Reluctant Intimacies

<p> Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan and Indonesia this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers' relationships with the cared-for elderly their Japanese colleagues and their employers. Through the notion of intimacy the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on the body migration demographic change and eldercare in a vivid account of societal transformation. Placed against the background of mass media representations the Indonesian workers' experiences serve as a basis for discussion of the role of bodily experience in shaping the image of a national other in Japan.</p>