“Radiation Refugees”: The Role of Gender and Digital Communication in Japanese Women’s Transnational Evacuation after Fukushima

Abstract

The study of environmental migration has shown how an attachment to land reduces the perceptions of risks, and how women often lack resources to evacuate. This qualitative study of Japanese women’s migration to Southeast Asia after the Fukushima nuclear disaster complicates the debate by showing that the post-disaster attachment to the land is disrupted by unequal gendered social relations and that digital communication among women provides a wide range of resources and emotional support to differently positioned women. This article shows how gendered social relations and digital communication play a major role in environmental migrant decision making processes in Asia.

Keywords:

• Gender
• environmental migration
• Japan
• Fukushima
• social media
• digital work

Acknowledgments

I thank the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, for providing a fieldwork grant to conduct this research and offering conference funding to host a workshop, “Gender, Migration and Digital Networks in Asia” in which I presented the earlier draft of this paper. I thank the conference participants, internal reviewers, and external reviewers for their insightful comments which were invaluable in revising the draft into the current form. All faults that remain are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

There was no financial interest or benefit that arose from the direct applications of this research.

Funding

This work was supported by the fieldwork grant by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Notes

1 MM2H visa requires applicants aged below 50 years to have liquid assets worth a minimum of RM500,000 and offshore income of RM10,000 per month.

2 Pseudonyms are used to protect individual identities.