Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan [email protected]
Abstract As Japan has started to come to terms with the emergence of an ageing society with a low birth rate, it has also had to face a shortage of care labour. Both the state and individuals have mobilized new sources of care work, and in so doing have transformed relations between Asian countries. Within this context, there has been a change in that long-term Filipina residents in Japan are now seen as an alternative source of care workers. Previous relations between Japan and the Philippines were structured through the experience of Filipina entertainers and hostesses. Yet, a shift to Filipina migrant care workers in response to labour market demands has been accompanied by a discursive transformation that affect long-term Filipina residents in Japan. Based on ethnographic observation of a course run for caregivers, in this article I examine how foreign nationals’ affective labour can be perceived. I further propose locating care within a broader transnational sphere, a ‘curo-scape’ that is to say, a transnational sphere of administering and managing care at not just a trans-regional and global level but also at a local state one.
Keywords CARE LABOUR, AFFECTIVE LABOUR, AGEING, JAPAN, THE PHILIPPINES, TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION, ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENTS
Care for the elderly has become an area of intense concern: who will provide it, how can it be valorized and within what framework should it be organized? (Izuhara 2006; Sazaki 2008). The Japanese population’s high levels of longevity is partly based on unprecedented welfare support, yet paradoxically, the country suffers from a lack of care workers and nurses to support a burgeoning elderly population (Kawamura 2007; Song 2007). In response, Japan is tentatively trialling nurses and caregivers from both Indonesia and the Philippines under Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), establishing new transnational links across and within Southeast Asia. Between 2008 and 2011, more than 1300 nurse and certified care worker ‘candidates’ entered Japan (Ohno 2011). However, these new links build on foundations laid by previous transnational relations, in this case a flow of migrants nominally employed as entertainers and hostesses. In this article, I focus specifically on the relations between Japan and the Philippines and explore how some local Japanese actors interpret
Reconstituting the affective labour of Filipinos as care workers in Japan
transnational relations within the context of Japan’s demographic and societal change. Conceptualizations of the capacity of Filipino migrants not only reorganize the relationship between state, market and family but also transform labour relations by seeing migrants in terms of a new discourse of care. This article has two main aims. The first is to show how, alongside the highly publicized EPAs, there are also lesser-known movements within Japan to procure and offer work to long-term foreign Filipino residents, as ‘supplemental’ caregivers. The second is to show how this has taken place through a discursive shift that shows how some long-term Filipino residents are being seen as ‘good carers’, at both a macro and micro-level.
What I suggest in this article is that at a micro-level, some local Japanese actors have been proactively rethinking the status of immigrants. This runs in parallel with the Japanese government, which is currently legitimizing longer-term arrangements that manifest themselves under the mantle of EPAs. These parallel trends are part of a rapidly changing field of relations. Following Appadurai (1994) in terms of global-scapes, I suggest we place these in what I term a ‘curo-scape’, namely a transnational sphere of administering and managing care that now operates just as much at a local state level as it does at a trans-regional and global one. With fertility rates dropping and populations ageing across other nations in the region, countries such as Singapore and Taiwan are also showing signs of meshing into this transnational sphere with proactive moves towards opening their markets to foreign care workers and marriage migrants (on the whole women) who care for families in receiving countries (Asato 2008; Pei-Chia 2003).
Japan is also beset by these regional issues and reframing some Filipino residents as potential caregivers has created conditions to fashion new frameworks that meet the ‘interim needs’ of the Japanese economy. Yet, I also want to try to understand the positionality of different actors who engage with Filipino residents. In this article, I dwell on local Japanese actors (as in the organizers of a caregiver course to be dis-cussed later) who reflect on changing relations. I do this to highlight how changing discourses about Filipino migrant residents permit them to reconstitute themselves and constitute others. These perceptions of migrants are based just as much on specific local conceptualizations of care/welfare that reside in different overlapping periods in Japan’s modern history as on present-day discourses. The analysis derives from participant observation of a caregiver course run exclusively for Filipinos in southern Japan. I present individual narratives collected in the field from a course run privately, but with approval and recognition from local government and the tacit approval of local Japanese NGOs.
What this article clarifies is that the precarious nature of care resources compels the state to build a tentative framework for the transfer of care labour, while simul-taneously reorganizing it at a closer, more intimate level. We need to take into consideration the dilemma that the transnational dimension of care now presents: how do you incorporate previously categorized bodies? The answer is by reconstituting Filipinos and incorporating them into the global/local market. This effects how easily one can reclassify some actors (women or men) as possessing affective labour suitable for changing demographic needs.
