ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how the partners in Japanese-Danish marriages in Denmark perceive their own gender and identity, and how the lifestyle and living conditions in Denmark influence the range of choices available to the couple when they try to establish a viable power and gender relation pattern for their marriage. Gender is a socio-cultural construct and gender identity is acquired largely subconsciously by each individual through continuous, lifelong interactions with others within the same socio-cultural environment. All sorts of mobility across borders repeatedly forces contacts between cultures, and these contacts are not always free of conflict or mutual dislike, even though they may cause people to readjust their concepts of what is ‘natural’. Personal identity is often perceived by the individual as distinct from the collective identity, but in fact this personal sense of identity is strongly interrelated with and dependent upon the collective identity of the group or groups to which the individual belongs.
