【Research Materials】

American Expatriates in Tokyo and
Their Celebration of Holiday
東京におけるアメリカ人移民の祝日の祝い方
YAMAMOTO Takayuki
（山本

貴之）

［ Abstract］

Much literature aims to capture the complex realities of migrant experiences in theage of globalization. Similarly, issues surrounding migrants from the Global North havegained increasing academic attention from scholars of international migration. However,migrants’ cultural practices in their hosting countries have scarcely been explored,
despite the fact that they mirror crucial aspects of globalization. In the given context,
this paper introduces my preliminary research on how American expatriates celebrate
different holidays in Tokyo, exploring the points of discussion that their holidaymakings
bring up. Among a variety of holidays referenced by informants, this paper singles out
their practices on Thanksgiving Day and Halloween, since they produce significant
points of discussion surrounding the location of, people attending, food of, and viewson the holidays after expatriation. Contradicting a traditional assumption that
migrants form ethnic/national communities in hosting societies, the informants for thisproject told stories of their holidaymakings which exemplify the much more complex
realities of their cultural practices in Tokyo. The first half of this paper is devoted tooutlining existing knowledge on the research topic and introduces a research question
and method. The latter half introduces findings of the research and discusses how
expatriation affects migrants’ holiday practices.

［ Table of Contents］
1.
2.

Introduction
Literature Review

3.
4.
5.

Description of Research
Data and Method
Findings― 17 ―

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American Expatriates in Tokyo and Their Celebration of Holiday

Halloween
Location
PeopleFood
Views
Thanksgiving Day
Location
PeopleFood
Views
6. Discussion
7. Conclusion
Appendix
References

1 . Introduction
Much literature aims to capture the complex realities of migrant experiences in
the age of globalization. Similarly, issues surrounding migrants from the Global North
have gained increasing academic attention from scholars of international migration.
However, migrants’ cultural practices in hosting countries have scarcely been explored,
despite the fact that they mirror crucial aspects of globalization. In particular, the livesof American expatriates in Japan remain untold, though they comprise the largest
migrant population from the Global North in Japan. In the given context, this paper
studies how American expatriates celebrate different holidays1） in Tokyo, exploring
what kind of points of discussion their holidaymakings bring up. The first half of thepaper is devoted to providing an overview of existing literature related to the research
topic, a description of this research, and an explanation of applied data collection andmethods. The second half reports findings and discusses some issues that emerge
from the research. Since this project was conducted as a preliminary research for mydissertation, this paper concludes by referring to possible further research topics.

2 . Literature Review
Traditional patterns of migration are often associated with global economic
inequalities. Scholars of migration have long been explaining them with push/pullmodels, stressing that both severe economic conditions in sending countries and labor
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American Expatriates in Tokyo and Their Celebration of Holiday

shortage issues in hosting countries generate a momentum of international population
movements. From this perspective, international migration is often pictured as the
movement from the South to the North, or from the East to the West. However, thecontemporary world characterized by the globalization of goods, people, and information
has diversified the reality of international migration. Some academic attention has
thus been given to less traditional migratory patterns, which include“high-skilled,
marriage, student, or even what has been recently called‘white’migrations”(Debnar,
2016, p. 2). These discussions of contemporary migration can be framed with a notionof‘transnationalism’. As opposed to international perspectives, which presume that
migrants usually stay in hosting countries, transnational perspectives assume that backand-forth movements between multiple countries would aid some individuals in creating
multiple networks. In that respect, as Yeoh (2018) argues, global cities are significant
locations for observing the multiplicity of diversities which transnational migrationentails. For instance, highly-mobile people, in hopes of further moving upwards in theircareers, can also be regarded as migrants, in which case migration is a deliberate action(Anno & Wank 2007)2）.
These‘privileged’migrants, despite a variety of motives in migration, aresometimes labeled as‘expatriates’(Croucher, 2012), often connoting the stereotypicalimage of white businessmen from the West. That being said, the field of criticalexpatriate studies has contributed much more precise descriptions of actual expatriate
experiences to the existing knowledge. As Farrer (2018) overviews, research on
expatriates—which initially focused on aspects of their psychological adaptations toworking environments in Asian hosting countries—currently covers other issues,
ranging from genders and whiteness as‘springs’of both privilege and marginalization
to the existence of economically unstable expatriates seeking stable positions
unavailable within in their home countries. With an increase in numbers of lifestyleand self-initiated migrants, the multiple realities of expatriates have been introduced inacademia, casting doubt on the prior one-dimensional understanding of expatriates. Also,
instead of recognizing the term as a classification of individuals, Kunz (2016) rather
understands‘expatriates’to denote social practices. In a similar vein, Farrer further
argues that“one is not‘an expatriate’by virtue of being a certain type of person but
rather learns to be an expatriate through socialization into an expatriate community
with its collective practices and outlooks”(Farrer, 2018, p. 197).