Care as an expression of transnational global flows
In the past ten years, care has come under the scrutiny of researchers analysing the policies, practices and organizational shifts that have occurred as Japan engages with its ageing crisis. The transnational nature of these shifts should not to be under-estimated. Both Indonesia and the Philippines have ratified Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) that have led to flows of caregivers and nurses into Japan (see Ogawa 2010; Ohno et al. 2010a, 2010b). This followed an earlier flow of Filipina labour, which started in the late 1970s, in which migrants came as entertainers (Ballescas 1992). These diversified forms of migration are showing a tendency to converge under the rubric of care. However, in Japan and the Philippines, the rise of international marriages has played a role in mobilizing female migrants to Japan as well as to other nations as marriage migrants (Constable 2009). It is important to recognize from the outset that previous migration streams created the conditions for international marriages to arise. They laid the groundwork for a reorientation of perceptions towards seeing the Filipinas’ latent capacity to be ‘good carers’ (Ogawa 2010). The discursive reallocation of one form of relationship into a new set of categories gives rise to a new series of relationships. This, however, is not to slight the Filipino government’s desire to see nurses and carers accepted in Japan as part of its labour export strategy.
Between 1992 and 2006, over half of all the Filipino overseas foreign workers (OFWs) were women, and the majority worked as domestic labourers (Asato 2010). As Parreñas (2001, 2005) has recorded, this outflow undermines the women’s care for their own families. Research outside Japan, in Taiwan, has shown how national identity, gender and racial characteristics naturalize to create discourses on what Filipino caregivers can offer (Cheng 2004). In the Canadian context, Pratt (1999) described the stigmatization of domestic Filipino workers in Vancouver as inferior housekeepers who endure non-citizen categorizations as live-in nannies. Other research has also singled out the Philippines for operating as a labour-broker par excellence, creating, promoting and reinforcing a truly transnational network that plugs into and analyses all the demands of foreign nations for their interim labour needs (Guevarra 2009; Rodriguez 2010). These studies highlight the effects of displacement on individuals who leave families and the disruption that affects their capacity to develop empathy-affecting relations with close kin (Isaksen et al. 2008). Yet, the focus on state apparatuses and displaced women, mothers and children in the concept of a care chain can hide how other actors in the chain react to changing notions of care. Actors high up in this hierarchical chain can see and recognize the flight of care from one intimate space to another, yet desire to participate in what Isaksen et al. describe as a ‘socio-emotional commons’. This term, expands on Yeates’s theoretical development of global care chains beyond a narrow focus solely on migrant care workers (Yeates 2004).
Although multiple regimes of care exist in different cultural and social settings, Slote (2007) has emphasized how those receiving care can exert a moral claim or demand to the right to care over those who provide it. This legitimizes and produces
Reconstituting the affective labour of Filipinos as care workers in Japan
relations between the cared and carers. Groenhout (2004: 32–3) has also emphasized that care is an embodied practice concerned with the physical and psychosocial needs of particular persons. In the case of aged dependants, this relationship is predicated on recognizing that bodies and their care at any stage in the human life cycle matter. Yet, embodied care practices are subject to different cultural regimes that discipline how agents function in society, give and require care. What we need to ask here is how care from others is understood as an expression of transnational global cultural flows.
Transnational systems that once accepted females in limited categories (as entertainer, bride and/or wife) are now shifting towards a new one – care. This in itself is part of a growing trend seen in a number of countries where there has been a shift in care from being a non-waged service that took place within homes, to one that is waged and classified as a commodified service (McDowell 2009). As McDowell makes clear, the transnational nature of labour movements is extra-local whereby the needs of local labour markets are transformed by demographic change for affective and embodied care work (McDowell 2009: 217). Thus, as changes and forms of participation in the labour force increase, minorities are increasingly being employed as care workers outside their country of origin. This engenders precarity over care resources and compels states to build tentative frameworks for the transfer of care labour, yet at the same time a reorganization of labour at a closer, more intimate level also occurs.
