ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an ethnographic study, which investigates both everyday experiences and perspectives of professional migrants and that of another group of professional migrants, namely, host national employees who are also undergoing spatial transnational movements by commuting from host societies to transnational offices. It focuses on mobility and open attitudes that are considered characteristics of cosmopolitans demonstrates the location of host nationals as part of professional migrants and a single continuum of cosmopolitans with transnational experiences based upon their spatial mobility. The Jakarta Office of the Japanese organization (JOI) provided services for Indonesia in cooperation with both the Japanese and Indonesian governments. The chapter explores the ways in which Japanese expatriate employees lived and worked with host nationals in Indonesia. It explains the experiences and perspectives of host national employees, who tend to be overlooked in discussions of elites and cosmopolitans. Simultaneously, binary distinctions between expatriate employees as elites and cosmopolitans and host nationals as nonelite and non-cosmopolitans are unclear.