While issues centering on these expatriates have attracted much attention fromscholars, the amount of academic literature on them is far from sufficient. Specifically,
there is a lack of sociological inquiry into the group-making of expatriates, including
their celebration of holidays and festivals. Although Durkheim’s canonical work (1995)

has proven the importance of ritualistic collective gatherings in establishing social― 19 ―

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American Expatriates in Tokyo and Their Celebration of Holiday

identities, he seems to presume that the existence of societies is taken for granted. Thatis, while the ritualization of holidays and festivals can be seen as a remembrance ofpreexisting communities and consolidation of collective identities, it should also entail
the generation of a new sense of‘us’. This rings especially true in today’s highly
globalized world, wherein an unprecedented level of cultural, social, and political mixing
is evident, a phenomenon that has been sociologically conceptualized as‘super-diversity’(Vertovec, 2007). In fact, migration studies have conventionally treated migrants as an

ethnically-oriented group of people, assuming that they form ethnic communities in hostcountries, and such views have been criticized by some scholars. As Wimmer (2009)
notes,“the comparative literature on ethnicity alerts us to the possibility that membersof an ethnic group might not share a specific culture (even if they mark the boundarywith certain cultural diacritica), might not privilege each other in their everyday
networking practice and thus not form a‘community’”(Wimmer, 2009, p. 252).

3 . Description of Research
The brief overview of the related literature above leads to a necessityof research on expatriates’ gatherings, since they reflect a variety of social facts
characterizing contemporary issues of migration. In that respect, this project explored
how American expatriates in Tokyo celebrate holidays. A rationale for sampling
American expatriates in Tokyo lies in the fact that, in terms of international migrants
from the Global North,3） they form the biggest population in Japan. Since the majorityof them reside in Tokyo, (American Residents in Japan 2019) they are therefore
approachable informants. The objective of this research is not to test theories ofacculturation/deculturation of migrants, applying positivist approaches; rather, it is to
explore the multiple realities of their holiday experiences in Tokyo and to expand therepertoire of theories of expatriation.

4 . Data and Method
Based on the idea of constructionism, which perceives social realities as
subjective, situational, and culturally variable constructs, the study employed qualitativeinterviewing as its core method and participant observation as a supplemental methodof data collection, aiming to produce theories. Hence, the project was also based on
grounded theory (Strauss, 1987). Following a style of grounded-theory-based research
introduced by Weiss (1995), three informants were recruited (age range: 44-70, twofemales and one male); one of them recruited through convenience sampling, and theother two through theoretical sampling. All of them are college graduates (two of
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American Expatriates in Tokyo and Their Celebration of Holiday

them holding Ph.D. degrees). Informed consent was verbally obtained from all three
informants, and each interview lasted approximately an hour. Due to the surge in
Covid-19 cases, all of the interviews were conducted online using ZOOM. Since thisproject was exploratory research, it followed a semi-structured interview guide in hopesof obtaining a fuller description of their holiday experiences, as well as framing potential
questions for further research. The interview guide for this research covered five major
aspects as follows; (1) what holidays informants celebrate in Tokyo, (2) where theycelebrate these holidays, (3) who they celebrate the holidays with, (4) what food they
have for the holidays, and (5) their views of holiday celebrations. Data collected fromthe first informant was analyzed through steps of categorical, general, and integrativecoding processes.

5 . Findings
The Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas, Obon, andShogatsu were holidays celebrated by the informants, and each interview reflected aunique effect of expatriation on their holiday celebration. Since the interviews resulted
in discussions primarily about Halloween and Thanksgiving Day, this paper singles
them out and explores several themes correlated with issues of locations, people, food,and views of the holidays, with references to excerpts from the interviews.
Halloween
Location
One female informant—who is highly-mobile and has lived in several major cities in
Asia, Africa, and Oceania—made mention of the existence of foreign areas. Her annual
Halloween celebration used to take place in Azabu Juban, which is known as an area ofdense foreign population. Recently, she has been holding a community-oriented trick-ortreating in her neighborhood in Yokohama.
PeopleInterestingly enough, despite the abundance of foreigners in these areas, she stressedthat there are“not so many Americans. Actually, most of the people that come are
Japanese. Our neighbors are Japanese, local, local Japanese. They also celebrate
Halloween. And they also have the decorations at the house and the table with candy
because they know this area. All the foreign people come here to trick or treat”(Interview 3).
Food
Although doughnuts are not typically an important food during Halloween, they are ofgreat significance for one informant, reminiscent of her mother’s homemade doughnuts― 21 ―

