About Suma Ikeuchi—Scholar, Writer, Anthropologist

At the most fundamental level, my work explores the making and crossing of boundaries in our increasingly interconnected world. Boundaries are part and parcel of human worldmaking. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, nation, border, diaspora, market, care, kinship, technology, and environment… Such forces are constantly animated by the boundaries we construct within the material and historical conditions inherited from the past. As a boundary-oriented thinker, I am always drawn to borderlands, gray zones, and blurred lines–the points of friction and fissure that expose the limits of powerful categories we live by. As such, what drives my scholarship is not its objects, such as “diaspora,” “religion,” or “technology,” although it certainly deals with such topics. Rather, the engine of my work lies in my intense curiosity to discern the fraying of dominant entities and realities. I am chiefly concerned with the edge of existence, where the taken-for-granted cohesiveness of objects begins to unravel. For example, I approach “Japan” not as a discrete entity but instead as a processual node, attending closely to the people, things, and beings that inhabit its shifting boundaries.

In my first monograph, Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora (2019 Stanford University Press), I wrote about the spiritual pursuits of Nikkei Brazilian migrants in contemporary Japan. They are the descendants of Japanese emigrants to Brazil who have “return-migrated” to their ancestral homeland since the late twentieth century and, once there, converted to Pentecostal Christianity thriving on the multi-ethnic social margins of Japan. Based on fourteen months of immersive multilingual fieldwork conducted in central Japan, the book offers an intimate portrayal of migrants who travel the borderlands of nations, ethnicities, and religions–in this case, the ambiguous space between their Brazilian birth, Japanese “blood,” and transnational God.

Jesus Loves Japan won two outstanding book awards in 2020: the Francis K. Hsu Prize and Clifford Geertz Prize, both from the American Anthropological Association, the world’s largest professional organization for anthropologists.

Now I am writing a second monograph tentatively titled Who Cares? Women, Migrants, and Robots in Aging Japan. The book situates the provision of eldercare by Filipina migrants within the historical context of Japan, where the “traditional” family care is becoming increasingly untenable and yet the futuristic vision of robotic care has not become a reality. Triangulating family, migrants, and technology, the project sheds light on the shifting boundaries of gendered labor, global market, and data economy as the symptoms of capitalist care. Funded by the National Science Foundation, I carried out an eight-month fieldwork in Japan in 2022, visiting a variety of sites such as nursing homes, caregiver training schools, and care robotics exhibit.

And Yes, I’ve Got Some Life…

Aside from research and teaching, I also enjoy pottery and hiking. In fact, these “hobbies” are vital to my scholarly endeavors. In the words of my wise grandma, “Use your hands and move your body if you don’t wanna be big-headed.”