Nikkei community and Japanese migrants in post-redress period：A case study on Ijusha's cultural sense of belonging in Western Canada

Focusing on the situation in western Canada, this paper aims to investigate the participation of Japanese migrants in the established Nikkei community. Within the long history of research on prewar Japanese migrants and their generations of descendants, attention has been paid primarily to ethnicity and acculturation. However, the increase of Japanese migrants since the 1990s has started to generate academic interest. Within the Canadian Nikkei community, those who left Japan after 1967 are called ijusha. In recent studies, their motivations for migration, interactions with both other ijusha and the established Nikkei community, and their notions of nationality and ethnicity have been considered. While these considerations have taken it as self-evident that contact between ijusha and the Nikkei community is limited, the reasons for the estrangement between these two groups has not been adequately explored. Ijusha are often unwilling to participate in Nikkei activities, and instead tend to merge directly into Canadian society by utilizing their high occupational skills and language ability. In this paper, I use data collected through participant observation and interviews with ijusha to discuss their sense of cultural belonging. As a result of this research, I have identified four factors that contribute to the gap between ijusha and the Nikkei community. They are 1) a denial of Japan, 2) de-abroadization, 3) the media, and 4) lifestyle migration and plural homes