FAIER, 2008

Runaway Stories: The Underground Micromovements of Filipina Oyomesan in Rural Japan

Lieba Faier

Links to relevant CA essay lists: Gender & Sexuality, Japan, Diaspora, Migration, Transnationalism

EDITORS' OVERVIEW
In the November 2008 issue of Cultural Anthropology, Lieba Faier uncovers the stories of Filipina migrants who have “run away” from their Japanese husbands in Central Kiso, asking why these stories hold such significance despite the fact that few of the women actually leave their husbands. “Runaway Stories: The Underground Micromovements of Filipina ‘Oyomesan’ in Rural Japan” highlights “running away” as one of the ways in which transnational migrants come to terms with the gap between their aspirations for living abroad and their experiences once there. Faier understands these actions as a kind of runaway agency that has become an uncertain and unsettling social force for Filipina women, their families and Japanese communities. Yet, running away holds ambivalence for these women, who lives and imaginations reflect the possibility of finding something better, as well as the uncertainty and danger that may come with those dreams.

“In focusing on the ways that running away figured for Filipina women in Central Kiso, I am drawing attention to the frantic, unstable, and subterranean micro-rhythms of movement that follow from migrants’ dissatisfactions with their lives abroad.  Attending to these movements can help us see how these dissatisfactions shape transnational processes sometimes in unexpected ways,” particularly as individual migrants negotiate new social relations and legal structures. As Faier writes, “Anthropologists have demonstrated that although transnational processes are in some sense deterritorialized, they are still tied to everyday, located, territorialized, and historical practices.” In the case of Filipina migrants, Faier’s work demonstrates “not only how the practice of running away transformed the lives of women who left, but also the ways that narratives about these women reverberated in the region and figured in the lives of those left behind.”

Lieba Faier is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Cultural Anthropology has published a range of essays on women, gender, and sexuality. These include Katherine Pratt Ewing’s “Between Cinema and Social Work: Diasporic Turkish Women and the (Dis)Pleasures of Hybridity” (2006); Aradhana Sharma’s “Crossbreeding Institutions, Breeding Struggle: Women's Empowerment, Neoliberal Governmentality, and State (Re)Formation in India” (2006); and Nicole Constable’s “At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns” (1999).

Cultural Anthropology has also published many essays on migrancy. See, for example, Didier Fassin’s “Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France” (2005); Victoria Bernal’s “Eritrea Goes Global: Reflections on Nationalism in a Transnational Era” (2004); and David B. Coplan’s “Fictions That Save: Migrants' Performance and Basotho National Culture” (1991).

Cultural Anthropology essays on Japan include Miyako Inoue’s “The Listening Subject of Japanese Modernity and His Auditory Double: Citing, Sighting, and Siting the Modern Japanese Woman” (2003); Karen Kelsky’s “Gender, Modernity, and Eroticized Internationalism in Japan” (1999); and Takie Sugiyama Lebra’s “The Socialization of Aristocratic Children by Commoners: Recalled Experiences of the Hereditary Elite in Modern Japan” (1990).

MULTIMEDIA LINKS

"Joint Statement of Japanese-Filipino Children (JFC)" (9/24/09)

"Uplift Lives, Transform the Image of Filipina in Japan"

ORGANIZATION LINKS

Center for Japanese-Filipino Families

International Organization of Migration

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan