Crafting Religious Selves in a Transnational Space: Japanese Women Who Converted to Islam upon Marrying Pakistani Migrants
This chapter explores the trajectories of identity formation of Japanese women who converted to Islam upon marrying Pakistani migrants. The frequency of this type of cross border marriage increased during the 1990s following the rise in the number of Muslim labor migrants in Japan in the late 1980s. After marriage, a majority of the Japanese wives converted to Islam. Using longitudinal data collected since the late 1990s, this chapter examines the complex ways in which these Japanese women construct their Muslim identity as they move across national boundaries in the process of child rearing.