“I couldn’t help but compare with other countries”: Migrant mothers’ lived experiences of Japan’s COVID-19 state of emergency
Connolly, Abigail
Connolly, Abigail
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Publication Date
2024-12-05
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journal article
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Connolly, Abigail. (2024). “I couldn’t help but compare with other countries”: Migrant mothers’ lived experiences of Japan’s COVID-19 state of emergency. Dearcadh: Graduate Journal of Gender, Globalisation and Rights, 5. https://doi.org/10.13025/29194
Abstract
This article presents the lived experiences of English-speaking migrant mothers in Japan during the early COVID-19 pandemic when school and childcare facilities closed, there was a national State of Emergency (SoE) and foreign residents were banned from re-entering the country. I examine the influence of the intersecting identities and social locations of being a woman, a mother of a dependent child, and a migrant in Japan. For mothers in this research, the COVID-19 pandemic played out against a backdrop of global gender inequality, which intensifies when women become mothers and is notoriously extreme in Japan. Although non-Japanese people face institutional and social discrimination, these mothers occupy a relatively privileged position amongst migrants, in a country which values English language ability. Still, their daily lives were affected by social structures and inequalities, and by a government response that did not sufficiently mitigate the uneven impacts of the crisis. Mothers experienced stress from the surge in demand for unpaid care of family members in a context of ambiguity, exacerbated by an unmet need for information and, for many, a language barrier. Mothers turned to online communities to provide each other with social support and information; as well as accessing information in English from sources in other countries. Findings support the case for intersectionality-based policymaking and crisis response which utilise knowledge from lived experiences of people with intersecting characteristics, as these factors influence people’s experiences of and access to services, and the ways in which they are impacted by crises such as public health emergencies.
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School of Political Science and Sociology, University of Galway
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International