor David Rowe (Chair).
Abstract
In major cities of the world live a diverse range of Japanese residents such as: retirement visa holders, working holiday-makers, overseas students, professionals, and those married to foreign nationals. The majority of these overseas Japanese residents can be seen as “lifestyle migrants” (e.g. Benson 2009), who migrate looking for a different lifestyle and way of life to that which they would have had in Japan. Such motivations to migrate do not neatly fit the push and pull factors thought to influence migration in traditional socio-structural models in migration theory. Drawing on these perspectives, a number of key questions arise in light of the circumstances surrounding contemporary transnational middle class migrants: What are the characteristics of an ethnic community and its networks in a city where various types of migrants reside together? For “lifestyle migrants” is there any relationship between lifestyle considerations and their attitude toward ethnic community? Taking Japanese migrants in Sydney as a case study of an ethnic community of diversified migratory types and lifestyle migration, the ethnographic study focuses on Japanese people’s involvement with their community and provides theoretical interpretations on ethnic community in the age of individualisation and transnationalism.Biography
Jun Nagatomo is an Associate Professor at the School of International Studies, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan. He received a PhD from The University of Queensland in 2009, where he has studied contemporary Japanese migration to Australia as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar. His publications include: Nihon Syakai wo Nogareru (Sairyusha, Sir Neil Currie Australian Studies Award); Japanese Queenslanders: A History (Bookpal, co-authored book with Dr Yuriko Nagata); ‘Globalization, Tourism Development, and Japanese Lifestyle Migration to Australia’, a chapter in Development in Asia: Interdisciplinary, Post-neoliberal, and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Derrick M. Nault; ‘Japanese Single Mothers in Australia: Negotiation with Patriarchal Ideology and Stigma in Homeland’, a chapter in Feminism and Migration: Cross-cultural Engagements, edited by Glenda Bonifacio; and ‘De-territorialized Ethnic Community: The Residential Choices and Networks among Japanese Lifestyle Migrants in South-East Queensland, Australia’ (Japanese Studies, 31(3): pp. 423-440).
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