Localizing the wider sphere of Filipina care labour
The Philippines has long had connections to the rest of the world through extensive trade and migration (Aguilar 2010; Tyner 2009). Japanese nationals first migrated to the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth century (Ohno 2005). Filipinos came to Japan from the 1880s onwards, albeit predominantly in the field of entertainment (Yu-Jose 1992, 2002). America’s hegemonic influence in the Philippines complicated these international flows, for the USA laid the foundations for a hospital training system, which began exporting nurses early on (Choy 2003). The flows have inten-sified over the past 30 years, with both countries deepening an ambivalent relation-ship while articulating images of Filipinas as female others. As numerous researchers have made clear, these articulations have discursively constructed not only Filipinos, but also Japan vis-à-vis the Philippines. Images of Filipinas have veered from mail-order brides to entertainer; from victim to gold-digger; and as a source of exoticism and otherness (Shimizu 1996; Suzuki 1997, 2003; Tyner 1996); or placing them round the axis of ‘Japayuki’, a term whose connotations have derogatorily and discursively limited how Filipinas have been seen in Japanese society (Yamatani 1985). External ‘third party’ influence has also been crucial in locating the other. A steady flow of ‘entertainers’ from the Philippines continued to enter Japan on short-term visas until 2005 when the Japanese government, under pressure from the USA, reformed the Immigration and Control and Refugee Act. In 2006, the US State Department published the Trafficking in Persons Report (DOS 2006). This pointed out that Japan had yet to comply in improving the situation of persons trafficked to Japan. In effect,
it labelled Japan as a Tier 2 trafficking destination.1 It is interesting to note how the language in the document links foreign women to Yakuza, glossing over the more complex processes through which women (and men) go through travelling between both countries. This led to a sharp decrease (of 42 per cent) in the number of women entering from the Philippines under the category of entertainer (MOJ 2006). This change also took place through advocacy for reform in the deployment of Filipino entertainers and pressure from NGOs who welcomed the changes.2
These changes have taken place while Japan was undergoing a great demographic shift. Some 22.1 per cent of the population is now over 65, and this is forecast to rise to 40.5 per cent by 2055 (MOH 2009a). There has been a corresponding surge in demand for care workers, of which there is currently a shortfall. In part, this is due to low caregiver salaries and the low status of care work in comparison with other occu-pations. As of 2010 the average wage has been revised to 231,366 yen ($2564) from the previous 214,866 ($2318) (MOH 2010), but this is still inadequate for workers who need to support themselves. This has led a few Japanese nationals who cannot afford care in Japan to receive it directly in the Philippines (Inaba 2008). The Japan–Philippine Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) was a bilateral trade treaty ratified in October 2008 between two nations. It was ordained to promote ‘the trans-border flow of goods, persons, services and capital between Japan and the Philippines’ (MOFA 2004). This change of focus framed in supposedly mutually beneficial terms, elides the foundations upon which the relations are built – labour export, the subsequent alienation of individual members of families and the global restructuring of their care resources directed for other overseas markets. Ballescas (2009) has rightly highlighted how the current gendered composition of migrants from the Philippines has its roots in the 1973 Philippine Japan Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation (PJTACN). The JPEPA belongs in a continuum of pro-moting an export-oriented labour migration policy and has two streams within which nurses and care workers can enter Japan. Nurses must graduate from a four-year university course, possess a Filipino nursing licence and have at least three years of work experience. Care workers must have been to a four-year Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) accredited course. Those who apply for (and are selected for) deployment to Japan receive six months of training, before working in a facility and studying for either the nursing care worker or nursing national board exam. Although the Japanese government has created an organiza-tional and administrative framework for accepting nurses and has officially expressed ‘general satisfaction’, the hurdles for working in Japan have been high (MOH 2009b). As of 2010, only three people (one Filipino and two Indonesian nurses) have passed the official exam, which has led to its revision for foreign nationals.3
In one respect, JPEPA’s orientation underlies a Filipino export-orientated strategy for sending nurses abroad and it rests on capitalizing on a notion of service. Yet, in more general terms, the Philippines has been criticized for creating a transnational ‘labour-brokerage system’ sustained by both the state and workers themselves (see Rodriguez 2010 and Guevarra 2009). This transfer of services leads to what are ‘externalized costs’, counted as the displacement of care for others at the expense of
Reconstituting the affective labour of Filipinos as care workers in Japan
close kin, family and children (Isaksen et al. 2008). This repackaging of a relationship (from entertainment-based services to care-based services) is not, however, purely the result of macro-level forces. Though JPEPA acts as an interface between two nations, expressing a care chain in a complicated curo-scape where management and the administering of care for the nation takes place, a focus on the above can hide other domestic movements that run parallel.
