ABSTRACT
The Sino-Japanese context is entangled with everyday circulations of people, things and practices. These various mobilities, from overseas study to overseas trade, have created a context where, on an everyday level, Sino-Japanese relations operate as a range of mobile socialities at multiple imaginative scales. Within this chapter, I draw on ethnographic observations of informal digital economies between China and Japan to ask how we might reconcile the emphasis on ‘flat’ interpersonal socialities typical of ethnographic mobile media research, with the way these socialities are often imagined as representing national, inter-national and global relations. I examine the practice of daigou among young Chinese people in Japan, which is a term for a range of informal social media-based trading practices among Chinese networks around the world. I contrast this ethnographic material with the representation of Chinese consumer practices in Japan as bakugai, a term that connotes extreme shopper enthusiasm to the point of aggression. Through these two keywords, I show how a mobile socialities approach, combined with attention to keywords that represent mobile socialities, allows us to trace how people imagine informal economies in multiple ways and at multiple scales. Furthermore, I reflect upon how how mobile socialities relate to our theorisation of the relationship between circulating things, such as gifts (Mauss) and commodities (Marx), and their imaginative consequences.
