This chapter explores the complexity of migrant communities in Japan through the lens of digital media. It aims to illustrate how migrants’ everyday diasporic experiences and their digital media usage are manifested in the Japanese context, so as to explore the intersection of digital connectivity and human mobility. The first section dissects the concept of “migrants in Japan,” followed by an introduction to transnationalism as a theoretical toolkit for digital migration studies. This chapter is then concluded by a case study focusing on digital media appropriation among Chinese migrants in Japan, demonstrating migrants’ indigenized application of digital media and transnational social engagement.

Introduction

With the rise of digital technologies, the time we are living in is marked by two interlocked phenomena, namely globalization and digitization. Globalization brings an easier means of transport together with evolving and transgressing technologies, leading to the increasing interaction, interpenetration and interdependence of economic, social and political activities across national boundaries. Meanwhile, digitization facilitates these transnational activities. Digital media, such as the internet and internet-based hardware (i.e., computers and smartphones) and software (i.e., social networking services, digital communication technologies and online streaming), have expedited the global process of interconnectivity and digitalized exchange, where flows of ideas and ideologies, languages and cultures contribute to the construction of a borderless world.

The increasingly interconnected and transnational media may also transform the meanings of being mobile and the logic of migration. Although transnational connections have always constituted an intrinsic element of human mobility, the instant communication and constant contact contemporary migrants enjoy differentiate them from their counterparts in other periods of history. Using digital media to mediate texts, images, sounds, discourses and ideologies, migrants today are able to engage in continuous contact with the homeland and at the same time negotiate the local reality in their host society as well as while on the move. In the context where digital media turn mobile individuals into connected dots (Diminescu 2008) that together compose a transnational social formation (Vertovec 1999), digitally connected migrants are no longer just a group of displaced people. Instead, through their development of new modes of social organizations, group actions, as well as collectively interpreted diasporic experiences (Guarnizo and Smith 1998; Wang 2020a), they are now designated as “transnational communities” (Anderson 1983; Retis and Tsagarousianou 2019; Ponzanesi 2020).