Kyōiku-ijū (Education Migration): Affluent Japanese Families’ Transnational Education Strategies in Johor Bahru, Malaysia (Joint seminar with FASS Migration Research Cluster)
Abstract
While Malaysia has been known as a country for retirement migration for Japanese families, the number of affluent young Japanese families migrating to Johor Bahru (JB), Malaysia for the purpose of their child’s international schooling has increased since 2012. This transnational migration phenomenon, known as Kyōiku-ijū (Education Migration), is understood as new because the existing literature has mainly introduced cases of inter-Asia mobility of Japanese families from Japan to the English-speaking “West” in order to pursue their well-being and their child’s acquisition of global cultural capital through Western education. How then can we understand this emerging intra-Asia flow of transnational migration from Japan to Malaysia? By using in-depth interview data collected from Japanese families living in JB, I pursue two tasks: 1) examine the structural mechanisms in Japan and Malaysia and some mediators that have yielded the flow of this transnational migration of Japanese families to JB; and 2) reveal how these families understand their experiences living and enrolling their child in international schools in JB and how they envision their future. I will present my tentative findings based on my ongoing fieldwork started from June 2016.
About the Speaker
Hiroki Igarashi is an assistant professor at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Chiba University, Japan. He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA, and specializes in transnational movements of affluent Japanese families with children in Asia-Pacific region. His articles include Privileged Japanese Transnational Families in Hawai’i as Lifestyle Migrants (Global Networks), The Transnational Negotiation of Selfhood, Motherhood and Wifehood: The Subjectivities of Japanese Women through Oyakoryūgaku in Hawaii (Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, with Saori Yasumoto), & Cosmopolitanism as Cultural Capital: Exploring the Intersection of Globalization, Education and Stratification (Cultural Sociology, with Hiro Saito).
