International Marriage, Migration, and Transnational Family Life in Asia: Japanese-Filipino Families

Abstract

Japanese-Filipino families are based on transnational cross-cultural marriages with their family, kinship, and social lives entailing migration to and from Japan and the Philippines. Thousands of them were formed through either Filipino migrant women’s intimate liaisons with Japanese in Japan or Japanese men’s marriages to Filipino women in the Philippines. The birth, socialization, and migration experiences represent Japanese-Filipino children’s major life stages that give rise to the morphology and dynamics of a transnational family life shaped by unequal socioeconomic and legal structures, with differentiated, culture-based familial expectations. This chapter surveys existing studies on transnational families in Asia and situates the transnationality of international marriage using Japanese-Filipino families as an empirical case. Like many other transnational families, Japanese-Filipino families configure “left-behind-to-reunited” and “circulating” patterns of transnational familyhood as an outcome of social class mobility of migrant mothers in the destination country. On the other hand, bi-/multicultural parenthood and access to location-specific resources, such as legal status and residency in Japan, enable children-initiated spatial and social mobilities and affiliations. This salient feature distinguishes transnational families from other migrant families broadly and stratifies the transnational social reproductive labor between Filipino migrant women.