Abstract

This thesis explores the intersections of race, class, gender, and mobility in the lifeworlds of Japanese migrants to Montreal, Canada in the 1990s and 2000s. Following the dramatic burst of Japan’s bubble economy of the late 1980s, Japanese politicians advanced a series of large-scale changes drawing on the popularity of market deregulation and neo-liberalism. During what has become known as the post-bubble period or lost decades, successive Japanese governments rapidly dismantled Japan’s postwar social contract in the name of privatization and cost-cutting. These measures unraveled the state apparatus that had sustained decades of male single breadwinner households supported by housewives in charge of home finances, household management, and childrearing. Social and political commentators examining this period have imagined a multiplicity of bleak Japans; while some critics point to employment precarity or the postponement of marriage as the primary concerns of the present, others scour the population looking for scapegoats. Against this backdrop, young Japanese people, and especially young women, have turned to alternative life-paths both inside and outside of the archipelago to temper the social and economic pressures felt at home.

Drawing on oral histories conducted with thirty Japanese people who migrated to Montreal in the 1990s and first decades of the 2000s, as well as Japanese language media sources including widely circulated non-fiction paperbacks, television dramas, and travel writing, I argue that migration is central to Japanese youth’s ability to create idealized “neo-liberal” selves. By turning their gaze abroad, these migrants seek more flexible lifestyles free from overwork and societal expectations. Yet, in Canada they continue to struggle with the social and economic realities of late capitalism, including precarious work, racism, and isolation from the host society they had hoped to fully participate in. As such, this thesis interrogates Canadian multicultural mythology and the emancipatory power of being “on-the-move” in the contemporary world. As they navigate post-bubble Japan’s mounting pressures and the limits of Montreal’s socioeconomic racialized landscape, the stories of Japanese lifestyle migrants exemplify the constant tension between optimism and disillusionment, and agency and oppression, that characterize the search for happiness in the contemporary world.