SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In recent decades, Bangkok’s Japanese community has undergone an unprecedented growth, with its official numbers skyrocketing to over 70 thousand (Japanese MOFA data 2015) and the unofficial ones thought to exceed 100 thousand. The majority of that increase is thanks to a new wave of migration type from Japan that first emerged in the late 1980s (Sato 2001, Ben Ari 2003). These migrants come from all ages and walks of life mostly destined to the global cities of the Asia-Pacific as well and London and New York City. They have been variously theorised as lifestyle migrants (Sato 2001), cultural migrants (Fujita 2008), spiritual migrants (Yatabe 2003), or transnational sojourners (Befu 2003, Mizukami 2007, Nakazawa et al 2014). This interdisciplinary thesis looks at Bangkok's Japanese and explores how the main three characteristics of their belonging: individualism, ambivalence, and impermanence, are produced or accommodated by various structural factors, institutions, and migrants' individual agency to allow the categorisation of this type of Japanese migrants as individual transnational sojourner. The data for this research is based on the author’s nearly three decades of involvement with the community and ethnographic fieldwork in 2014-15.