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This chapter offers a “map” of artistic Japanese migrants in New York City. It begins by presenting brief snapshots of some Japanese migrant artists in NYC, who are all members of the so-called creative class, and within it work specifically in “supercreative” fields. It then provides a short history of postwar Japanese international travel, along with the history of external migration, particularly of creative people such as artists and intellectuals. It also examines how the mobility of Japanese migrant artists began, and how Japanese came to leave their country in the first place. It shows that contemporary Japanese migrants, particularly the independent artists who go to NYC and other cities, are difficult to categorize. They are at once travelers, sojourners, and migrants, and their time abroad might be characterized as a kind of extended travel.

This book examines the everyday lives of Japanese migrants who have reinvented themselves as artists in contemporary New York City. Drawing on research carried out between 2005 and 2006 in New York City and between 2003 and 2007 in Tokyo, the book explores the tension between optimistic self-reinvention and material and logistical constraints on self-realization, as well as the more ephemeral and intangible qualities in NYC that migrants value so highly. Focusing on the bohemian, artistic class of Japanese migrants—visual artists, graphic designers, fashion designers and stylists, dancers, musicians, and writers—the book approaches migration as well as the narrative and representational practices surrounding it as forms of aspirational self-making. It shows that the story of Japanese migrant artists in NYC offers important insights about Japan beyond its borders. This introduction uses everyday life as a framing device rather than an explicit theoretical concept, drawing from Michel de Certeau's notion of the everyday as the mundane moments where the “ordinary man” or “common hero” subverts and resists hegemonic power in creative ways.

This chapter examines how migrants in New York City craft themselves as Japanese through their creative work and personal identities. More specifically, it considers how Japan—as an idea, an identity, and an object of reflection and crafting—operates among Japanese migrants in NYC. It shows that many migrant artists struggle with the idea of “Japaneseness” itself, as they may package themselves and their work as “Japanese” or “Asian” so as to be commercially successful. The chapter interweaves these artists' stories with parallel histories of Japanese migration from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also juxtaposes the narratives with two texts: Natsume Sōseki's 1914 speech “Watakushi no kojinshugi” (My individualism) and Kuki Shūzō's 1930 treatise “Iki” no kōzō (The structure of “iki”).

This chapter examines the appeal of being an artist for Japanese migrants in New York City, along with the relationship between urban life and creative production. It shows that artistic production is a key means of self-actualization by drawing on the ethnographies of art and fashion. It also considers migrant artists' vision of NYC as a site for the birth and development of organic, authentic life experiences and reveals that their understandings of the authentic have three dimensions: encounters with radical difference in urban space, Japan's relationship to the world and the role of connection, and, finally, feeling and sensation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of authenticity and creativity in the context of modernity.