Sakura Yamamura: "Mobile professionals and their families: The making of transnational spaces in Tokyo from a male perspective"

“Mobile professionals and their families: The making of transnational spaces in Tokyo from a male perspective”

Conceiving mobile corporate professionals as part of the growing transnational migrant population is a rather novel turn in migration research. Likewise, research on their families – including their trailing spouses and third culture kids – is an emerging field. Based on interviews with 43 male transnational corporate professionals in Tokyo, this lecture paper presents their take on the effects that their marrying and starting a family had on their socio-spatial patterns within the urban space. Whereas transnational professionals have been mostly researched in their functions and practices as economic actors, this study gives a new insight into their social and socio-spatial lives from a personal and thus individual migrant’s perspective. Though relatively uncommon to take the masculine view on family and gender issues, the narratives of the working fathers and husbands still constitute a non-negligible piece of the overall picture of transnational families. Touching also upon issues of different patterns of binational/-cultural marriages, I will discuss how the extent and quality of transnational spaces transform over the life course.

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