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American Expatriates in Tokyo and Their Celebration of Holiday

that she used to have during childhood. She does not cook them herself but buys themat Krispy Kreme. She also buys candies for Halloween at the nearest Costco. Anotherinternational food market called National Azabu, as well as the online shopping website
Amazon, were referred to in the interview.
View
For one informant, who gave up being a Mormon when she left the U.S. about 20 years
ago, Halloween has a special meaning, since“it’s not a Christian holiday. It’s not areligious holiday. And it’s not a patriotic holiday. It has nothing to do with America. It’sa tradition that, it is a neutral tradition”(Interview 3). The informant rarely celebrates

Thanksgiving and Christmas and tries to celebrate the‘secular part’of them on suchoccasions.
Thanksgiving Day
Location

One of the remarkable indications regarding locations of holidays is that, whilesometimes they celebrate Thanksgiving at home, two of the informants highlighted aparticular restaurant called the Pink Cow as a significant location for the holiday. The
restaurant is currently located in Akasaka. They also indicated that there are a few
other restaurants in Tokyo which feature Thanksgiving dinner.
PeopleTwo of the informants explained how the celebration of Thanksgiving is a friendoriented event. For them, although originally celebrated with Americans residingin Tokyo, the Thanksgiving celebration increasingly included diverse participants,
regardless of nationalities. One informant who usually hosts the Thanksgiving gathering
explained that she“started inviting other people, and then in the past, I don’t know,
maybe 10 years ago, it ended up being more people who are not Americans than
Americans, simply because, you know, the Americans I knew here were having, youknow, their own celebration or people that I didn’t, you know, see a lot”(Interview 2).
Food
Food is an important aspect of the Thanksgiving celebration. Two informantsemphasized that the Pink Cow features a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, although
one of them still recognizes a minor difference in how it is served and tastes, noting“the Pink Cow does that stuff [traditional Thanksgiving dinner] although I’m sure that
the Pink Cow is not doing a whole turkey. What comes out when they’re serving is
like turkey meat, that’s been pre-prepared, pre-sliced, and stuff like that. The taste issignificantly different from the whole turkey. It tastes like frozen food”(Interview 1).

Also, another informant mentioned Kyle’s Good Finds, a cake shop in Nakano, which
also features a take-out style Thanksgiving dinner. Like in the Halloween celebration,
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American Expatriates in Tokyo and Their Celebration of Holiday

international food markets also play a pivotal role in expatriates’ celebration ofThanksgiving, especially at home, since they provide a wide variety of choices of food.
Views
Interestingly enough, all the informants expressed negative perspectives on
Thanksgiving Day, especially when they talked about how the holiday usually provides
a space for arguments and family tension in the U.S. One informant expressed how
her childhood memories of the holiday are unhappy because of domestic troubles andfamily quarrels, which is why she stopped celebrating it in Japan. Another informant
also remarked that the holiday has become unimportant over years of living outside
the U.S. Although he has been celebrating the holiday for several years now, it islargely because of the fact that his bosom friend organizes the gathering, implying theunimportance of the holiday itself. On the contrary, while sharing negative sentiments
towards Thanksgiving Day with the other two, one informant emphasized how theholiday has become increasingly important. She explained that the meaning of theholiday shifted over the years, from giving thanks, to rich harvest, to general gratitude
for people who have taken care of her.

6 . Discussion
Although roughly divided into four categories, the findings above are in fact
quite complexly intertwined with each other and help us recognize important points
of discussion. First, the significance of a particular restaurant as a location of holiday
celebration certainly reflects how some holidays are disembedded from local contexts
and reembedded in different locations (Giddens, 1990).
As for Thanksgiving celebration, the shift of the locationfrom home to restaurants stems from several facts, suchas the difficulty of buying turkey meat in Japan and thefact that Japanese ovens do not“fit the turkey”(Interview

3). Yet another factor worthy of attention is the line
between‘home for family’and‘restaurants for friends’.
That is, as one informant stressed,“Some Americans like
Jim, his family is here, you know, so when he celebrates
Thanksgiving with his family, he wouldn’t be a candidate
for the Pink Cow (Interview 2)”. The celebration at therestaurant exemplifies how expatriates living apart fromfamily hold the holiday gathering in Tokyo, inviting not
only Americans, but Japanese participants as well. This
challenges the popular assumption that migrants often― 23 ―

Picture 1 taken by Takayuki
Yamamoto on July 14, 2020.
The Turkey Bento from the
Kyle’s Good Finds in Nakano.

