Choosing to Go Home: Capital, Ethnicity, and Return Migration

• In Event: The Many Faces of Return: Problematizing Return Migration

Abstract

This study aims to utilize the concept of “return” or return migration as a heuristic device in analyzing and understanding capital, home, and migration among return migrants in Okinawa Prefecture in Japan. Inherent in its term as movement or motion, returns arguably provide one with tools necessary in understanding and analyzing the concept of home in migration as well as the role capital (i.e. economic, cultural, and social capital) plays in this whole process.

This study looks at people of both Filipino and Okinawan parentage who returned to their birthplace during their adult years – Okinawa, and examines their return process/es and perceptions of home, which is very much linked to both capital ownership (i.e. cultural and social) and capital accumulation (i.e. economic). Most existing literature on return migration to Japan is focused on the Nikkeijin, or people of Japanese descent, who made the return trip back to Japan mainly for financial stability and economic mobility. There are of course other factors that entice these people to migrate beyond the push-pull paradigm that dominates the literature. In this study, it is to be argued that the concept of return in this regard is primarily actor-led (despite the palpable role of the state in border-crossing movements) and that these return movements speak volumes not only of migrants’ choices and experiences but also enable one to conceptualize return movements as both a circumstantial option and a process that can serve as heuristic in better understanding the notion of home and its intersection with ethnicity and capital.

Author

• Johanna Zulueta, Soka University of America