Abstract. Jackie J. Kim-Wachutka, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
Imaginary Spaces of "Nation" and "Transnation": Communicative Memories and Collaborative narratives of Aging Migrants in Japan.
Within transnational migration and aging, empowering themes such as residential strategies for purposes of obtaining social entitlements, health and welfare services, cost-effective quality care, and other benefits reveal proactive agency of aging migrants. Simultaneously, technological advances allow fast travel and innovations of digital communication compress multi-national spaces, enabling aging migrants to practice transnational activities and maintain connection with family and social networks in their country of origin. Needless to say, however, aging migrants also face numerous vulnerabilities, dilemmas, and challenges. Specifically in Japan, a country perceived to be ethnically "homogeneous;" analysis of the lifespan trajectories of migrants, their transnational strategies and practices, and importantly their aging process is only currently gaining attention.
Through transnational communication strategies and practices within their immediate community, aging migrants in Japan reveal an interweaving of ethnicity, gender, class, educational and social status, political alignments, and the consequences of wars and division, as they age as the "other". Their "in place" domestic transnational experience indeed goes beyond nation-states, territories, and borders and is located in nostalgic memories of "homeland" and an imaginary "nation," with all of its emotive symbols, meanings, and connections. Rekindled memories through reconstruction and performative narrative acts merge the temporal and spatial realms of the old and the past within the present, serving as strategies for physical, psychological, and emotional wellbeing. Intergenerational collaboration transports constructed memories of "nation'' and its "cultural tradition'' through conscious narrative utterances that tell and retell lived historical realities and shared experiences of the past within present space. Aged migrants and the younger generation of caregivers perform "nation" within the boundaries of a shared imaginary as the "other" by communicating their historical realities and biographies that fuel each other's collective memory and narrative. Within transnational spaces of aging migrants in Japan, communicating "country of origin;" "crossing borders;" emphasis on "our culture and tradition," "national affinities and their dilemma;" "shared migratory history;" and "overcoming hardships and social struggles" provides a sense of being and belonging through recognizing "commonness in difference".