The JFC Book Project centers on Japanese-Filipino Children, individuals born from Filipino and Japanese parents. The JFC encounter challenges to their identities early on in life due to legal issues involving their nationalities and the various negotiations they undertake in order to achieve stability in either the Philippines or Japan. The JFC are mostly offspring from the time thousands of Filipinas migrated to Japan on entertainer visas to find their loves and fortunes in the Land of the Rising Sun. Because of personal and cultural differences, a large number of Japanese-Filipina marriages fail and the Filipinas resort to returning home with their children in tow. These children grow up treated differently by their neighbors, playmates, and classmates, and end up longing for their absent Japanese fathers. This absence permeates a JFC’s life and most of them seek to activate their rights to their expired Japanese citizenship in a bid to look for their fathers and achieve integration into Japanese society. The book will be told through the eyes of its author, Ken Ishikawa, who like the JFC, is also Filipino-Japanese. He investigates the lives of several JFCs in the book in a bid to understand their journeys and their places in Filipino and Japanese societies.

Main Cities of Activity

Japan: Oosaka

Host Institution(s) / Individual(s)

Lopez Mario Ivan (Associate Professor, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University)

Activity Reports

JFC Book Project