Indian Women Life Stories in Japan

With :

Megha Wadhwa (Research Associate at Free University of Berlin, and a visiting fellow at Sophia University, Tokyo)
Chair : Aki Yoshida (Maitresse de langue à l’Inalco et chercheuse associée à l’IFRAE et docteur en littérature japonaise)
Discutant : Laure Sizaire (post-doctorante, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains. Université Libre de Bruxelles, fellow de l’Institut Convergences Migrations)

“Finding their niche : unheard stories of migrant women“, 2023
An hour-long film documents the life of two Indian women migrants who moved to Japan more than a decade ago as trailing spouses. The women were excited to move to a foreign country and to be with their husbands, but they had no prior knowledge of Japan. Having witnessed at a distance the lives of their relatives settled in the US, UK, and Canada, they had similar expectations for their own future lives in Japan. But the reality was to prove different from the expectation. Through personal narratives told by the women, we examine past, present and future expectations and see how these affect their roles as Indian women, wives, mothers, and workers in a foreign country, as well as the challenges they faced in ‘Finding their Niche’.

Director’s Biography – Dr. Megha Wadhwa is a migration researcher and Japanese and Indian studies Scholar. She is a Research Associate at Free University of Berlin, and a visiting fellow at Sophia University, Tokyo, which is also her alma mater. Originally from New Delhi and she was a resident of Tokyo for about 15 years before she moved to Berlin in 2021. She is the author of the book ‘Indian Migrants in Tokyo: A Study of Socio-Cultural, Religious and Working Worlds’ (Routledge:2021). She has also written several articles on the Indian community in Japan and other topics for The Japan Times and journals. Currently she is working on ‘Indian Professionals in Japan and Singapore: Migration Trends, Labor Market Integration and Challenges’ and is a part of the research project – ‘Qualifications and Skill in the Migration Process of Foreign Workers in Asia’(QuaMaFA), supported by Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany (BMBF)