Download or read book Reluctant Intimacies written by Beata Świtek and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.