'Care-ful' boundary negotiation: Curating translocal subjectivities among Japanese women in London

Abstract

This paper explores the everyday experience of Japanese female migrants in London. Asking how culture can offer us a lens through which to understand the diversity and heterogeneity of care in this globalised world, the Japanese concept of omoiyari, as curation of landscapes of care, is used as an analytical lens to unpack the interplay between culture, care and identity, illuminating the boundary-drawing aspects of ethics of care with which people make ongoing distinctions between self and others, and constructing translocal subjectivities. Understanding care as a form of communication, this paper uncovers the contextual and relational formation of care and self, and how this is enabled as well as constrained by culture. It contributes to an understanding of the relational formation of care in which caring practice is neither static nor embedded in place and culture, but is rather shaped through relationships dynamically, while social relationships in turn also shape the meaning of care.

Keywords: Care; Culture; Curation; Omoiyari; Translocal subjectivities.