Transnational Domestic Masculinity: Japanese Men’s Home Cooking in Australia

This chapter aims to bring a new perspective into existing work written on the shifting relationship between domesticities and masculinities, by locating men’s home cooking in a specific transnational context. Despite growing popular and academic interest in men’s involvement in home cooking, there is little research that investigates how transnational migrant men engage with the particular domestic domain. Using Japanese male migrants in Australia as a case study, this chapter examines the ways in which their engagement with home cooking reflects their changing relationships to home, work, and masculinity. Rather than depending on paid public work as a realm to perform and prove their sense of selves as “men,” my interviews suggest that the Japanese male migrants alternatively connect to unpaid domestic work such as home cooking as a practical and readily available platform for “doing” men.