Situating domestic Filipina care workers
To develop the above arguments, I turn to an ethnographic analysis of Japanese nationals’ personal reflections about their encounters with Filipinos, and look into how they locate them in their own histories. In 2005, a privately funded non-profit venture was set up for Filipina residents in southern Japan with the aim of training them to be caregivers. Validated and acknowledged by the local prefectural govern-ment and with later tacit approval from NGOs and the local Filipino community, the training was for groups of 20 participants paying initially 60,000 yen ($485) for a three-month course, including training and textbooks.4 The course included two full days of instruction each week, supplemented with placement training in the final weeks. It was created by a retired bank manager, whose son had wanted to set up a carer service agency, mainly targeting Indonesia (through the Indonesian Ministry of Health) and the Philippines (through private enterprise), but died before starting the venture. The director, a former bank manager, decided to focus solely on Filipinas in the local area. By 2009, the programme had trained over 110 graduates from six batches of trainees; 25 were working in hospitals and nursing homes. The agency also directly founded a nursing home. Participant observation took place in 2005/6. It involved interviewing the director, three trainers in the first two batches, ten women on the course and two care home managers employing Filipinas. There were subsequent interviews and follow-up participant observation with staff and workers in a daycare centre created by the venture, and other daycare centres where Filipinas were employed between 2007 and 2010.
Although a limited sample, there were numerous common themes in our discussions. In particular, there was an acute anxiety over the future reproduction of Japanese society. Within the context of this concern, Filipinas were seen to have a predisposition to care for the elderly and show respect for them; they were perceived to be representative of social values that no longer exist in Japan. The director of the course, a frank man, Hashimoto-san,5 summarized his venture in terms of a familiar issue, the precariousness of the future reproduction of Japanese society. This preoccupation, however, is expressed first in economic terms:
You know with care … if you compare the care industry with others, you see how other companies, on realizing the costs in paying for labour at home, go to other countries to set up shop in China, the Philippines and so on, make factories and employ local cheap labour. Then look at Japan. We have one of the world’s most advanced welfare systems and yet we are the world’s number
one ageing industrialized society. If we follow the logic of other industries should we take all our aged overseas to get cheap care (sarcastically laughs) … it’s because of the cost.
This initial reference, however, links to a deeper framework that underlines the precarious nature of the situation, of who can be qualified to care for others in the long term and what qualities they may possess to do so.
You know Filipinas they have pride, know how to care, they have self-esteem and know how to respect others … they have all of this. And, they do this better than the Japanese … you know, I think that their respect for humans, their pride and so on … they have it a lot more than we do.
The director uses the terms ‘pride’ and ‘respect’, which are incorporated into the lexicon for describing bodies. This orientation of terms is based on his observation of other courses run in other parts of the country. An outward gaze can be located in a discourse of the observed and the observer. At a macro level, observations clarify anxiety in terms of procuring and providing care, whereas at a micro level the potential of long-term foreign residents who have been observed in the framework of entertainer can now be reappraised for offering care that excels that of the Japanese. This may read as a crude and simplistic juxtaposition illustrating a transition between entertainer and care worker. As stated previously, Filipinos in Japan have been dis-cursively located in a number of negative categories from which it has been difficult to escape. The use of terms such as respect and pride can locate these observations on two levels – renegotiating ‘qualities’ (or drawing upon hitherto undervalued ones) and finding a way to have minority groups re-commodified and recognized in the body politic. If we tie this to the curo-scape we can see that what is at work here is a pro-cess that reorientates perceptions of the affectivity of others. Yet, I want to complicate this reading by introducing further reflections that deepen the field in which care is situated – within actors’ own histories and trajectories in Asia and further afield.
You know, we had WWII. We were blamed for it. My father, he fought in the war for five years … in Malaysia and Indonesia, but he came back. The war finished, but then we had the cold war. … The atomic bombs were dropped and disaster fell upon us. It wasn’t that Japan had slipped back to a starting point, we were utterly destroyed. We rebuilt the country. We went from rags to riches. I was five at the end of the war, but even in all that poverty, my father worked bloody hard for us. All of that generation worked for the nation, to enrich the nation as fast as possible, my father’s generation and mine. We were the Gundam generation – corporate warriors, soldiers.
(Director Hashimoto-san)
This reflection on family, nation and the economy shows a more complex picture within which the present-day dilemmas are located for some actors. Care is wrapped
Reconstituting the affective labour of Filipinos as care workers in Japan
in a work ethic ingrained in a previous welfare regime where the allusion to sacrifice is located in nation building and now its preservation.
The narrative threads of this individual are very powerful because they show how actors can constitute not only others but also themselves in specific social and historical processes. This theme can be traced further through another frank discussion with a trainer, Nagata-san, a retired businessman who gave specialist Japanese language instruction about working in nursing homes. His personal experiences were rooted in how Japanese society saw Filipina women.
For example, if a Filipina is working in a hostess bar … giving entertainment and serving a drink it is not care, but a service … a kind of arrangement (tehai no shurui). In Filipino you might say it is a form of obligation … you are a giver … you provide a service. You put yourself out to provide a service. What I want say is that we are not on an equal footing. … Those women who work in these places understand the relationship between men and women. I don’t think this has even changed now. Even if I have come to see sense now, even when I go home, I think I still look down on women.
Although the above commentary finishes with the trainer’s personal reflections on the role of women in Japanese society, the arrangements mentioned here for Filipinas as entertainers were, to a certain extent, carried over into the structure of his teaching in the caregiver course. The understanding is that the course is an investment for the women who take the course (which it is), yet it invests not just in care, but within a rubric tainted by the recent past in which Filipinos have predominantly been seen within the context of entertainers over the past 20 years. When asked about the need for a care course (in particular for resident Filipinos), his response was to locate the discussion in another series of levels – on economic and market terms.
We know that here in Japan the shrinking workforce is a deciding factor for societal change. This is going to be the topic for the next 30 years … you need to tell more people about this care-work issue. You need to tell people that we are suffering a chronic shortage of workers and you need to tell people that we need to ask foreign workers to come over and do this. The time has come to ask others to come and help (Onegai suru jidai wa yatto kimashita).
(Nagata-san)
This clearly acknowledges a shift in Japan’s economic situation over the past decade. There has not only been a change in perception of foreign workers but also anxiety over the unpredictability of market forces. That the Japanese term onegai, literally meaning ‘wish’ or ‘request’, is used, stresses the exigency of the perceived current situation. Anxiety is a key undertone, concerning the precarious nature of Japan’s future wellbeing in economic and socio-historical terms.
These narratives share a realization of the perceived precariousness facing Japanese society. These two senior citizens (both retired), involved in a non-profit
venture with no direct relation to state structures (apart from working within validated parameters), express a series of relations that are embedded in Japan’s recent past. They reflect back into their recent lived/experienced past to locate the current dilemmas of the country. We also see in this reflection a collection of images of Filipinos and the perceptions of them that have been constructed over the years. There is, however, a sense that these perceptions are changing in that there also exists the acknowledgement of meeting halfway, of cooperation and working in tandem.
In a separate interview with Hasegawa-san, a female trainer in her early fifties who has worked for more than ten years as a professional care trainer, she spoke about the need to reorient care labour in Japanese society and add intimacy to what has increasingly become an undervalued and highly mechanized profession. She joined the venture in 2009 and her interactions with Filipina trainees left her with the impression that Japanese people had highly regularized caring through a ‘formal textbook’ approach. Through teaching Filipinas, and working at a slower pace with them, she felt that they were more ‘inclined’ to caring than other professions:
In Japanese we have an expression: matching the right people for the right places (tekizai tekijo wo okonau koto). I really think that in this sense, Filipinas are the right people for this kind of work. But, with regard to the right places, it’s difficult to say if these places are the right places for them. This is a difficult issue. If the system doesn’t change, if homes don’t manage their staff (Filipinas) we send out, they will buckle under the pressure.
The inclinations expressed above highlight the trainer’s perceptions of how and where the women can work from her perspective, stressing the ‘perceived’ benefits that Filipinas can potentially derive from the course. Although real chances do exist through going on the course, these perceived inclinations do not necessarily match with those of the Filipinas who participated in the course, some of whom saw the skills they could gain as part of a repertoire of expanding opportunities. One participant from the second batch of trainees was a divorcee in her late thirties with two children. She worked both during the day and in the evenings and noted that ‘this is a useful investment, but I don’t know if I can do this work full time to live off and support my families … but it is another string to my bow if the situation changes.’
This ‘string’ I later discovered was for learning a set of skills for caring for her elderly parents whom she felt she would have to go back and care for at some point in the near future. Another Filipina in her mid-thirties noted how care work was an extension of something with which she was already familiar. Also divorced, with two children in elementary school, she added with a sarcastic sigh of resignation, ‘Oh well, this is something we are used to, after all we did nothing but care for our papa-san (husband)!’
This resignation is problematic and points to a wider dynamic of engagement within which some actors now work as carers. On one visit to the daycare centre to observe interactions between Filipina staff and the elderly with whose care they were entrusted, an elderly male client in his eighties forcefully grabbed a Filipina’s breasts
Reconstituting the affective labour of Filipinos as care workers in Japan
causing her pain. She pushed him off her saying, ‘Dame da yo! Sore wo sende! – Don’t do that! It is wrong!’ When asked if this occurred regularly, she replied, ‘we are used to it’. The use of we points to some of the everyday challenges that women collectively face in negotiating caring. The Filipinas I interviewed and to whom I spoke in the first stages of the course all showed hesitancy about whether they could work as carers afterwards. In fact, only a few from the first two batches secured work and were aware that they were part of an experimental trial. Yet, this did not stop a number of enterprising women toying with the idea of setting up their own services outside the remit of the programme. There are clearly two sets of interests at work here – those of the actors who want to hold onto their own agency and decision making and the interests of Japanese nationals who see Filipinos as providers of services.
Reciprocal restructuring of care workers
Bodily contact zones also create different reactions between actors that in turn lead to the reciprocal restructuring of relations. Moreover, it is in the training facility and care homes where Filipinas are sent where relations are scrutinized and reinterpreted. An interview with the owner of a medium-sized nursing home can help us understand how the discursive space in which caregivers reside is constructed and interpreted. Kubota-san, an old hand at working in and owning her own nursing home, accepted two graduates from the first batch and this attracted some interest from the media, though both eventually quit with one ‘defecting’ to another competing training school in the area. When asked about the media view of Filipinas, before and after the course had run, and how the local media had interviewed her on her new staff, Kubota-san presented the following observation:
One thing I can say that they all had in common (implied by their questioning) was that Filipinos working as carers will usher in a new period. In my case, I was asked how we would deal with any problems we might encounter in employing Filipinos. That is what they wanted to hear. That is how they interviewed me. I told them that we had no problems and my impression is that they were disappointed with my replies. … It seemed that they were expecting me to talk about integration problems. They wanted to hear that we were resistant to accepting Filipinos. That is what I felt they wanted to hear, but it is not what I gave them.
(Kubota-san)
Juxtaposing this positive reception and resistance to depicting Filipinas in a negative light, however, is the ‘good carer’ rhetoric that again places Filipinos in multiple vectors relating to their position in Japanese society and further afield:
The Filipinos I have met are really good at communication. If you want me to give you my opinion of the Japanese now they are like robots. That is why they (the Filipinas) are so good at caring. They have love towards the family
(Kazoku ni ai wa aru yo). They look after their families. Their love is their starting point (Ai wa genten desu). They look after other families’ elderly (users) as they would look after their own.
(Kubota-san)
The terms ‘love’ and ‘family’ extend to nursing clientele, an inherent characteristic that is lacking in the ‘robotic’ Japanese. This is located in another rubric on the dependency of Japan on other nations, a dependency that now includes the inevitability of care with a shift from the personal micro-level politics of the nursing home, to the broader more encompassing ‘we’ of the nation.
We (ware ware) are dependent on foreign imports … our economy is dependent upon all of the things we take for granted. Yet, when it comes to employment, bringing in labour from overseas is another story. There is the idea that they will damage the country. We don’t want to take a policy whereby we demand care workers who are ‘perfect’ Japanese speakers, but speakers who can care. In their case, they are full of love, so when they speak words come out naturally.
(Kubota-san)
Although the above comments finish with personal reflections on the role of women in helping to offer a sense of stability in the face of radical demographic transformation, all the above conversations suggest that investment is more a Japanese interest than one of furthering mutually beneficial relations. The Filipinas are also endowed with expectations; to state that ‘they’ are full of ‘love’ and speak ‘naturally’ is to insinuate that the Japanese are lacking in this area.
In a separate interview with another care manager, the juxtaposition of Japanese and Filipino staff was made clear. Akita-san, the owner of a multi-purpose daycare centre for the elderly, employed three Filipinas and four Japanese on his staff. After approaching the course director, he tried out one Filipina before employing two others. Akita-san was at first disconcerted by their spontaneous and intimate empathizing with users of the centre’s facilities, something that he starkly contrasted with his own staff.
My staff, who are all professionals and have been to properly accredited academies learn how to be carers and do everything by the book. Everything is done as it is spelt out in the book. It is (care) like paperwork that has to be filled out correctly … they consciously create divisions of labour. But, what I most noticed when Mary came here is that she and the other Filipinas have a totally different outlook toward caring.
(Akita-san)
What is interesting here are the observations about the Japanese employees dividing labour and Akita-san’s observations of Mary’s intimate, but public bodily
Reconstituting the affective labour of Filipinos as care workers in Japan
interactions with home users. In particular, he observed how when they bathed their elderly clients it was ‘quality time’; Filipinas offered ‘sukkinshippu’ (intimate contact) as opposed to the more systematic and timed approach his Japanese staff took. These comments are interesting in the sense that they come from bodily observations and comparisons of care regimes and the alternatives already existing in Japan. One can relate these observations to the wider framework the Japanese were developing through the JPEPA. When asked what he thought about the government’s trial of Filipino nurses he stated:
I think that the EPA is a total failure. It is just an economic transaction and cannot succeed because you are just bringing over people, training them and then dispatching them to institutions without truly considering what they can do. On this small scale, I think it is viable to use Filipinos who live locally, know Japanese and also know how to care in their own contexts. Just by seeing how they work here in our home has made me see the possibilities.
