This project supports the dissertation research of an anthropology student from the University of Colorado. The student will study the relationship between Japanese corporate wives' self-identity and their experience of home-making in the alien environment, for them, of the United States. As wives and mothers, Japanese women are responsible for the cultural reproduction of the home, and the project will investigate how they cope with the challenges of reproducing a Japanese home in a foreign place. The student has studied Japanese wives in a small, dispersed expatriate community in Denver. This project will extend her ethnographic, participant-observation research into two other expatriate communities: in a medium-size `company town` environment in Ohio, and in a large, diverse expatriate community in the NYC metropolitan area. In each area she will develop an informant pool of 15-20 key housewife informants and will interview Japanese corporate officials, government officials, and other professionals who come into contact with Japanese residents. Variables to be studied include corporate organization and policies, the employment situation, subjects' life history, and social networks. This research is important because it will add to our knowledge of how the transnational, globalization of families affects their core function of reproducing home culture while adapting positively to an alien location. Japan, as a world power, has long had expatriate families in other regions of the world, who have remained distinctively `Japanese`. This research will advance our understanding of the fundamental processes of this sort of cultural creation and maintenance in this important case.
