ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores present-day female marriage migration in East Asia through a selective survey of literature, highlighting migrants’ experiences. They introduce the key issues involved in studies of gender and marriage migration, provide an overview of migration patterns and suggest reasons for the increase from the point of view of the receiving countries. The author looks at migrant women’s experiences, exploring their motivations for marriage, their relationships with their husbands and other members of their new families, the meanings placed on paid work and concerns surrounding social and legal citizenship. Compartmentalisation obscures the diverse and fluid processes of migration on the one hand, and the commonalities that inform women moving within the global economy on the other. Marriages between a national and a foreign spouse started to show a significant increase in the 1980s in Japan, and in the 1990s in South Korea and Taiwan with notable numbers of co-ethnic marriages.
