Yuiko Fujita's book examines the relationship among the media, migration, and identity construction. Taking as point of departure Arjun Appadurai's understanding that the electronic media produce the condition of possibility for potential migrants to imagine their lives as nationals in foreign countries, Fujita demonstrates the ways in which the media and the individual migration process impede the process of transcending one's national identity. She challenges the general discussion of transnationalism by arguing that “media and migration lead migrants not to transcend but to renegotiate or even heighten their sense of national identity, under particular historical and social conditions” (p. 10), which poses an important qualification of the theory of transnationalism.
In this study, Fujita poses two major questions. The first question interrogates the ways in which young Japanese come to envisage the idea of immigrating to New York City and London for cultural purposes such as music, dance, fashion, and art. Employing multisited ethnography in Tokyo, New York City, and London over a five-year period, she closely follows twenty-two young Japanese, whose ages ranged from nineteen to thirty years old at the time of departure.
Fujita examines the subjects' sociocultural backgrounds and the conditions of contemporary Japanese society, and concludes that migration offers an avenue of escape in their search for a better life. Simultaneously, she scrutinizes their understanding of America and Europe acquired through media representations, and provides two ideas of the West represented in their imaginations: America has been internalized into Japanese culture and society as part of everyday life, while Europe is considered more distant from Japan. Yet what is common in their imagined West is the lack of racial and ethnic awareness and discrimination, which she finds play significant roles in renegotiating their Japanese national identity. This lack, combined with a positive imaginary of the West, motivates the subjects to desire lives in these cities, and Fujita successfully demonstrates where “push” and “pull” factors meet. However, the endeavor of these young Japanese to seek fulfillment of their lives overseas does not lead them to develop a sense of transnational identity; rather, their experiences lead them to renegotiate or even heighten their Japanese national identity.
Having reached this conclusion, Fujita poses the second question: how do young Japanese experience their sense of Japanese national identity in their destination city? (p. 19). She observes a “self-Orientalizing” process expressed through the discourse of nihonjinron, a discourse of Japanese uniqueness that thrived along with Japan's economic prosperity mainly in the 1970s and 1980s. Concurrent with their return to nihonjinron discourses of identity, Fujita shows the processes by which the young Japanese realize the racial wall they face, and reveals that such racial markings entail the notion of particular-universal as well as masculine-feminine. What is important to note is that the reference point is the white race that occupies the dominant position in Western societies. As a result, the young Japanese realize their pre-departure perception of the West as illusionary, and this leads them to reaffirm and reproduce the discourse of nihonjinron and Japan's imaginary homogeneity.
The significance of this work rests in providing a case study of twenty-two young Japanese to demonstrate the disjunction between the pre-migration imaginary of the West produced by the media and the actual experience, which results in disillusionment about commonly held positive conceptions of the West, in due course reaffirming one's own national identity.
I would have liked to see Fujita extend her discussion on two points. One is the persistent imaginary of a homogeneous Japan in the discourse of nihonjinron among young Japanese. As she claims, the enduring blindness toward the structural maginalization of minorities in Japan does not lead them when they encounter discrimination abroad to a new awareness of the various forms of discrimination present in Japan. Despite today's media representations of minorities in Japan, what makes these young Japanese blind to the marginalization and discrimination? Would the answer be found in the racial and ethnic diversity they experienced in New York City and London? Or would the dominant position they occupy in Japan lead them to neglect the issue? Here, the author could have delved more deeply into what drives the nihonjinron discourse.
The second concern is with the positions that the young Japanese occupy in Japan and in their host county, which should be thought of in relation to my previous point. As Fujita claims, the twenty-two young Japanese she studies moved to New York City and London for cultural purposes. She differentiates her study from the more common forms of transnationalism, in which economics or politics drive migration. However, such differentiation seems not to have factored into the author's analysis of young Japanese, who have the choice of returning to Japan once they realize the impossibility of leading a better life in the host country. Economic and political refugees seldom have this choice. Also, the dominant position the young Japanese occupy in Japanese society should be taken into account, as the dichotomy between their lives in Japan and America as well as Japan and Europe signifies the contrast between the privileged life and the underprivileged one. I would have liked to see how the conditions the young Japanese were immersed in would relate to their unconscious reference to and reproduction of nihonjinron discourse.
Despite the above concerns, Fujita's work significantly contributes to the understanding of a current trend in international migration in which the media play a critical role in constructing a positive image of the West. As seen not only in Japan but also in other countries, major American and European cities are considered to be ideal destinations to realize one's dream. This case study provides a detailed analysis of Fujita's subjects' perceptions of the West, as well as the shifts in perception produced by their migration experience.
