Descending from Japan: Lifestyle mobility of Japanese male youth to Thailand.

The paper examines the emerging transnational mobility of Japanese young men as lifestyle migrants in Southeast Asia, mainly targeting those in their twenties and thirties moving to Thailand for a change of life. Japanese lifestyle migrants are considered to be socio-cultural “refugees” who escape the stresses of Japanese society and seek a better quality of life elsewhere. This paper explores how and to what extent mobility liberates Japanese men from the male-centered corporate culture orsalarymanmasculinity. It also analyzes the role that travel writings have had in the social labelling and facilitation of the lifestyle mobility of Japanese young men sojourning in Southeast Asia in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]