“It is Hard to Make it without Diskarte”: Japanese-Filipinos’ Patterns of Economic Migration

• In Event: Immobilities of Migration: Structural Challenges to Migrant Filipinos in Asia and Beyond

Abstract

Migration literature theorizes migration as a strategy of social mobility of the first-generation migrants (Massey et.al. 1998, Arango 2004, Vertovec 2005, Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). Existing studies on Filipino migration to Japan, for instance, highlight the instrumental value of Japan migration in the lives of first-generation Filipinos (Suzuki 2000, 2005; Piquero-Ballescas 2005). Whether the second and 1.5 generation of Japanese-Filipino children‘s migration continues to be a tool of social mobility, or an outcome of the first generation’s social mobility provides a crucial point of inquiry.
Born to Japanese and Filipino parents, Japanese-Filipinos are reared in a family where migration functions in their transnational socialization and family life, certain narratives, norms and ideals are drawn from Japanese and Filipino societies. Japanese-Filipinos are a generation of immigrant-citizens who aspire and strive for equality in the form of rights to citizenship, reconfigure kinship and other symbolic ties, and reconstruct their desired self. The current study examines how second and 1.5 Japanese-Filipinos draw from the narratives of success and failure of the first generation and extended kin in the Philippines, and construct their own economic migration trajectories that indicate their differing ways of actualizing diskarte (strategy of social mobility). I also illustrate how diskarte determines their choice, aspiration and capacity to negotiate between migrating to either Japan or to the Philippines, or to a third country of migration.
This ethnographic research mainly utilizes data from life narratives of (70) Japanese-Filipinos who are living in Manila and Tokyo. This study identifies Japanese-Filipinos as worker-citizens, dual-nationals and expat-cosmopolitans. Their three modes of economic migration indicate the contemporary shifts in migration tend to create push and pull tendency between those who are committed to the capital and global economy, and those who would like to commit to their family and social relations. This paper emphasizes how intersections of status, class, generation and citizenship may be found in how Japanese-Filipinos interpret and realize diskarte, and further create social differentiation. By exploring Japanese-Filipinos’ economic migration, this paper analyzes the extent to which the diskarte of Japanese-Filipinos produce differing life trajectories.

Author

• Jocelyn Celero, Waseda University