Recent socioeconomic and political developments have exacerbated a sense of uncertainty and precarity among the young around the world and prompted them to question conventional markers of and paths toward adulthood. This dissertation examines the trajectories of about twenty young Japanese who have translocated their moratorium and maturation beyond the national borders of Japan. It proposes that for them sojourning abroad is best understood as a form of agency: these "moratorium migrants" proactively, individualistically, and self-consciously carve out different living spaces and life styles, while challenging, and/or adapting normative modes of achieving adulthood in Japan. Hence, this dissertation theorizes the connections between migration, maturation and perceptions of race and gender, by arguing that global circulation is a way to stretch and re-interpret the limits of internalized social norms without publically protesting or openly rebelling.

This multi-sited ethnography examines the lives, journeys and thoughts of Japanese emerging adults sojourning in small-town Germany or California. The four chapters are organized in the emic categories of "education explorers," "artists and artisans," "resetters," and "international voyagers." The analysis of their experiences illustrate that, at least for these individuals, migration is primarily powered by a desire for meaningful livelihoods that they can shape themselves, rather than a form of self-searching or escape from Japanese society. For these Japanese in their twenties and early thirties, it is such livelihoods in conjunction with their acquired skills and the transnational networks of people they rely on that have become a "place to call home" (ibasho). There, they strive to negotiate the tension between their globalized life courses and Japanese social norms.