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American Expatriates in Tokyo and Their Celebration of Holiday

establish ethnically-oriented communities. It also resonates with another informant’scelebration of Halloween, which takes place in her local foreign neighborhood in
Yokohama but involves a considerable number of Japanese participants. These
instances suggest that expatriates holding these gatherings have an impact of someextent upon how local people live their lives, establishing a unique community.
That being said, the question of whether such a community is‘purely’friendsoriented remains. The following excerpt implies that the boundary line between family
and friends is blurring to some extent:
In Japan, it [Thanksgiving Day] took on an extra meaning of“Oh, this is a timefor family, and it is, for a lot of us, a time for exploring new concepts of family,
you know, seeing our deep friendships as family. (Interview 2)
Ostensibly, this serves as an example of fictive kinship, as opposed to‘realkinship’based on blood ties. However, such a conclusion might invite criticism,
since anthropological research into kinship has cast doubt on the assumption thatgenealogical correlation is a pivotal factor in defining a family (Schneider, 1984). In thatsense, the informant’s subjective recognition of changes in the meaning of family should
be understood as an example of how the meaning of each holiday is deconstructed andreinterpreted through the process of expatriation andeveryday life in one’s hosting society.
Food for the holidays, as the take-out styleThanksgiving dinner suggests, is manifested as alocalized dish to some extent (Picture 1). Similarly,
one informant notes, “I think, once I celebrated[Thanksgiving] with a Japanese family. They invited me
and you know...at Christmas...chicken legs”(Interview1). What he meant here is that that the Japanese family
served chicken legs for Thanksgiving Day, which
are usually served at Christmas in Japan, evidencing

localized holiday celebrations. At the same time, thereferences to transnational corporations and stores
Picture 2 taken by Takayuki
Yamamoto on July 11, 2020.
The Quality Food Market Sakagami
near Kiyose Station. Although
the large variety of food at the
Sakagami resembles generalinternational food markets, it is also
a high-end grocery store.

of American companies such as Costco and Amazon
imply that the economic globalization and technologicaldevelopment of food products transportation havefacilitated expatriates’ reproduction of ‘authentic’
holiday experiences with a particular food. It is worth
noting that while some restaurants and supermarkets

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American Expatriates in Tokyo and Their Celebration of Holiday

are located in Minato Ward—traditionally the heart of international living in Tokyo—
some other places including the Kyle’s Good Finds and a supermarket called Sakagami(Picture 2) are not necessarily located in such foreign areas. This indicates that

expatriates are not always concentrated in‘environmental bubbles’(Farrer, 2018).
Finally, the views of each holiday reveal how the informants recognize certain
obligations attached to them. For example, in the case of the ex-Mormon informant,
Thanksgiving Day is interpreted as a substantially gendered, religious holiday, towards
which she expressed her revulsion. Contrarily, Halloween represents Thanksgiving’smuch happier counterpart, to her representing cultural neutrality. This instancehighlights how holidays are framed by both national and cultural aspects. Anotherpoint of discussion which arises from these interviews is tension among expatriates.
One informant labeled expatriates as spoiled people and usually“stayed away fromthe Azabu Juban area because we didn’t want to be with the foreigners”(Interview
3). This is also related to her appreciation of her annual Halloween celebration, during
which she observes a good mix of participants. Resonating with the other informant’scelebration of Thanksgiving Day at the Pink Cow, a central meaning of holidaymaking
for her is not the maintenance of her religious and national identity, but interaction withlocals.

7 . Conclusion
It is interesting to see how expatriation pulls some holidays out from particular
timeframes like national calendars, weakening‘day-off’aspects of these holidays andin turn strengthening their function as community gatherings. In the same vein, this
exploratory research illustrates the impact of expatriates upon locals, creating uniquecommunities and contradicting the popular assumption that migrants form ethnicallyoriented communities in hosting countries. That being said, the limited number ofsamples with relatively high social status is far from sufficient, and questions of classaspects remain unanswered. Migrants from Western countries today do not always fit
into the category of privileged migrants. Rather, some of them are middling migrants(Lehmann, 2014) whose economic and social statuses do not represent those of global
elites. Based on this preliminary project, further research should focus on middlingmigrants from the U.S. and their holiday practices in Tokyo to more deeply understandmigration in the global age.

