Caring For Elderly Parents In Japan While Living Abroad: Transnationalism, Mobilities, And Long-Term Strategies
Caring For Elderly Parents In Japan While Living Abroad: Transnationalism, Mobilities, And Long-Term Strategies

Author(s): Yana Yovcheva
Subject(s): Gerontology, Migration Studies
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Caring For Elderly Parents; Japan While Living Abroad; Transnationalism; Mobilities; Long-Term Strategies;
Summary/Abstract: When the words ‘care’ and ‘transnational migration’ are used in one sentence, what typically comes to mind are migrants – usually women – who move to another country in order to care for children or elderly people there because the latter’s own family are in a more advantageous position and have other priorities. In view of the constantly increasing movement of foreign health, residential and domestic care workers to rapidly-aging upper- and middle-income countries, researchers have developed the concept of global care chains (Hochschild 2000, Parreñas 2005, Yeates 2009). Defined as “a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring” (Hochschild 2000: 131), the chain extracts physical and emotional labor upwards to the Global North (or, the core), leaving the Global South (or, the periphery) as a reservoir of care workers (Yeates 2009, Raghuram, Bornat & Henry 2011). These chains “cascade downwards and incorporate labor that at each stage is remunerated to lesser extent” (Kofman & Raghuram 2012: 8). For instance, a woman in a poor country migrates from the big city to a wealthy country to work as a domestic maid; she, in turn, relies on another woman from the countryside to migrate to the big city to care for her children and/or elderly parents in her absence; she, in turn, relies on (female) relatives to care for her own children and/or elderly parents back in the countryside. As Ormond & Toyota (2018) point out, care deficits are passed downward in distinctly gendered, racialized and classed manners.

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