Nobue Suzuki

Between two shores: Transnational projects and filipina wives in/from japan

Abstract While tales about Filipinas in diaspora have attracted a global audience, those living in Japan have been referred to as “entertainers” who work in “the sex industry.” Filipinas in Japan have thus been constructed as the “immoral” Other under the gender regimes of Japan and the Philippines. Based on ethnographic research, I explore the meanings and possibilities of the practices of Filipina wives of Japanese in public charity events organized by the women themselves in Japan and the Philippines. Dislocated from their subjective identities, Filipina wives in the Tokyo area have deployed images and symbols of socially sanctioned (Christian) wives and mothers in these events. Although ironically participating in Orientalist and sexist discipline in the context of their events, their practices nevertheless constitute a way to create affirmative spaces for themselves on the margins of the two nation-states.

Carework and Migration: Japanese Perspectives on the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement:

This paper details the context of the reception of Filipino careworkers under the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA). Following the reduction in the deployment of Filipina/o entertainers in Japan since March 2005, the potential deployment of careworkers to Japan has generated much interest in the Philippines. However, many aspects of careworker migration are not well understood. The primary objective of this paper is thus to clarify the social conditions surrounding the JPEPA to better understand the various issues involved in carework in Japan. Towards this end, the paper discusses the following: the attempt of the state to reduce the costs of carework; state policies on foreign workers and the prospect of bringing in Filipino careworkers under the JPEPA; the responses of government institutions, medical and labor organizations to careworker migration; the process of careworker migration as provided in the JPEPA; and possibilities of cooperation between Filipinos already in Japan and incoming careworkers.

Japayuki, or, Spectacles for the Transnational Middle Class

Although “vaginal commodities”—feminized and sexualized bodies in the economic system—are found everywhere on the globe today, this article focuses on the ways in which such sexualized images of the Filipino “Japayuki” entertainers working in Japan have been produced and consumed. Suzuki will trace the history of this fantasy production back to the 1970s when the Japanese first began to construct the workers in a particular way. Subsequently, these images became widely circulated among the transnational public in which most eager consumers of these representations are the transnational middle class such as advocates, academics, lawmakers, and the media people, including the Philippine elite. Recently, such overt sexualization of the workers has also subjected Filipino male workers in the night businesses. Whatever workers’ sex and sexual orientation, they are seen not as humans but as objects of sex. They are feminized by the hands of the indifferent narrators of the images, and the workers’ entirety as humans is reduced to those who are only good at making a living in bed. To analyze, Suzuki takes “Philippine cinema,” the theme of this journal, to mean a site that both veils and invokes global audiences’ particular visual fantasies about laboring Filipina/o entertainers. The data used here are queer and drawn not only from filmic but also from printed and audio materials. The time period covered is from the 1970s to March 2005, when the Japanese government suddenly tightened the issuance of the entertainer visas.

Filipina Modern: “Bad” Filipino Women in Japan

Julie, in her early twenties in the early 1990s, thought going to Japan offered a sure way to acquire the kind of modern appearance that many Filipinas her age desired.1 Faced with financial difficulty, she also decided to go to Japan to earn money to enable her younger sisters to continue their schooling. She convinced herself by saying, “Find some means to raise money. School, school, school. Money, money, money! I’m the eldest and I must be strong!” In the end, Julie went to Japan, got a job as a bar hostess, worked hard, and saved. But she did not give all the money to her family. She gave about 20 percent to her parents and kept 80 percent for herself. After marrying Masaki, a Japanese public employee, in 1995, she began investing in property in the Philippines. As a sign of her middle-class life, human value, and security, she now owns a fancy 4.8 million-peso (

Suspended Mobilities: Japanese Filipino Children, Family Regimes, and Postcolonial Plurality

12,000 @

Performing between Two Empires

1 = PhP25) condominium near the foreign embassies, overlooking Manila Bay. For Julie, working and marrying in Japan enabled the realization of her multiple goals of being simultaneously filial and modern.

Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa

In the wake of the massive influx of Filipino women (Filipinas) to Japan’s nightlife businesses from the 1970s to the mid-2000s, the children they left behind have gradually been entering Japan. These children are popularly known as ‘Japanese Filipino children’ (JFC) many of whom were born to Filipina (former) nightlife-worker mothers and their Japanese-client fathers. The lives of JFC are perhaps more complicated than those of child migrants elsewhere. For example, JFC are of mixed parentage; were fatherless from birth or were abandoned by their fathers at an early age; were variously socialized in Japan and/or in the Philippines; and are located at the margins of both societies (for details, see Suzuki, 2010a, 2015). Takahata and Hara (Chapter 6) portray a small group of JFC who have achieved, however contingently, relatively stable lives and their visions for upward mobility. Yet, my field knowledge suggests that a significant number of JFC, and particularly those who grew up with their kin in the Philippines and after becoming teenagers joined their mothers in Japan, are in fact leading especially precarious lives in this culturally foreign ‘fatherland’. They share much with a growing number of children born to couples of different nationalities (Constable, 2014) who have joined the flows of ‘low-end globalization’ to engage in ‘low-skill’ jobs, marginal entrepreneurship, and illegal work in an affluent global north (Mathews, 2011).

Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World introduces an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology examines the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture.