Homeward bound: the circular migration of

entertainers between Japan and the Philippines

RHACEL SALAZAR PARREÑAS

Box 1892, Department of American Civilization,

Brown University, 82 Waterman Street,
Providence, RI 02912, USA
rhacel_parrenas@brown.edu

Abstract One feature of globalization is the growing number of temporary labour

migrants, but their experience of settlement does not always fit the dominant
perspective of transnational migration. Unlike transnational migrants, circular
migrants tend not to be equally entrenched in home and host societies, but instead
hold feelings of greater affinity for the home society. They engage in repeated short
periods of work abroad, an example being migrant Filipina entertainers in Tokyo,
Japan. This article describes the settlement of these circular migrants and
demonstrates how it is a process of returning to the home society that entails limited
integration in the host society; they are routinely segregated in time and space.
Migrant Filipina entertainers start thinking about their departure almost as soon as
they arrive, and their departure is marked by a carefully-planned ceremony, or
sayonara party. Questioning the assumption in the literature that circular migrants
will eventually become permanent residents, in this article I call for the formulation
of new theoretical frameworks that better capture the qualitatively distinct
experiences of circular migrants.

Keywords TEMPORARY LABOUR MIGRATION, CIRCULAR MIGRATION, TRANSNATIONAL

MIGRATION, SEGREGATION, FILIPINA ENTERTAINERS, JAPAN

Thousands of women from the Philippines, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Russia,

Colombia and Bulgaria secure an entertainer visa to work in Japan’s nightlife industry
1
as contract labourers for three to six months. The majority of these workers – 60 per
cent – have historically come from the Philippines (Oishi 2005), but their number has
dwindled dramatically in recent years from 82,741 in 2004 to approximately 8607 in
2
2006. That the US government labels them as sex workers, which is an identification
that most of them contest, largely accounts for the decline in their size (US
3
Department of State 2004). Nevertheless, since 2004, the Japanese authorities have
begun to monitor their migration more strictly and to scrutinize whether or not they
are real singers or dancers.

Global Networks 10, 3 (2010) 301–323. ISSN 1470–2266. © 2010 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd & Global Networks Partnership 301
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Despite their declining numbers, a consistent population of Filipina entertainers

continues to enter Japan to entertain clients in hostess clubs scattered across the
country. They work by singing, dancing and flirting up close at the table with clients
4
(Ballescas 1992). The focus in this article is not on the labour of these entertainers
but on their patterns of settlement as temporary labour migrants. Migrant Filipina
entertainers in Japan follow three patterns of settlement – permanent, indefinite and
short-term migration. Permanent migrants have long-term legal residency, and refer
5
specifically to wives and mothers of Japanese nationals. Indefinite migrants refer to
visa overstayers, meaning those with a precarious status as undocumented workers.
Lastly, short-term migrants are generally contract workers with three to six month
entertainer visas, but they could also include tourists.
Most Filipina entertainers experience migration as short-term migrants and
contract workers, returning to the Philippines at the end of their contracts. They are
unlikely to seek long-term residency and stay in Japan either permanently or
indefinitely. For instance, only around 10 per cent of them attain long-term permanent
6
residency by marrying their customers or having a child with a Japanese national.
Historically, most entertainers opted not to stay in Japan indefinitely as
7
undocumented workers. Representatives of non-governmental organizations estimate
there are approximately 28,000 undocumented Filipina entertainers in Japan,
exceeding the current annual flow of contract workers but still a small percentage of
the cumulative count of entertainers in the last five years. While most contract
8
workers do not stay in Japan permanently or indefinitely, many return regularly.
Their migration falls under the rubric of circular migration as, if given the
opportunity, they would remigrate to Japan but only for short periods of work.
The case of migrant Filipina entertainers indicates that there is not a single pattern
of migration, but instead several patterns, challenging us to develop multiple
frameworks for understanding migrant settlement. Their situation also suggests that
we cannot assume that most migrants will inevitably become long-term settlers,
which is a common assertion in the literature and has been described of migrants who
initially intend to sojourn in Germany, the United States, as well as Japan (Castles
9
1984; Massey et al. 2002; Tsuda 1999). As Tsuda (1999: 698) describes of Japanese-
Brazilians in Japan, ‘Despite the initial intentions of the migrants themselves and the
governments that receive them, more often than not migrant workers who are deemed
“temporary” become a permanent presence in the host society’. In this article, I
examine the settlement of short-term migrants or more specifically circular migrants
10
who engage in repeated short periods of work abroad. I focus on short-term
migrants because of the absence of discussions in the literature on the nature of their
settlement as non-permanent migrants and the likelihood that they are a growing
presence among migrant workers globally.
My goal in this article is to distinguish qualitatively their experience of circular
migration from what we currently understand in the literature as transnational
migration, a discussion premised on the experiences of permanent migrants. I
expound on the experience of circular migration with a view to contributing to our
development of a framework that better describes the settlement of short-term

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 Homeward bound

migrants. Short-term migrants tend to be target earners. In the case of Filipina

entertainers, they ‘earn money in Japan and spend it in the Philippines’. They hold
feelings of greater loyalty for the Philippines. As such, their pattern of settlement does
not fit the classic definition of transnational migrants, who have repeatedly been
described as feeling equally entrenched in host and home societies (Levitt 2001;
Smith 2006). They maintain this coexisting allegiance by inhabiting transnational
social fields (Basch et al. 1994) or maintaining transnational practices (Portes et al.
1999). By contrast, circular migrants continue to look at the sending country as home
and intend to settle in the receiving country for only a short while. Migrant
entertainers, for instance, plan for their return to the Philippines soon after they arrive
in Japan.
My analysis begins with a literature review in which I distinguish circular
migrants from transnational migrants. Then I describe the experience of circular
migration by first enumerating the factors that encourage this pattern of settlement
and second by illustrating how the object of their settlement is to return to their home
society. Then, I describe the settlement of migrant entertainers in the host society,
establishing it to be one of segregation or limited integration. Migrant entertainers are
segregated not only socially, but also spatially and temporally. I end by making a case
for qualitatively distinguishing the experience of short-term and long-term migrants.

Circular and transnational migrants: an overview

The idea that migration could in fact be a process of returning home is at odds with
current theorizations on migration. In the literature, settlement generally consists of
assimilation and/or transnational migration, which are not mutually exclusive
processes (Levitt 2001; Smith 2006). Instead, it has been demonstrated that the
assimilation of migrants facilitates the greater likelihood of transnationalism (Smith
2006). As Alejandro Portes, Cristina Escobar and Alexandria Radford (2007) have
noted, only established immigrants can effectively engage in transnational practices.
If we disregard the assertion that transnationalism is compatible with assimilation, the
idea that short-term migrants intend to return home soon would seem to agree with
concepts of transnational migration. Pioneered by anthropologists Linda Basch, Nina
Glick Schiller and Christina Szanton Blanc (1994), research on transnational
migration acknowledges the cross-national affiliation of immigrants. This research
seeks to explain why immigrants still maintain ties with the country of origin,
participate in nation-building efforts not only in the country of destination but also in
the country of origin, and regularly move back and forth between the country of
origin and destination.
However, circular migrants are not quite like the transnational migrants that Basch
et al. and others, including Peggy Levitt (2001) and Robert Smith (2006), have
described in their studies. This is because, if we look at the case of Filipina
entertainers for instance, they tend not to maintain equal allegiances to home and host
societies as do transnational migrants. Their different dispositions distinguish circular
from transnational migrants. The former maintain greater allegiance to the sending

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country while the latter balances their allegiance to both sending and receiving
countries. Helping us make sense of the thwarted allegiance of circular migrants are
discussions on citizenship, particularly those that call attention to the ‘partial
citizenship’ (Parreñas 2001) of migrant workers and the exclusionary measures that
position migrant contract workers as indentured and unfree workers (Lan 2007).
Regarding the structures that control citizenship, Stephen Castles and Alastair
Davidson (2000) describe how some host societies, such as Japan, enforce the
‘differential exclusion’ of migrants and accept migrants only within strict functional
and temporal limits; such host societies are more likely to welcome migrants as
workers but not as settlers and as temporary sojourners and not long-term residents.
Differential exclusion consequently encourages migrants to extend citizenship beyond
the territorial boundaries of the nation-state and to inhabit a transnational sphere as
the scholars of transnational migration argue (Levitt 2001). In this instance, we see
that differential exclusion encourages transnationalism, an observation that
contradicts the earlier cited claim of Portes et al. that transnational behaviour is an
outcome of assimilation. This suggests that there is probably no iron relationship
between assimilation and transnationalism, and that there are still insufficient studies
to suggest which is the norm.
What we do know is that differential exclusion can result in the lopsided
allegiance of migrants towards the country of origin, the significance of which
remains inadequately explored in the literature on migration. This is because many
migration scholars assume that the longer the duration of settlement the more likely it
becomes that the lopsided allegiance of migrants towards the sending country will
subside (Massey et al. 2002). They often view temporary labour migration as nothing
more than a prelude to permanent settlement as it usually initiates chain migration and
the subsequent formation of ethnic communities (Castles 2006; Castles and Miller
1998). While true, we should not lose sight of the fact that, as we see with foreign
entertainers in Japan, some temporary labour migrants remain short-term circular
migrants with unequal allegiances between host and home countries. Not all of them
become permanent or indefinite settlers. In Germany, for instance, only 25 per cent of
the 18.5 million guest workers who entered between 1960 and 1973 settled
permanently (Martin et al. 2006: 86–7).
At the moment, dominant models and paradigms on migrant settlement ignore the
11
experiences of short-term circular migrants, and they are largely based on the
experiences of long-term migrants. As migration scholar Graeme Hugo observes, ‘we
have to confront the situation that the bulk of our international migration data
collection, much of our empirical knowledge and theory is anchored in a permanent
settlement migration paradigm’ (Hugo 2003: 1). Our entrenchment in a permanent
settlement paradigm is perhaps because most theoretical formulations on migration
are based on the experiences of migrants in the United States. However, history tells
us that we cannot assume that most sojourners, even in the United States, will
eventually become permanent settlers. Indeed, half of Italian male sojourners in the
United States eventually returned to Italy (Gabbacia 1999). Moreover, not all bracero
workers inevitably became immigrants (Garcia y Griego 1977). Today, the United

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States still formally admits a sizeable number of temporary labour migrants per
annum and their experience remains an understudied phenomenon (Meyers and Yau
2004). A significant number of them are likely to remain circular migrants. Those
most likely to do so are the unskilled seasonal workers who enter with non-renewable
H-2 visas and perform seasonal agriculture work or low-wage employment as con-
struction workers, hotel housekeepers in resorts, or perhaps cannery industry workers
(US Citizenship and Immigration Services 2007). Why studies have ignored the short-
term migration of temporary labour migrants is puzzling, but the growing trend of
temporary labour migration without doubt challenges us to start accounting for the
difference in settlement between long-term and short-term migrants.
Experiences of migration not only in the United States but also in other
destinations such as Europe challenge us to develop better frameworks to account for
the settlement patterns of temporary migrants. In Europe, we see greater intraregional
migration as a result of bilateral agreements that allow the exchange of short-term
12
migration without the issuance of work permits between Ukraine and Poland. In
Poland, Krzystek (2008) recognizes the growing number of ‘circulatory’ or ‘rotation’
migrants from Ukraine, meaning migrants who only remain in Poland for several
months in the year. Unlike the sojourners in the United States described as
‘permanently temporary’, or in other words unintentionally permanent, ‘rotation
migrants’ are considered ‘permanently circular’ (Slany and Malek 2005: 116).
Indicating variations in circular migration, Iglikca (2001, 2005) further distinguishes
between ‘rotation migrants’ and ‘shuttle migrants’ with the former referring to those
who hold wage employment and the latter referring to those who peddle goods from
13
Poland in the former Soviet Union.
Like certain countries in Europe, the destination of Japan also invites the develop-
ment of conceptual frameworks on migrant settlement that better account for short-
term circular migration. Research on Filipino migrants in Japan has yet to address the
settlement of short-term migrants, focusing instead on undocumented workers
(Ventura 2008) or permanent residents (Faier 2007; Suzuki 2005). Moreover, studies
on short-term migrants focus not on the question of settlement but on labour
(Ballescas 1992), representation (Tyner 1996), or the economic causes and
consequences of migration (Osteria 1994). Yet, in the context of the common suppo-
sition in the literature that temporary labour migrants will eventually settle perma-
nently, the pursuit of different paths of migrant settlement just among Filipina migrant
entertainers raises the question of why a large number of them become circular
migrants.
The diversity of settlement patterns among Filipina entertainers mirrors those of
the Nikkei-jin from Brazil, who initially arrived in Japan in 1990 as temporary
workers granted renewable visas lasting from between six months and three years
(Tsuda 1999; Yamanaka 2000). Not all these temporary labour migrants become
long-term residents. A sizeable number become circular migrants who shuttle back
and forth between Japan and Brazil. Despite the recognition of their presence by
Tsuda (1999) and Yamanaka (2000), we could still learn a great deal about the
characteristics and dynamics of their integration in the host society. At present, these

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circular migrants are depicted as nomads or, more precisely, ‘vagrants trapped in a
transnational migrant circuit between Brazil and Japan’ (Tsuda 1999: 714). As repeat
migrants, they are said to face ‘double marginalization’ because they cannot be ‘stable
residents in either country’ (Tsuda 1999: 714).
Despite the acknowledgement of circular migrants, we still need to define their
experience of settlement in the host society as short-term migrants. To develop our
understanding of short-term migrant settlement, we must first move beyond the
transnational migration paradigm that asserts the equal and coexisting allegiance that
migrants maintain with sending and receiving societies. Next, we cannot assume that
temporary labour migrants will gradually develop a greater sense of allegiance in the
host society and simply insert their experience in existing frameworks of assimilation.
Instead, we need to account for the barriers that impede their feelings of membership
in the host society. Moreover, we must define how their stunted feelings of
membership would impact and limit their integration into the host society.

Further distinguishing circular and transnational migrants

While the settlement of short-term migrants remains inadequately explored in the
literature, scholars predict that more nations will develop temporary migration
programmes, leading to an increase in short-term migration and a consequent rise in
14
circular migration (Castles 2006; Hugo 2003: Martin et al. 2006). Indeed, various
destination countries are maintaining or formally putting in place temporary labour
migration programmes, including Australia, the United States and countries in East
Asia, the Middle East and Europe (Hugo 2003; Martin et al. 2006). As we are likely
to see more circular migration, we need to distinguish this process of migration from
transnational migration. In this section, I describe the conditions that increase the
likelihood that temporary labour migrants would adapt via short-term circular rather
than transnational migration. In other words, I shall elaborate on which migrants are
likely to become permanent migrants, including permanently temporary, and which
ones are likely to become permanently circular. A combination of factors determines
the likelihood of transnational or circular migration. They include migrant agency,
state policies, geographical proximity, the human capital of the migrant, and the
ability of the migrant to return freely to the host society.
First, temporary labour migrants in liberal democratic states are more likely to
make the transition to permanent settlement (Martin et al. 2006). For instance, we are
less likely to see low-skilled temporary labour migrants in authoritarian nation-states
such as Taiwan and Singapore move to permanent settlement. This is because they are
not only denied the right to family reunification in these host societies, but, as is the
case in Taiwan, they do not qualify for visa renewal and in Singapore their pregnancy
would result in deportation (Lan 2006). Still, some run away from their employers
and become long-term undocumented workers (Lan 2006). That some choose to
become undocumented workers suggests that the likelihood of long-term settlement is
shaped by, but not entirely reducible to, state and state policies (Waldinger and
Fitzgerald 2004).

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 Homeward bound

Second, access to re-entry encourages short-term circular migration. For instance,

there was a decline in the traffic of circular migrants from Mexico with the militar-
ization of the US–Mexican border in the 1990s and an increase in the number of
undocumented workers becoming indefinite or permanent settlers (Massey et al.
2002). In contrast, we see a consistent number of Nikkei-jin circulate between Japan
and Brazil because of the flexibility their legal residency status allows. Likewise,
migrants from member states take advantage of the open borders within the European
Union. For instance, Pollard et al. observe an increase in circular migrants among
Polish workers in the United Kingdom. As they note, ‘The vast majority of Polish
migrants come to the UK for economic reasons, but leave because they miss home or
want to be with their friends and family in Poland’ (Pollard et al. 2008: 5). Generally,
open border policies, geographical proximity and affordability of travel enable re-
entry. As such, we are likely to see a high rate of short-term circular migration within
regions.
Third, skills would determine the pattern of settlement, with highly skilled tem-
porary labour migrants more likely than low skilled ones to settle permanently in the
host society. This is because host societies often limit eligibility for permanent
residency to highly skilled migrants. In contrast, they restrict the citizenship of low
skilled labour migrants. For instance, in the United States, H-1 visa holders
(professionals) could qualify for permanent migrant status, while H-2 visa holders
(non-professionals) could not.
Fourth, differential exclusion as the basis of membership for migrants would
encourage their circular migration (Castles 2006; Castles and Davidson 2000). Poor
wages, ineligibility for family reunification, restricted durations of migration, and
limited political rights are conditions that would stunt the integration of migrants and
encourage their circular migration between host and home societies. Yet, despite these
restrictions, we have seen the integration of migrants confronting differential exclu-
sion unavoidably occur in host societies such as Germany, the United States and
Japan. This reminds us that migration is a social process with its own inherent
dynamics. As a self-sustaining process, migration is shaped not only by structural
forces but also by migrant agency (Castles 2004).
For the remainder of this article, I turn to my research on one group of circular
migrants – migrant Filipina entertainers in Tokyo – and describe their experience of
migrant settlement in Japan. I illustrate their stunted integration in the host society,
describing their temporal, social and spatial segregation, and in so doing establish
their lopsided allegiance towards the home over the host society in the process of
migration.

Methodology
This article draws from interviews and participant observation that I conducted in
Tokyo between April and November 2005. I gathered open-ended and in-depth
interviews with 56 Filipina migrant hostesses in Tokyo, more specifically 45 females
and 11 trans subjects. By hostesses I refer to those who flirt with men in drinking

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establishments known as hostess clubs. Contrary to public opinion, hostess work does
not entail the provision of sex. At most, they would sexually entice customers by
banter or provocative dance or song performances.
Most interviews were 60 to 90 minutes in length. Interviews focused on the
process of labour migration, work and customer–hostess relations. I identified
research participants at various locations in the community including three churches,
eight restaurants, one food store frequented by Filipino hostesses and, lastly, three
Philippine clubs. I only utilized the snowball method for a handful of my inter-
viewees. Usually, I identified potential interviewees by direct contact. Prominent
members of the community, including restaurant owners, old-timers, and religious
clergy also introduced me to potential interviewees.
Because of the large number of undocumented workers in the community and the
15
inaccessibility of migrant contract workers, it was difficult if not impossible for me
to attain a random sample of Filipino migrant hostesses. To diversify my sample, I
made sure I obtained a sample that represented the three types of migrants in the
community – permanent, indefinite and short-term. I also made sure that I sought
research participants from various areas of Tokyo. Here I primarily draw from my
interviews with 16 temporary contract workers and 22 former temporary contract
workers. Of the 22 former contract workers, 11 made the transition to permanent
residency as a wife of a Japanese citizen, while the rest escaped from their clubs to
become undocumented workers. None of them intentionally entered Japan to become
permanent residents, but some fell in love with a Japanese citizen and thereafter
stayed in Japan, while others had escaped their place of employment due to poor
working conditions.
To learn about the work culture and gain the trust of the hostesses, I decided to
work as a hostess for three months. This gave me greater access to potential
interviewees, not necessarily my co-workers who some (7 of 23) but not most I had
interviewed, for my experience enabled hostesses to see me as someone more likely
to understand their occupation. Knowledge of my work experience led to more
women agreeing to my request for an interview. I also conducted participant
observation as a customer and visited nine Philippine clubs regularly, usually
accompanied by a man because women may not enter these spaces on their own. At
clubs, I would watch variety performances and learn about the hostess clubs’ wage
systems and job requirements.

Qualifying circular migration: migration as a process of returning home

In this section, I illustrate the homeward bound orientation of entertainers by
describing the practices of planning sayonara (goodbye) parties and sending
balikbayan (return home) boxes. Hostess clubs celebrate not the arrival but the
departure of entertainers. They host a party, which members of the community refer
to as a sayonara, an event in which entertainers wear gowns – long evening dresses –
that range from Philippine couture to generic taffeta or chiffon prom dresses. At the
sayonara, festive décor would brighten the club from a banner announcing the

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departure of one or a group of entertainers to balloons pinned on walls and ceilings to

party favours on tables.
The sayonara represents the finale of an entertainer’s six months in Japan.
Entertainers view this event as perhaps their last opportunity to say goodbye to
customers and their last chance to collect presents. Rarely do entertainers return to the
same club for their next contract, as management prefer to offer customers a fresh
batch of new hostesses to meet on a regular basis. There is also the strong likelihood
that the departing entertainer will not get another opportunity to work in Japan. Most
entertainers who wish to return to Japan must undergo another rigorous application
process in the Philippines. But, with the supply of prospective entertainers far
exceeding the demand for them at Japanese clubs, and the preference of clubs for
young entertainers, there is a greater likelihood that prospective return migrants will
not have the opportunity do so, making the sayonara an all the more important event
and source of income for them. Still, some have the opportunity to return to Japan and
those who do are usually able to persuade their customers to visit them in their new
workplace. However, because the opportunity of return is not guaranteed, entertainers
aspire to receive as many gifts and cash presents as possible at their sayonara. The
presents that entertainers receive range from cash to the latest electronics such as a
HDTV or a portable DVD player. At the height of the ‘bubble economy’ of Japan in
the late 1980s, entertainers left Japan with much larger presents than they do today.
Back then, entertainers aimed for a ‘bahay, lupa, kotse’, meaning ‘house, land, car’.
Because of the decline in the Japanese economy, by 2005 entertainers could only
expect cash presents that would usually amount to no more than 10,000 yen ($100)
from regular customers and 50,000 to 100,000 yen ($500 to $1000) from special
customers, meaning customers who are particularly fond of them.
Although the sayonara takes place on their last night of work in Japan, enter-
tainers start preparing for this event soon after arriving in Japan. This is almost always
the case in transgender clubs, where the sayonara is a more spectacular event than in
female hostess clubs. In their sayonara, transgender entertainers must perform a solo
dance while those in female clubs do not. In transgender clubs, all entertainers wear a
gown during a sayonara, while in female clubs only those who are leaving do.
The experience of one’s sayonara in transgender clubs, including its preparation,
illustrates how labour migration for entertainers in Japan becomes a process of
making plans to return home to the Philippines. For instance, entertainers begin to
design sayonara gowns not long after they arrive in Japan, envisioning not just the
design but also the colour and material. Then, two months after working in Japan,
they have a designer in the Philippine sew the gown. On average, hostesses spend
US$ 200 on a gown, which is significantly less than the cost of a comparable dress in
Japan. However, there are risks associated with sending the design back to the
Philippines because the designer would sometimes alter or not quite understand the
entertainer’s instructions and drawing. Hence, entertainers prefer to receive their
gown months before the actual sayonara. In this way, they have time to alter the
gown or alternatively to lose weight if the gown does not quite fit. Entertainers also
prefer to have their gown in advance so that they can envision a solo dance

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performance that suits their gown. Entertainers rarely dance in their gowns. Instead,
they usually design a different attire for the dance performance that would not clash,
but instead blend well with the character projected by their gown.
In the sayonara events I attended, the entertainers would project their unique
characterization of a sophisticated woman, an angel, a femme fatale, a beauty queen,
or a superstar. They retain this characterization not only in their gown but also in their
dance performance, speech and, finally, their last walk on stage. For instance, Nikki, a
27 year-old transgender woman with a tall svelte figure, wanted to project the image
of someone who was ‘naughty but nice’ for her sayonara party. She had designed a
baby blue taffeta gown, which looked quite demure from the front but revealed a
backless rear. Keeping up with her ‘naughty but nice’ motif, Nikki played the
character of an angel for her solo dance performance and wore a white sequined
halter-top with feathered wings and form-fitting white pants. With a wand sprinkling
angel dust, Nikki ran around the club as if she were soaring through the sky to the
song ‘If I Could Reach Out’ by Gloria Estefan.
Nikki gave an emotionally uplifting performance, which I knew she had been
dreading for weeks. She had practised the dance continually during her last month in
Japan. Yet, the solo dance performance had only been one of her worries. Nikki also
dreaded having to deliver a speech, which she memorized and practised in front of me
at least three weeks before her sayonara. Like a beauty queen, entertainers in trans-
gender clubs deliver a ‘goodbye’ speech and then take their final walk on stage before
approaching each one of the guests to thank them personally for attending their
sayonara. This final goodbye is usually the last opportunity entertainers have to
secure tips from the customers. Nikki told me that the speech makes a great deal of
difference to whether or not a customer extends that tip. Accordingly, Nikki wrote,
rehearsed and memorized her speech, which she had to deliver in Japanese. She
practised the speech in front of customers so they might correct her grammar as well
as to remind them of her impending departure. In the speech, she said how much she
had learnt and grown as a person in the last six months, for which she felt a
tremendous gratitude to Japan and its people. It must have been an effective speech
because I noticed quite a few customers handing her a 10,000-yen note ($100) after
her final walk on stage.
Transgender hostesses are not the only ones to anticipate their return to the
Philippines soon after they arrive in Japan. The entertainers in female clubs start
worrying about what material acquisitions to take back to the Philippines from Japan
soon after they get there. Open and partially filled balikbayan boxes, cardboard
containers measuring six cubic feet, are part of the furniture in any resident
entertainer’s apartment. On seeing such a box for the first time, I could not help but
mistakenly assume that the entertainer must soon be returning home to the
Philippines. After all, balikbayan literally means to return home and return migrants
usually use these boxes for the perishable goods, including chocolates and tinned
foods, they bring home to the Philippines. Unless sealed and stacked in a corner, these
boxes are often scattered throughout the entertainers’ crowded apartments and
unavoidably end up as tables. Transported in cargo ships, balikbayan boxes take 15 to

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21 days to arrive in the Philippines and cost approximately 9000–10,000 yen ($90–
100) to send to Manila, irrespective of their weight, and a few thousand more yen to
send to other places in the Philippines.
Entertainers begin to acquire goods to fill these large cardboard boxes within
their first two months of arrival in Japan, if not earlier. They aspire to send three
boxes back to the Philippines before their six-month labour contract ends. Yet, as
these boxes are usually for their own consumption of Japanese goods once they
return to the Philippines, they usually do not send them until they are closer to their
departure date. Still, in anticipation of their eventual return to the Philippines,
entertainers purchase items to throw into a balikbayan box as part of the daily
routine of life in Japan. For this habitual practice, they would visit hyaku (one-
hundred) yen shops to buy chocolates, kitchenware, soap and detergents, school
supplies, and many other sundry items. I even participated in this practice by giving
each migrant contract worker whom I interviewed a case of ramen and two or three
bags of chocolates to put in their balikbayan box. Relations with customers would
often revolve around balikbayan boxes as courtship and friendship rituals in the club
would involve giving items entertainers wanted for their balikbayan boxes as gifts,
including CDs of popular Japanese music, gourmet chocolates, cups of noodles and
stuffed toys.
The practice of planning sayonara parties and sending balikbayan boxes home to
the Philippines symbolizes the sojourn of entertainers and illustrates how they migrate
to improve their lives in the Philippines. Each suggests that entertainers remain
conscious of the short duration of their migration. This consciousness accordingly
shapes their actions, behaviour and attitude to settlement; it discourages them from
establishing roots in Japan and encourages their continued ties to the Philippines. In
the next section I illustrate the limited nature of the entertainers’ integration. As I
show, three types of segregation – temporal, social and spatial – define their
experience of settlement. These various forms of segregation strengthen their con-
tinued orientation towards their homeland and weaken their entrenchment in the host
society.

The segregation of Filipina entertainers

The homeward bound migration of temporary labour migrants distinguishes their
experience of migration from what we know in the literature as transnational
migration. In circular migration, the movement of migrants between the country of
origin and country of destination is oriented towards building their life in the country
of origin (Slany and Malek 2005). Circular migrants have little investment in building
a life in the host society. In this section, I describe how this disposition emerges in
their everyday life in Japan. I show that their homeward bound orientation manifests
in their experience of settlement in the host society as one of segregation. More
specifically, they experience settlement as one of temporal, social and spatial
segregation, all of which aggravates their greater feelings of affinity for the home
society and fortifies their limited integration in the host society.

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Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Temporal segregation
Entertainers are restricted to three-month visas that are renewable for a maximum stay
16
of six months. This time constraint on settlement undoubtedly shapes their experi-
ence of settlement. Migrant entertainers often describe migration as a process of
putting their life in the Philippines on hold while they are in Japan. They limit their
integration and make minimal efforts to anchor themselves in the host society, which
they for instance could do by investing in home furniture or décor, taking language
classes, and exploring Japan by leaving the vicinity of their neighbourhood.
Although they limit their integration, entertainers must still acculturate, but defin-
itely not to the same extent as long-term migrants. At the very least, they must acquire
some language skills in order to interact with their customers. By the end of six
months, the entertainers have usually acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the
language, which they attain from speaking to customers nearly every night throughout
the duration of their stay. While they may not speak grammatically correct Japanese,
they do manage to converse with the customers before the end of their first labour
contract. Making an effort to learn Japanese usually endears them to customers,
resulting in more generous sayonara presents, and increases the likelihood of their
return as a contract worker.
Despite their efforts to acculturate, Filipina entertainers for the most part still view
migration as a process of putting their life in the Philippines on hold. This is the case
with the earlier described Nikki, a third time contract worker who tells me she never
looks forward to her return to Japan when in the Philippines. Instead, she usually tries
to extend her stay in the Philippines until she depletes the savings she had accrued
during her last contract in Japan. Explaining why she prefers to stay in the
Philippines, Nikki describes her poor mental health when in Japan:

I have not really fully adjusted to this place. The emotional trauma of being
away is still there. For example, there are times you get so lonely. You feel so
homesick. You look for the people who can be there for you in times of need,
even with the small things. Before, I just make a phone call and my friends all
come right away. Here, I have no one to call. No one is here to take care of me
except myself. … But I have feelings of needing to force myself to work. This
is because I need to make a living. But let me tell you it is hard. It is very hard.
There is not one day here that I do not cry. Everybody does here.

Once in the Philippines, it takes Nikki time to get over the ‘pressure’ and
‘exhaustion’ of working in Japan. She rarely thinks of Japan when in the Philippines.
Moreover, she rarely keeps up with people in Japan when in the Philippines, but in
contrast communicates regularly with people in the Philippines while in Japan. For
many Filipina entertainers, food and phone cards are the staple necessities of life in
Japan. Like many of her counterparts, Nikki is not a transnational migrant who
maintains her allegiance to both Japan and the Philippines but instead is a circular
migrant who works in Japan to secure a comfortable life for herself in the Philippines.

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 Homeward bound

Angie, a 23-year-old female entertainer who is finishing her fourth contract in

Japan, similarly describes how working in Japan entails having to put her life as a
mother in the Philippines on hold. As she told me, ‘I want to be with my child, but my
money is better here. If you work you have money monthly. In the Philippines, if you
do not have a job, then you struggle … you just let go of money and money never
comes in.’ Angie likewise sees her migration as nothing more than a means of earning
money to spend in the Philippines. If given a chance, she would rather run a business
in the Philippines, like an Internet shop or a small café. Yet, Angie realistically knows
that while she is young her best option for earning money is to work as an entertainer
in Japan. Angie is like Nikki in that she often thinks about her life in the Philippines
when in Japan, and rarely about her life in Japan when in the Philippines. Unlike
Nikki, however, Angie does maintain ties with at least one or two customers while in
the Philippines. She often exchanges phone calls with them; she might even turn to
them for financial assistance if she depletes her earnings before she gets another
opportunity to return to Japan.
Nikki and Angie maintain a fragmented lifestyle of ‘earning abroad to spend
money in the Philippines’. Their temporal segregation in Japan promotes this frag-
mentation. We can imagine that other temporary labour migrants share this same
lopsided sense of greater belonging in the country of origin than in the country of
destination. In the case of migrant entertainers, their temporal dislocation aggravates
this sentiment as nighttime workers whose schedule further limits their social
interactions with other members of the Filipino migrant community.

Social segregation
Migrant entertainers usually keep to themselves, interacting only with customers and
co-workers while in Japan. They do not interact with other members of the Filipino
community, or for that matter with other members of Japanese society. Two central
factors account for their social segregation: the temporal location they occupy as
nighttime workers and the social stigma attached to their work.
Entertainers maintain a time clock that they refer to in the community as ‘vampire
hours’. They are awake when most of Japan is asleep. They work from 7 p.m. to 4
a.m., or for shorter periods between these hours. Their different daily rhythm without
doubt fosters their social segregation from most of Japanese society. Even though I
also worked as an entertainer during the course of my research, I never quite got used
to their different rhythm and like them I adjust by replacing day with night. At four
o’clock in the morning, I would rarely have any energy left to stay awake and would
fall asleep as soon as I arrived home from work. My co-workers, by contrast, who
often slept over at my apartment, would stay awake for a few more hours. After work,
they would stay up – eat, talk on the phone, watch a video recording or read a Tagalog
romance novel.
The different temporal location of entertainers fosters their social segregation in
Japan, which undoubtedly intensifies their orientation towards the Philippines. Being
awake at night and asleep during the day segregates entertainers from most members

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Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

of the dominant society. Because of their work schedule, entertainers attend to their
business and leisure activities from four to nine o’clock in the morning and/or from
four to six o’clock in the late afternoon. During this small window of time, they
would shop for groceries, dine out, attend mass, do their laundry, cook, rent bootleg
recordings of Filipino TV programmes and attend to other such daily activities.
Due to their different time clock, entertainers tend to be socially isolated not only
from members of the dominant society but also from other members of the Filipino
migrant community, meaning the non-entertainers who include wives, domestic
workers, male construction workers, factory workers, and other low-wage service
workers (Ventura 2008). While these other members of the community would go to
church at noon, patronize a restaurant at eight o’clock in the evening, or go to the
bank at one o’clock in the afternoon, the rhythm of life for entertainers prevents them
from performing such activities during the same temporal locations. It is therefore
rare for entertainers and non-entertainers to meet, resulting in the bifurcation of the
Filipino migrant community. If entertainers and non-entertainers do meet, they rarely
interact socially. Entertainers and non-entertainers usually meet only on Sunday
afternoon at church, mingling after mass in the crowd gathered around the food
vendors set up outside for churchgoers.
The entertainers’ different daily rhythm partially explains why I struggled to find
interviewees during my first two months in Tokyo, as I visited Filipino business
establishments such as restaurants during the day and not during the night. I was later
advised to visit Filipino restaurants at 3 o’clock in the morning, which I eventually
did, despite the difficulty of travelling in the middle of the train’s non-operational
hours. After circling various areas in and around Tokyo, I soon took notice of the non-
typical operating hours maintained by Filipino grocery stores and restaurants. In
Roppongi, for instance, Nanay’s Lugaw, a small restaurant near the Philippine
embassy caters to nightlife industry workers after midnight and embassy patrons
during the day, staying open 24 hours each day. Catering to entertainers, Flash
Philippines, a small restaurant in the working-class neighbourhood of Oyama on the
periphery of Tokyo, is open from three o’clock in the afternoon to eight o’clock in the
evening and then reopens from two o’clock to six o’clock in the morning. Bahay
Kubo in Nishi-Kawaguchi, a working-class area in the neighbouring prefecture of
Saitama, is open from six o’clock in the evening to six o’clock in the morning. Like-
wise, the restaurant Jungle, located in the working class neighbourhood of Higashi-
Jujo on the periphery of Tokyo, similarly operates from eight o’clock in the evening
to eight o’clock in the morning. So does Boracay in the red light district of Kinshicho.
Many Filipino food stores reopen from two until six in the morning to cater to
entertainers.
The different time clock of migrant entertainers tells us of their minimal
interaction with members of the dominant society, but this is not reason enough for
their homeward bound orientation upon migration. After all, they could adapt to life
in Japan within this temporally bound ethnic community. Further pushing their
greater orientation towards the home country is their marginalization in the migrant
community, which only partially results from their different time clock. Promoting the

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 Homeward bound

segregation of entertainers from other members of the community is the social stigma
attached to their occupation. Other members of the community, for instance wives
including those who used to work as entertainers, tend to shun them. Key institutions
in the ethnic community, for instance banks and the Philippine embassy, ignore their
needs. Most community advocacy and support groups do not prioritize the concerns
of this socially stigmatized group. Only churches have made significant efforts to
adjust to the schedule of entertainers. For instance, one church in Tokyo offers prayer
services to Filipino workers at 4 o’clock on Wednesday afternoons, which is a time
slot that actually fits their schedule. Churches also perform afternoon mass in addition
to the 12 o’ clock Sunday mass attended by most other Filipinos. In contrast, branches
of Philippine banks do not acknowledge entertainers as one of their constituency,
insisting on closing at three o’clock in the afternoon like most other banks in Japan.
Likewise, the Philippine embassy closes at five o’clock in the afternoon. The
inaccessibility of the Philippine embassy for migrant entertainers calls into question
whether this governmental institution adequately protects and advocates for them,
which is troubling in light of their identification by the US government as severely
17
‘trafficked’ people (US Department of State 2004, 2005).
Perhaps more troubling is the fact that Filipina entertainers had not been a target
group of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) in Japan during the
time of my research. OWWA is the designated government agency assigned to protect
and promote the welfare and wellbeing of Filipino contract workers and their depen-
dants. With offices located in most high destination areas of migrant Filipino workers
around the world, OWWA operates in two locations in Japan – Nagoya and Tokyo. In
Tokyo, OWWA is located in the embassy of the Philippines and operates during the
same hours as the embassy. OWWA’s operating budget comes not from the
government but from the annual US$ 25 subscription collected from all temporary
migrant workers deployed by the government. This makes it all the more ironic that
OWWA in Tokyo does not address the needs of its largest group of constituents but
instead works mostly with non-OWWA members, specifically the wives of Japanese
men, as well as the smaller group of domestic workers. In Tokyo, the welfare officer
has devoted much of her energy to developing a community-based theatre group,
which without doubt empowers the community by addressing the plight and diffi-
culties of migrant Filipina workers in Japan. Yet, not one migrant with an entertainer
visa participates in this group and the issues this theatre addresses in its performances
concern those confronted by wives and domestic workers. Likewise, hometown
associations have not reached out to migrant entertainers. The reasoning of the
various community leaders whom I met is that entertainers are only in Japan for six
months. This ignores the fact that they may still have needs that arise during this brief
period and that their constant circulation between Japan and the Philippines
guarantees that there will be some present in Japan at any given time. The tendency of
community advocate groups to ignore the needs of entertainers tells us that their
temporal segregation inadvertently results in their social segregation, which further
encourages their homeward bound orientation and consequently their limited
integration.

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Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

It is a reasonable assumption that the social stigma attached to entertainers is a

central reason behind their marginalization. Indeed, the welfare officer of OWWA
informed me that she prioritizes members of the community other than entertainers
(for example wives and domestic workers) to ‘uplift the image of the Filipino
community’. In its quest to improve the public image of Filipinos, OWWA sees it as a
priority to inform the public that not all Filipinos in Japan are entertainers, which we
could speculate to mean that not all Filipinos are sexually loose women. The
dismissal of entertainers as a public embarrassment for the identity of the nation
indicates not only the marginal status of entertainers in the community, but more
importantly it tells us that OWWA, at least under the leadership of the welfare officer
during my field research, had not addressed the needs of one of its largest constituents
in Tokyo. Giving community leaders the benefit of the doubt, this is perhaps because
of the temporal inaccessibility of entertainers. Regardless, entertainers remain in the
shadows of the Filipino migrant community. Their invisibility undoubtedly stunts
their integration in Japan while promoting their continued orientation towards the
Philippines in the process of migration.

Spatial segregation
Aggravating the orientation of entertainers towards the Philippines is their experience
of spatiality in Japan, or more specifically ‘the partition of [their] space’ from others
in the host society (de Certeau 1984: 123; Lefebvre 1992). In Japan, entertainers
remain geographically concentrated not only in a specific locale but also in private
spaces within this locale, resulting in their experience of spatial segregation upon
settlement. Suggesting their imprisonment, entertainers spend most of their free time
indoors in apartments and if outdoors restricted within their neighbourhood. Yet,
entertainers do not seem to mind their geographical constraints, but somehow find
comfort and safety in it. As May, a former entertainer who lived in an apartment
above her club when she was a contract worker tells me, ‘I was safe [at work] because
… I never had to leave the premises.’
Without doubt, appearances could be deceptive, as the absence of entertainers in
public spaces seems to suggest their imprisonment, hence trafficking, by employers.
Yet, for the most part, entertainers we should note stay indoors not by force but by
choice, one that they make in the context of the constraints they face as temporally
segregated migrants who see their settlement in Japan as a period of putting their life
in the Philippines on hold. Entertainers stay within the confines of their apartment to
minimize their expenses; as sojourners, they would rather spend their money in the
Philippines and not in Japan. While they may choose to stay indoors, other factors
constrain their spatial actions. These include the close vicinity of their residence and
workplace, their temporal location, the fact that businesses are closed when they get
off work at two or four in the morning, the six a.m. curfew imposed by most club
management on entertainers, and lastly their illiteracy, which discourages
entertainers from travelling by bus or train outside of their neighbourhood. When
spending time with entertainers, one soon notices that most do not venture outside

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the vicinity of their neighbourhoods during the three to six months they work in
Japan.
The settlement of entertainers in Japan is one of spatial segregation, as we see not
only in their confinement in particular neighbourhoods but also in their concentration
and restricted movements in their place of residence. Entertainers spend most of their
free time in their apartment. It is where they shop for clothes, remit money, and com-
municate with their family in the Philippines. Peddlars – many being Filipina wives of
Japanese men – sell ‘omise’ (club) clothes, usually brightly coloured polyester
dresses, to entertainers in their apartments. Some also sell phone cards, and most
entertainers I met purchased at least one 1000-yen ($10) phone card a week. One card
would usually give them nearly an hour’s phone call with someone in the Philippines
on their cellular phone, which they usually acquired courtesy of one of their many
customers at the club. Other entrepreneurs also sell jewellery or offer door-to-door
remittance. Because of the inaccessibility of banks, most have to rely on the peddlars
who visit their apartments to send money to the Philippines. Some risk relying on the
postal service but most opt for the greater security offered by remitters in the under-
ground economy. While banks charge no more than 2000 yen ($20) per remittance,
door-to-door peddlars impose a much higher pro-rated fee of 10 per cent. In the
informal economy, the service fee for a 10,000 yen ($100) remittance would be 1000
yen ($10), while it would cost as much as 5000 yen ($50) for a 50,000-yen ($500)
remittance.
During the course of my research, I had an opportunity to visit a few of the
contract workers’ apartments. The first time was when I accompanied a nun who
regularly visited entertainers at their place of residence as part of what she called her
‘pastoral care’ to her constituency in Tokyo. The apartment I first visited is located
amid other nightlife businesses such as pink salons for sexual massages, soaplands for
assisted baths, and adult health clubs for sexual role-playing. Greeting me when I
entered this apartment was the rancid smell of used cooking oil, which permeated the
thick air. All the other apartments I visited in the course of my research were a lot like
this first one, as they are usually dark, squalid and cramped units.
Entertainers claim that they get free housing as part of their contract to work in
Japan, but this is questionable. Labour contracts of entertainers filed at the embassy of
the Philippines stipulate a 30,000 yen ($300) monthly salary deduction for housing.
Considering that anywhere between 10 and 12 entertainers occupy each residential
unit, which are usually no bigger than 400 square feet and usually only a two
bedroom and one bathroom apartment, clubs could make a tremendous amount of
profit from the rent of entertainers and earn as much as 300,000 yen ($3000) in
monthly rent for each unit. Not located in prime neighbourhoods but instead in seedy
red-light districts, the average rent of a two-bedroom apartment should be no more
than 100,000 yen ($1000). For example, I learnt that one of the comparable units in a
building with apartments that house Filipino entertainers costs the tenant only 60,000
yen per month.
Management usually bars the entry of outsiders into the apartments of entertainers
and only peddlars whom management preapproves may come and go regularly.

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Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Management supposedly does so to discourage customers from entering these spaces,

but perhaps a more apt reason is to hide their unsanitary conditions. Mould, mildew,
cockroaches and mice are common in these apartments, where visitors are not
expected to take off their shoes upon entry as they would in other residences in Japan.
Cockroaches of different sizes crawled throughout the apartments I visited. Unfor-
tunately, rodents also infested some of the units I entered with many entertainers
complaining to me that ‘Mickey Mouse’ had eaten their food.
Aggravating the public health risks of entertainers is the lack of ventilation in
these residential units. Due to their different temporal location, entertainers cover
their bedroom windows with cardboard boxes to block the sun while they sleep during
the day. Consequently, air rarely circulates, leaving entertainers at risk of tuberculosis
and other airborne diseases. Lessening their risk of disease, entertainers must pass a
clean bill of health to be eligible to work in Japan. However, even if with less risk of
contagion from tuberculosis, they are still prone to illness from overcrowding, lack of
ventilation and the unsanitary conditions of their residence.
Symbolically mirroring their experience of migrant settlement as one of spatial
restriction, the entertainers’ apartments tend to be crowded units in which one cannot
move around freely. These cramped and enclosed quarters cannot offer entertainers
much solace from the close monitoring of their movements in the workplace. Enter-
tainers’ residences tend not to have a common living area. Moreover, hallways are
often blocked by jumbo balikbayan boxes, while kitchens would rarely be conducive
to anything else but eating a quick meal. For example, kitchens do not always have a
table and entertainers tend to use not chairs but instead small plastic pails as seats.
Sometimes apartments are too small to accommodate all the entertainers assigned
to live there, so some have to make do with the hallway or kitchen as their bedroom.
This happened to Rachel and Kay, two experienced entertainers whom management
assigned to sleep in one corner of the kitchen. Complaining to me one afternoon,
Rachel showed me how the wall separating her bedroom from the kitchen is actually
only three layers of cardboard boxes and a tarpaulin hanging from the ceiling.
Showing a great deal of ingenuity, Kay and Rachel created a bedroom by putting two
bunk beds against each other and separating them with layers of cardboard. They
sleep on one bunk bed and the other, which is technically in the kitchen, they use as
storage for their suitcases and balikbayan boxes. Inside their ‘bedroom’ is one bunk
bed and two plastic bins that they use as drawers. According to Rachel, her ‘bedroom’
did not look anything like this when she first arrived in Japan but instead it looked
more like a storage room piled with junk and furniture. She and Kay had to figure out
how to clear the space, get rid of the excess furniture and junk crowding their
‘bedroom’ before they could feel they had a semblance of a home in Japan. Since
clearing their room, Kay and Rachel have been able to personalize their space, which
they have primarily done by tacking photos of their family on the cardboard adjacent
to their bunk bed.
Bunk beds and not bedrooms are usually the sole sanctuary of entertainers in
Japan. Each bunk bed is enclosed with blankets that hang from the ceiling or the top
bunk to give the entertainers a semblance of privacy. Entertainers do everything on

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 Homeward bound

their bed except eat. This is where they do their make-up, read, write letters, watch
DVDs, and talk on the phone with their families in the Philippines or customers from
the club. Personalizing these spaces are family pictures of the entertainers, usually
pictures of siblings, parents, or children, pinned on the side of the bed.
Despite their limited space within the cramped quarters of their apartments,
entertainers still spend most of their free time in there. Looking at the private spaces
occupied by entertainers, the enclosed space of the bunk bed and apartment with
sealed windows metaphorically represent their segregation in Japan. Considering that
entertainers spend most of their free time in the encaged space of their apartment, it is
not difficult to see why they would not feel entrenched in Japanese society but instead
would view migration as a process of putting their life in the Philippines on hold.

Conclusion
In this article, I have described the process of migrant settlement for Filipina enter-
tainers in Japan. I illustrate their settlement as short-term migrants to be a process of
putting their life in the Philippines on hold, which is a sentiment aggravated by their
experience of temporal, social and spatial segregation in Japan. While social structural
conditions foster these conditions of segregation, they also emerge from the senti-
ments of migrants. It is important to point out that most entertainers initially enter
Japan with the intention of settling for only a short period. We should therefore note
that structure and agency operate dialectically to discourage feelings of membership
for Filipina migrant entertainers in Japan.
With an unequal sense of allegiance for Japan and the Philippines, most migrant
entertainers are unlikely to think of themselves as transnational migrants who are
equally entrenched in the Philippines and Japan. Instead, they view themselves as
visitors to Japan whose loyalties remain with the Philippines. Consequently, they
remain conscious of their eventual return to the Philippines during the entire duration
of their settlement. As such, we can describe their migration as a process of returning
home to the Philippines. Emblematic of this process are their preparations for sayonara
parties and continuous accumulation of goods for balikbayan boxes. Without doubt,
the poor conditions of their migration foster the migrant entertainers’ desire to return
home. However, better housing and living conditions and greater access to com-
munity assistance would not necessarily make them want to settle permanently in
Japan, but they would improve their quality of life.
Notions of migrant settlement in the literature have insufficiently taken into
account how temporal restrictions qualitatively shape migrant experiences. This
article takes a step towards amending that omission in the literature and contributes
towards the development of a paradigmatic framework on settlement based not on the
experience of permanent migrants but instead on temporary migrants. It distinguishes
circular migration from transnational migration; it shows how circular migrants main-
tain a greater sense of allegiance to the sending country. What it fails to do, however,
is account for the conditions in sending communities that propel the continued cir-
cular migration of return migrants. Still sorely missing from the literature are

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Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

empirically grounded accounts on circular migration from the perspective of sending

communities.
Contributing towards our better knowledge of the experiences of short-term
circular migrants in the host society, this article addresses how their temporal segre-
gation would shape their adaptation. It establishes that temporal segregation results in
the social and spatial segregation of migrant Filipina entertainers, and consequently
results in their experience of short-term migration as a process of returning home. I
suggest that accounting for short-term migration requires a paradigmatic shift from
our models of settlement based on long-term migration. Perhaps a more suitable
analytic framework for documenting the settlement of temporary migrants would be
to look not at the extent of their integration but instead at their segregation in the host
society.

Acknowledgements
This article benefits from the editorial suggestions of Ali Rogers as well as comments shared by
Hasan Mahmud, Dina Okamoto, Lok Siu, Min Zhou, and three anonymous reviewers.
Conversations with Leah VanWey also enhanced the arguments presented in this article. I
shared earlier versions of this article and received valuable comments from audiences at the S4
Colloquium Series organized by John Logan at Brown University, the Rethinking International
Migration Workshop organized by Roger Waldinger at UCLA, and the Sociology of Race
Workshop organized by Anthony Ocampo at UCLA. I thank Ruri Ito of Hitotsubashi
University for her support of this project and the Institute for Gender Studies at Ochanomizu
University in Tokyo for their generous funding support.

Notes
01. The word entertainer generally refers to theatrical and musical performers. They sing,
dance, or perform ethnic music in a public venue. They also include those involved in show
business. See Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, A guide to Japanese visas,
http://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/visa/appendix1.html, last accessed 4 January 2010.
02. See Philippine Overseas Employment Administration website on the number of deployed
overseas workers at http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/statistics.html, last accessed 4 January
2010. Also see a report issued by Human Rights Osaka, http://www.hurights.or.jp/news/
0702/b01_e.html, last accessed 4 January 2010.
03. In direct response to Japan’s low placement in the Tier-2 Watchlist in the US Trafficking in
Persons Report, the government of Japan implemented more stringent requirements for
prospective foreign entertainers, disqualifying most experienced entertainers from re-entry
to Japan. See Parreñas (2008).
04. Note that it is illegal for foreigners with an ‘entertainer visa’ to interact directly with
customers. Their visa limits their work to performances on stage.
05. For non-nikkei-jin, eligibility for long-term residency is restricted to foreign spouses or
mothers of Japanese nationals.
06. Personal conversation with Nobue Suzuki, an anthropologist who has done research on
Filipino wives of Japanese men (Tokyo, Japan).
07. One becomes an undocumented worker when running away. Deterring entertainers from
running away is that they would be denied their salary, which is withheld from them during
the entire duration of their contract and only given to them at the airport on their very last
day in Japan. Those who are likely to run away are entertainers who (1) suspect they will be

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denied their salary at the airport; (2) face abusive conditions at the workplace; and (3) fear
they will face difficulty securing another labour contract for work in Japan.
08. In this highly competitive industry, it is rare for entertainers to complete more than two or
three labour contracts before they permanently retire in the Philippines, because not only
does the supply of entertainers far exceed the demand, but the greater preference for
younger women also reduces the likelihood of return migration. In this industry, youth is
more valuable than experience.
09. Castles and Miller (1998) formulate a stage model of migration in which migrants initially
arrive as temporary workers but prolong their stay then sponsor the migration of their
family and eventually become permanent settlers.
10. Not all temporary labour migrants become circular migrants. Some only migrate once while
some decide to stay indefinitely or permanently in the host society as we see in the case of
migrant Filipina entertainers.
11. Historical studies provide us greater insight on sojourner migration, but methodological
limitations prevent them from giving first-hand accounts of the daily experiences of
sojourners (Gabaccia and Ottanelli 2001; Hing 1993).
12. In the United States, short-term seasonal migration is also encouraged from neighbouring
countries such as Mexico and the Caribbean. These migrants are required to hold temporary
work permits.
13. Iglicka (2001) further qualifies that some shuttle migrants experience ‘primitive mobility’,
meaning a process of deskilling. Shuttle migrants include professional workers who earn
more peddling goods than practising their occupation after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
14. As Stephen Castles (2006: 749) notes, ‘There is currently a global trend towards more
temporary labour migration, and repeated and circulatory migrations are becoming much
more common.’
15. They are inaccessible because they rarely venture outside their workplace. This is the case
not because organized crime enslaves them but because they work long hours and lack
funds.
16. The visa restricts the employment of the entertainer to the sponsoring club.
17. During the time of my research, the embassy began to operate on Sundays but still closed
its doors at five o’clock in the afternoon.

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Castles, S. (1984) Here for good: Western Europe’s new ethnic minorities, London: Pluto
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