How do Western immigrants make lives for themselves in Japan⁰́₄where many do not feel they can ever fully belong? And how do they navigate that society to create the lives that they want while being so obviously, unavoidably, and permanently marked as outsiders? Through an exploration of the experiences of a group of migrants who, by definition of the society they have immigrated to, cannot fully assimilate, in this dissertation I examine the intersections between various personal characteristics and migrants' experiences and processes of adaptation. The objective of this study was to not only collect accounts of this group of migrants' experiences in Japan, but how and why those experiences differ; how migrants' decisions, the strategies they employ, and the effectiveness of those strategies are influenced by both their individual identities and the social and structural constraints of Japanese society.Unlike many migrants elsewhere, Westerners in Japan must accept that by choosing to settle in Japan, they are constructing their lives there in a permanently liminal space. This limbo Westerners occupy, within but never truly "inside" Japanese society, is marked by both constraints (e.g. restrictive immigration policies; an exclusionary, ethnoracially based conception of Japaneseness) that prevent them from fully integrating into Japanese society (if desired), and freedoms that afford Westerners a remarkable degree of flexibility in crafting exactly the lives they wish to live and social and employment opportunities that would not exist if they lived elsewhere. The tension between these two aspects of life in Japan simultaneously produces in them the desire to further integrate and resistance to further integration. Despite stark differences among migrants' lived experiences based on factors like gender, sexuality, ethnicity, country of origin, overall, those who chose to live long-term in Japan felt strongly that the good aspects of their lives there far outweighed the bad. Participants argued this was due to the fact that their obvious non-Japanese-ness both eclipsed characteristics (e.g., sexuality, religion) that marked them as different in their home countries and afforded them considerable freedom to shape their lives according as they wished.Using a combination of common sociocultural anthropological research methods (participant observation, interviews, surveys, and document analysis), in this research I investigated how these migrants create lives for themselves within this liminal space, accepting⁰́₄and in many cases enjoying⁰́₄this aspect of their lives as immigrants in Japan. Surprisingly, I found that this freedom is a product of the way Japaneseness is defined; since they cannot become fully Japanese, they are freed from many of the restrictions and expectations that they would otherwise be expected to adhere to. This research therefore contributes to the recent efforts by migration scholars to expand the diversity of migrant groups and flows being studied, and further the development of more nuanced understandings of migrant adaptation strategies in relation to the societies they settle in.
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