Shifting perceptions, emotions, and memories : Japanese women in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland

• Main Author: Maehara, N.
• Published: Queen's University Belfast 2014
• Subjects: 305.48
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.679221

Through an autoethnographical approach, and interviews and participant observations with forty women who migrated from Japan during the past two decades and are now living in Northern Ireland and the Republic, this thesis documents the dynamic subjectivities of individual migrants: the ways in which their emotions, perceptions and memories are formed by specific globalising forces and the peculiar dynamics of transnational families. The following questions have been considered: (1) what prompted these women to leave Japan and migrate to Ireland! Northern Ireland?; (2) how did they make adjustments to the cultural and physical distance between their own and their husbands' home country?; (3) in shifting social settings and cultural contexts, how did they recreate a sense of belonging?; and (4) how were their subjectivities shaped and reshaped in changing relationships and emotional involvements with families 'here' and 'there'? In examining these questions, this study reconsiders two themes that have been central to contemporary studies of migration, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism: the role of global imaginary in shaping people's perceptions of places as loci of possibility (or lack of possibility); and shifting and situated senses of belonging. Some theories of affect, emotion, acculturation, and perception are also applied in order to explore the links between individuals' subjectivities and social-cultural forms.