
Home Away from Home: Japanese Corporate Wives in the United States
Sawa Kurotani
Kurotani interviewed and spent time with more than 120 women in three U.S. locations with sizable expatriate Japanese communities: Centerville, a pseudonymous Midwestern town; the New York metropolitan area; and North Carolina’s Research Triangle area. She highlights the contradictory situations faced by the transient wives. Their husbands’ assignments in the United States typically last from three to five years, and they frequently emphasize the temporariness of their situation, referring to it as a “long vacation.” Yet they are responsible for creating comfortable homes for their families, which necessitates producing a familiar and permanent environment. Kurotani looks at the dynamic friendships that develop among the wives and describes their feelings about returning to Japan. She conveys how their sense of themselves as Japanese women, of home, and of their relationships with family members are altered by their personal experiences of transnational homemaking.
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About Sawa Kurotani
Reviews for Home Away from Home: Japanese Corporate Wives in the United States
Cory Taylor
Asian Studies Review
“Sawa Kurotani offers an engaging and persuasive account of how the kaigai-chûzai experience, or corporate overseas posting, affects Japanese housewives. . . . There is much to recommend in this enjoyable and elegantly written study.”
Ronald P. Loftus
Journal of Gender Studies
"Home Away from Home offers an interesting and highly readable account of small communities of Japanese expatriate wives in the United States. . . . These are indeed interesting findings which add to our understanding of aspects of the very complex phenomenon of globalisation."
Rumi Sakamoto
The Australian Journal of Anthropology
"Sawa Kurotani's ethnographic work . . . is . . . a delightfully easy read for anyone interested in the ideology of Japanese domestic life. . . . Revealing. . . . Fascinating."
Colin Donald
Daily Yomiuri