At the turn of the millennium, the number of Japanese permanent residents in Australia surpassed 30,000, the highest figure since emigration Down Under took off some 30 years ago. These individuals, argues the author of this slim new volume, belong to a new generation of "lifestyle migrants," who move abroad for pleasure or to experience relative freedom from social restrictions, unlike their predecessors, who migrated for economic reasons. A writer and resident of Australia since 1973, Sato interviewed nearly 200 immigrants for her award-winning 1993 book "Shin kaigai teiju jidai: Osutoraria no Nihonjin," the basis for the English volume under review.
The original was likely recognized for the impressive range of people Sato interviewed and the remarkable variety of their experiences. She writes of the government health official and in-demand WHO consultant who struggled early on to prove her credentials, reflects on the change in cultural mind-set it must have taken for the university professor to become a happily dish-washing husband, and rejoices with the children's-book illustrator who found her way out of solitude through art. There is the story of the young chef who didn't let a night in jail dampen his ambition to one day own a restaurant in Melbourne, the woman who took a stand against her violent, alcoholic husband, and the missionaries who established a church amid abuse from the surrounding community. The more than 30 stories in the book are always compelling.
Their presentation, however, leaves much to be desired. Although the interviews are grouped into five chapters (focusing on women migrants, professional women, how class can affect the immigration experience, cross-cultural marriages and a miscellaneous chapter with no clear theme), too often the narrative doesn't support these divisions. In places the interviews read simply like a list of individual experiences, one jumping to the next with little to smooth the transition. While immigrants' anecdotes and observations provide food for thought, the lack of narrative structure and direction within the text tend to obscure Sato's overall arguments.