― 25 ―

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Appendix
General Information About Informants
Informant 1-

Gender: male
Age: 65
From: Saint Paul, Minnesota-

Occupation: university professor
Educational background: holding a PhD degree
Recruitment: convenient sampling

Informant 2
Gender: female
Age: 70
From: San Bernardino, California
Occupation: Aikido lecturer, retired editor and professor
Educational background: holding a PhD degree
Recruitment: snowball sampling
Informant 3
Gender: female
Age: 44
From: Salt Lake City, Utah
Occupation: Housewife (MA student)-

Educational background: having a college degree
Recruitment: snowball sampling

References
American Residents in Japan. (2019, December 3). Retrieved December 7, 2019, fromhttps://stats-japan.com/t/kiji/11634.
Anno, T., & Wank, D. (2007). Seijigaku shakaigaku jinruigaku ni okeru
toransunashonarizumu no shikaku. In Gurobaru shakai no dainamizumu: Riron totenbo (pp. 28–58). Jochi Daigaku Shuppan.
Croucher, S. (2012). Privileged mobility in an age of globality. Societies, 2(1), 1-13.
Debnár, M. (2016). Migration, Whiteness, and cosmopolitanism. New York: Palgrave

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Macmillan.
Durkheim, E. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen E. Fields.
New York: Free Press.
Falassi, A. (1987). Festival: Definition and morphology. Time out of Time: Essays on theFestival, 1-10.
Farrer, J. (2018). Changing expatriate communities in Asia and the blurring boundaries
of expatriate identity. Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations.
Fouron, G. E., & Schiller, N. C. (2001). The Generation of Identity: Redefining the Second

Generation. Migration, transnationalization, and race in a changing New York, 58.
Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kunz, S. (2016). Privileged mobilities: Locating the expatriate in migration

scholarship. Geography Compass, 10(3), 89-101.
Lehmann, A. (2014). Transnational lives in China: Expatriates in a globalizing city.
Springer.
Rusu, M. S., & Kantola, I. (2016). A time of meta-celebration: Celebrating the sociology ofcelebration. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 7(1), 1.
Schneider, D. M. (1984). A Critique of the Study of Kinship. University of Michigan
Press.
Strauss, A. L. (1987). Qualitative analysis for social scientists. Cambridge University
Press.
Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and racial studies, 30(6),1024-1054.
Weiss, R. S. (1995). Learning from strangers: The art and method of qualitative interview

studies. Simon and Schuster.
Wimmer, A. (2009). Herder’s heritage and the boundary ‐ making approach: Studying
ethnicity in immigrant societies. Sociological theory, 27(3), 244-270.
Yeoh, B. S. (2018). Transnational migrations and plural diversities: Encounters in global
cities. In Routledge handbook of Asian migrations (pp. 238-249). Routledge.

〔注〕1 ）The line between holidays and festivals is often blurred, but this paper supposesthat holidays can be conceptualized as temporal frameworks of celebration, while
festivals can be defined as“periodically recurrent, social occasions in…a multiplicity
of forms and a series of coordinated events”(Falassi 1987, 2). See (Rusu & Kantola2016) for more about the definitions.
2 ）This is not to say that migrants with economic vulnerability do not fit into thecategory of transnational migrants; for instance, migrants settling in hosting― 27 ―

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American Expatriates in Tokyo and Their Celebration of Holiday

countries and sending remittances to their home can be seen as individuals
belonging to multiple locations and making economic and cultural contributions
to both countries’ societies. A key aspect of the transnational approach is thatit recognizes continuing economic, social, and political relationships between
migrants and their home countries. See (Fouron & Schiller, 2001) for more about its

definition.
3 ）This paper applies the idea of the Global North instead of the West, since it isdebatable whether American expatriates can be described as being from the West.
A similar typological
United Kingdom.

dilemma also presents itself in other countries such as the

要旨
近年、
移民研究においてはグローバル化時代の移民の複雑な現状をとらえるために、グローバル・ノースからの移民に関して注目が集まっている。しかし、彼女ら彼らの文化実践については、それがグローバル化の重要な側面を反映するにもかかわらず学術的な関心が寄せられていない。この問題意識のもと、本稿は東京におけるアメリカ人移民の祝祭日の祝い方について筆者が行った探索的研究の結果を報告し、研究を通して立ち上がった論点について議論する。具体的には、本研究に参加したインフォーマントが言及した複数の祝祭日のうち感謝祭とハロウィーンに注目し、それら二つに関わる場所、人、食、移住後のインフォーマントの考え方について考察する。国際移民が移住先で民族／国家に基づくコミュニティを形成するという移民研究において支配的な仮説に反し、本研究のインフォー
マントは東京における複雑化した文化実践を体現している。本稿の前半では先行研究のレ
ビュー、研究の目的、方法について説明する。後半では、研究結果の報告と、国際移住が祝祭日の祝い方に与える影響について議論する。

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