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Marriage Migrants of Japanese Women in Australia pp 123–155Cite as

Bridging to the Mainstream: A Challenge of a Group of Japanese Mothers in Western Sydney

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Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which Japanese marriage migrants remould a particular gender identity in their Australian life. In particular, I focus on the way in which these women re-contextualise their (imagined) Japanese femininity by representing a new interpretation and remoulding of their self in Australia. To account for this, the chapter particularly considers their social roles and daily obligations in the family. I describe the process through which these women begin to assign positive meanings to being a Japanese woman, which they cannot realize in Japan. Furthermore, I argue that there are also common problems among these Japanese women, which are difficult for migrant women to escape in the country of settlement.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Of course, this socio-demographic profile is relevant to some suburbs of the Western Sydney region only. However, most of my Japanese respondents are, in contrast to A. G., living in Penrith and surrounding regions, such as the Blue Mountains; they often depicted their suburb and their neighbourhood as such.

  2. 2.

    Meanwhile, the PJC was also running a regular playgroup for mothers and children. When the PJC was launched in September 2006, the PJC playgroup was running once a week, apart from regular meetings of the PJC. However, due to the difficulty of securing a place for playgroup, outside of the meeting venue of the PJC at the Community Centre, the PJC playgroup has finally merged into the regular meetings of the PJC in 2008. As of 2009, the PJC runs a regular meeting and playgroup one after the other at the Community Centre, on a weekly basis.

  3. 3.

    I borrowed this idea from the concept of the environmental bubble (Cohen 1972: 168), denoting the peculiar characteristics of mass tourists who only enjoy their excursions in well-organised and familiar circumstances, instead of jumping into a new world as an independent traveller.

  4. 4.

    See studies by Ho (2017), Butler et al. (2017) and Watkins (2017) about public attitudes to this growing Asian educational culture in Australian education.

  5. 5.

    It is important to note that many of Japanese residents in the northern Sydney regions are relatively long-established setters who had a chance to purchase an affordable property before the property “bubble” occurred in Australian capital cities in the late 1990s, while the majority of Japanese women of marriage migrants became a permanent settler through between the 1990s and 2000s.

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  1. The University of Kitakyushu, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, Japan

    Takeshi Hamano

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Hamano, T. (2019). Bridging to the Mainstream: A Challenge of a Group of Japanese Mothers in Western Sydney. In: Marriage Migrants of Japanese Women in Australia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7848-5_7

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