Everyday Mobility: the Normalization of China-Japan Migratory Flows and their ‘Everyday Practice’

Coates, Jamie

doi:10.1515/irsr-2013-0002

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…My research was conducted over two periods of intensive fieldwork from 2009 to 2011 and from 2014 to 2016. Through my research I found that young Chinese in Japan are torn between two national institutional frameworks, cosmopolitan and parochial desires, and feel the tensions between individual success and personal familial commitments (Coates 2013;Fong 2011;Liu-Farrer 2011. Consequently, their sense of belonging is rarely attached to a specific place, but rather shaped by projects of education, employment, and social mobility.…”

Section: The Cruel Optimism Of Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 98%

The Cruel Optimism of Mobility

Coates¹

2019

Positions: Asia Critique

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Over the past thirty years, moving overseas has been a positively valued aspiration in China. On both a government level, and within popular discourse, migration has been propagated as a means to be better citizens, and a better nation, resonating with families’ desire for a better life. However, there are consequences for those who move, in terms of belonging and how they imagine their life projects. This article extends the established scholarship on mobility out of China by comparing the rhetorical construction of mobility with the experiences of Chinese migrants in Japan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among educationally channeled Chinese migrants in Tokyo, I show how the imaginaries that shape migrant projects are constituted by conflicting aspirations and desires. The mismatch between daily experiences and discursively informed perceptions of what constitutes a “good life” and “success,” in many senses resemble what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism.” Educationally channeled migration out of China is posited as a desirable object-idea that is “cruel” because the “cluster of promises” that constitute its “optimism” cannot be reconciled with the mobile lifeworlds of many Chinese transnational migrants. Due to the impossibility of simultaneously achieving the promises of success, pleasing one’s family, and attaining a sense of cosmopolitanism, many migrants resign themselves to the instabilities of mobile life. Their experiences are suggestive of the consequences of a world that increasingly celebrates mobility, with implications for how “being at home in the world” is imagined today.

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Section: The Cruel Optimism Of Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 98%

The Cruel Optimism of Mobility

Coates¹

2019

Positions: Asia Critique

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“…While the logics of this migratory flow may seem primarily economic, according to the testimonies of Chinese migrants in Japan, there are fewer contradictions between everyday economic and cultural logics than there may seem (Coates 2013). These purportedly separate logics were combined into a variety of narratives that demonstrate the blurring of the economic and cultural in the everyday.…”

Section: Personhood Mobility and The Blurring Of Cultural And Econommentioning

confidence: 99%

The cultural and economic logics of migration

Coates¹

2018

Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations

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“…This is particularly the case for Chinese migrants in Japan, who have become the largest non‐Japanese minority in Tokyo today, making up roughly 40% of the total non‐Japanese population. From the late 1980s onwards, most came to Japan on education‐based visas and now fill vital roles in Japan's shrinking labour market (Coates ; Liu‐Farrer ; Tajima ). However, their prevalence and increasing importance in Japan has also posited them as subjects of increased surveillance and suspicion.…”

Section: Tokyo Flâneriementioning

confidence: 99%

Key figure of mobility: the flâneur

Coates

2017

Social Anthropology

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The flâneur acts as a key figure for understanding the relationship between the individual, modernity and the city. A reference to dandy young gentlemen, who walked, performed and loitered within the arcades of late 19th-century Paris, the flâneur has transitioned from a literary and theoretical figure to one used in mobile urban ethnographies. The flâneur, traditionally male, is a figure of pedestrian mobility whose sensorial and mobile engagements with the urban landscape generate distinct forms of creative practice. For this reason, the flâneur has been invoked in relation to the methods and experiences of the ethnographer, who moves and takes note in similar ways. This paper conducts a review of extant literature on the flâneur in ethnographic research, which shows a strong connection between this key figure and its ties to a European tradition dealing with Anglo-European (post)modernities. It has also inspired a range of methodological innovations in urban ethnography more broadly. Finally, through the case of Tokyo, the paper asks the question of who is drawn to flânerie and who is deterred from it, demonstrating how the transgressive potentialities of flânerie are only desirable for some.

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Everyday Mobility: the Normalization of China-Japan Migratory Flows and their ‘Everyday Practice’

Cited by 12 publications

References 22 publications

The Cruel Optimism of Mobility

The Cruel Optimism of Mobility

The cultural and economic logics of migration

Key figure of mobility: the flâneur

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