Longer-Term Consequences of ‘Youth’ Migration: Japanese Temporary Migrants in China and the Life Course

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Japanese ‘youth’ in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties who participated in temporary migration to Dalian, a northeastern Chinese city, at a turning point in their life course. They left economically stagnant Japan to work in the digital service outsourcing sector targeting the Japanese market, by providing remote customer service in their native language. While the workers enjoy some perks of corporate employment and skilled migrant status, migration reduces their salaries to levels comparable to Japanese minimum wages, and the constantly shifting nature of immigration control and offshore outsourcing renders their presence fundamentally precarious. Based on semi-structured interviews, I argue that geographical mobility affords a temporary refuge from the normative expectations of a settled adult life, but in this liminal time–space, classed and gendered life course norms continue to frame the migrants’ interpretation of their presents and futures. My findings show that the remote service workers simultaneously engage in multiple temporalities of suspended life back home, increasing stasis in the present and anticipated futures through imagined migration. The analysis illustrates that cross-border mobility produces freedom from the constraints of expected life transitions, but also potential entrapment through new modes of exploitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• life course
• youth
• middle class
• digital work
• Japan

Acknowledgments

A portion of this manuscript was presented at an interdisciplinary workshop ‘Youth Mobilities and Immobilities in the Asia-Pacific Region’, 7-8 November 2016, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. I thank the editors of this special issue, the workshop participants, the journal editor, the anonymous reviewers, and Professors James Farrer and Gracia Liu-Farrer for their valuable comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Kumiko Kawashima is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Macquarie University. She has published on transnational migration, global capitalism, youth labour and consumption, and class, gender, racial and cultural identities. Kumiko is the author of Japanese Labour Migration to China and IT Service Outsourcing: The Case of Dalian (2019) in: A. Lehmann and P. Leonard, eds. Destination China: Immigration to China in the Post Reform Era, Palgrave Macmillan; and White-Collar Outsourcing and Labour Migration in a Digital Age: Transnational Linkages between Japan and Dalian (2017) in Global Networks 17 (4). She also co-edited with Professor Brenda SA Yeoh a special section on ‘Mobilities and Exceptional Spaces in Asia’ (2017) in Asian Anthropology 16 (1).

Notes

1 By the late 2010s, the starting salary for educated bilingual Chinese staff was comparable to that of the monolingual Japanese without prior industry experience.

2 While I have some data on the trajectories of a dozen return migrants, a full investigation is outside the scope of this paper.

3 For example, see ‘Tips for successful career change or re-employment at the age of 40’, a feature article of a popular job search engine website MyNavi Tenshoku https://tenshoku.mynavi.jp/knowhow/caripedia/08 (Accessed 15 July 2018); ‘The widening income gap for those above 40, despite labour shortages’, Nikkei Style, 7 July 2017 https://style.nikkei.com/article/DGXMZO18414150T00C17A7000000?channel=DF180320167080&page=2 (Accessed 15 July 2018).

4 This changed to 10 years in 2017. The proportion of those who do not fulfil payment obligations is approximately 40 per cent in Japan (Nihon Keizai Shinbun 2017). Such figures have led to social and media debates about generational inequalities, the ageing population and the future insecurity for today’s youth.