Both through repeated interviews with course providers and care managers employing Filipinas, actors interpret relations and construct a ‘caring affective side’ of Filipinas in Japan. This provides a dynamic situation for potential negotiation, persuasion, and tension among local actors (both course providers and participants working in an intimate curo-scape they are responsible for imagining and putting into practice) who come under the direct remit of the Japanese state (in the form of care institutions, hospitals and nursing homes). This also sets up a dominant discourse that delineates how Filipinas are perceived in market terms. As Ueno (2008) has pointed out, these domestic changes are also transnational ones where emphasis shifts towards the reproduction of female workers in Asia for more intimate care markets, with a move away from production based activities to affective labour. At the same time a more complicated picture exists where the trajectory of a particular generation of Japanese nationals, raised in postwar Japan, with access to a lifetime of experience and, more importantly, strong social capital, are reconstituting themselves and other actors in response to demographic change and existing possibilities.
Within the first few years, most women trained in the course did not use their new qualifications to find work. This may indicate a resistance to the discursive practices that continue to direct them towards gendered care work. However, the success of the course lies in the wider ramifications of a discourse that recommodifies women perceived to have been entertainers, now shedding one image for another. This repackaging of relations has found itself expressed in the national media. One example is an article in the Shukan Post, one of Japan’s top selling tabloids, entitled ‘Whose hand are you going to hold when you depart? Filipina hostesses attend to the final moments’. An undated photo from a previous decade shows four Filipinas, microphones in hand, gazing into the camera from a stage with the caption underneath stating, ‘One time hostesses from the Filipina pub boom are now becoming helpers’. This is juxtaposed alongside another photo of Filipinas tending to an elderly person, highlighting the dramatic shift from entertainer to carer (Shukan Post 2008). In a
sense, this pilot scheme has (as with others around the country) played a role in reintroducing Filipina residents as ‘carers’ into Japanese society, and raising media interest in local ventures that work with long-term migrant residents. In one respect, this has given local actors an opportunity to face those who have worked, or continue to work, at night in the entertainment business. The presence of the particular course presented in this article has also acted as a trigger to forge new relations but it does so as part of an established framework where previous cross-cultural interactions took place through marriage and business ventures between Japanese and Filipino nationals. As Ballescas (2009: 134) notes here, the versatility of actors in this changing framework outpaces the state. Furthermore, the relations here also reveal actors who are not within the direct remit of state influence. In her work on the Filipino state’s institutionalization of transnational migration, Rodriguez (2010) argues that in sending out Filipino citizens with what seems to be little chance of developing opportunities not dictated by it, the state acts as a labour broker. This view is problematic, however, for Filipino actors have shown that they can exert their agency beyond the remit of both the Japanese and the Filipino states and, in the case of the Filipinas to whom I spoke, care is one life choice among others available to them as residents in Japan.
However, these transitions fail to alleviate the fundamental issue of the discursive reallocation of bodies: labour is repositioned through reconstituting who will care for others. Does this reconstitution really make a difference to a complicated socio-emotional transaction crosscut by the actors’ histories and relationships to the nation? Yes, it does when we understand that Filipinas are in a changing yet discursively feminized space in a ‘global care chain’. However, the concept of a chain can be mis-leading when we consider that care is a series of societal relations both within and outside the remit of capital relations. One cannot reduce care to pure market forces. One can see it as a genuine experiencing of relations beneficial to both carer and care recipient, a liberating experience for both parties and hence not solely a paid service. By placing what are multiple dimensions in a curo-scape, we can examine the different contours of relations that are cut across by social and historical forces and the articulation of the care regimes in defining actors in the present as expressed in the above narratives. One dimension that needs incorporation is the generational national consciousness that operates in locating female bodies not just in the present, but also in Japan’s recent past. I tentatively suggest that this reinscription of relations relocates the Philippines in an ethics of community and care that is diminishing in Japan where (re)productive labour is strategically placed in a curo-scape. Through legitimizing Filipinos as providers of care, this sphere of activity can be fashioned to provide concrete practices, as in the materialization of the caregiver course, to recycle, reimagine and feminize a workforce. The negative presence of the category ‘enter-tainer’6 justified creating the conditions for allowing Filipinos to step into a new community (an elusive re-entry as most have not pursued work with their qualifications) that had until now denied opportunities in Japan. Understanding actors’ individual approaches towards care requires a detailed analysis of their histories for they operate as a living framework bridging past and present.
Reconstituting the affective labour of Filipinos as care workers in Japan
Even though the formulation and implementation of the JPEPA programme simultaneously sets a broader operative framework, an ‘on-the-ground’ movement has already proactively marked territories and stimulated discussion. This will be seen as a positive move in some quarters, yet the shift from entertainer to care worker is in form not in substance. Any real opportunities that will arise from foreign residents or care workers who enter Japanese society should be predicated on a range of choices rather than the imposition of constituted categories. In other words, if foreign residents from previous moments in Japan’s recent history are to be productive members of Japanese society, they should be allowed to choose the direction in which they move, as opposed to being fitted into a category that labels them as care worker. The individual narratives presented here are traces of a subtle, yet dominant discourse that relocates the Philippines inside Japan as a source of caring and hospitality, and inevitably places Filipinas in the lower tiers of the labour market. A new series of relations arise as Filipinos are scrutinized for the latent care they possess, which attempts to reorganize previous dominant rubrics. Until 2009, recent nationals from other countries were not allowed to participate in the caregivers’ course. This changed after a complaint from another foreign national that this was a form of positive discrimination. Nevertheless, this is testimony to a powerful and specific discourse about Filipinas.
Conclusion
In this article, I have argued in favour of a deeper contextualization of how different overlapping regimes of care need to be weighed within a broader sphere: a curo-scape. By complicating the idea of a global care chain, we can see how actors are co-dependent on each other and how they are acutely aware of the stakes at cost in reproducing care labour that can be to the detriment of the reproduction of families (whose members leave them to support them) in another part of a transnational curo-sphere. I have also sketched some preliminary contours on the impact of migrants, settled outside their country of origin, on Japanese nationals actively engaging in distributing care. The recent past continues to haunt the present and inform under-standings of how actors’ multiple viewpoints not only constitute bodies, but also reconstitute themselves in the face of the challenges of caring for a burgeoning elderly population. Through this case study, we can see how discursive categories have redefined how entertainers can become carers – a shift in form but not in substance. However, individual actors’ trajectories can contradict this, for the con-nections they make with the migrants/foreign residents they engage as potential care workers heavily influence them. Their imagining a new status quo also operates in parallel with the Japanese state and its experiment in hiring nurses from the Philippines. We see a dual movement that forms part of a global care chain. Yet, this takes place in a dynamic sphere of care where actors and state structures cross over each other.
This sphere calls for a more in-depth enquiry to define its dimensions. Actors’ histories and conceptualizations of the past must be considered as integral issues
when dealing with the care of bodies as they reshape and imagine available political and social capital in reaction to social transformation in Japan. By exploring how, in Japan, Filipinos are viewed within global capitalist production, it is clear that reformulations of care shape how care workers can be envisaged and shaped. These also discursively locate residents as caregivers, simultaneously underwriting the conditions that determine how foreign migrant labour can potentially be mobilized.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my thanks to Shirlena Huang and the other organizers of the Transnational Mobilities for Care: State, Market and Family Dynamics in Asia Conference that was held on the 9–11 September 2009, at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers, the editor of Global Networks, Shimizu Hiromu, Caroline Hau, Ogawa Reiko, Hamano Takeshi, Jafar Suryomenggolo and Nathan Badenoch for their thoughtful comments.
Notes
1. Tier 2 is a US Department of State category that refers to countries whose governments do not fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s minimum standards, but are trying to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.
2. DAWN (Development Action for Women Network), an NGO based in the Philippines, expressed pleasure at the passing of the Philippines Republic Act No. 9208 (26 May 2003) against the trafficking of people, thus in part paving the way for regulating the flow of accredited entertainers overseas (see SINAG 2004). Yet, impeding the flow of entertainers to Japan did not benefit everyone. In my fieldwork, Filipino bars run by enterprising Filipino nationals also lost out in the subsequent decrease in Filipinos leading to some of them (permanent residents, divorcees and previously entertainers themselves), to return to the Philippines.
3. See Inquirer, 30 May 2010, http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/ 20100530-272876/Japan-should-open-up-to-more-foreign-nurses.
4. This has now risen to 100,000 yen (approximately $1067). 5. This is a pseudonym. To protect the identity of interviewees, names have been changed in
this article. ‘San’ is a polite suffix attached to surnames in Japan. 6. Highly imbalanced images have elided how empowering some of the women I met doing
fieldwork had found their work in the sense that their earning capacity and standing with their families in the Philippines had radically changed. As breadwinners in Japan supporting families in both countries, working in nightclubs or bars was not the universally negative experience that course providers depicted.
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