From liminality of marital citizenship to precarity of denizenship in Japan: female migrants from former Soviet states and their sense of belonging

This paper explores complexities of marital citizenship and denizenship within the context of securitisation of migration in Japan. It focuses on female migrants from former Soviet Union countries and their experiences of a continuum of belonging transformation. As many states securitise borders by creating conditions where marital citizenship is liminal and denizenship is precarious, migrants exercise agency through choices securing their residence status. Living in Japan, many women aimed to receive permanent residence status over a spousal visa, as the latter was contingent on their marriage continuation. While permanent residency status offered some freedoms, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed underlying issues of exclusion, intensifying restrictions on foreign residents, leading to challenges for temporarily leaving/entering the country. Our findings suggest that internal citizenship entitlements, such as marital citizenship and denizenship, do not provide the security necessary for long-term belonging. By drawing on the case of marriage migrants in Japan, we contribute empirically to citizenship studies by illustrating how citizenship is constituted through lived practices, negotiations, and everyday interactions at the margins of the legal domain. Although situated in Japan, these findings have broader relevance for understanding how states transform private relationships into instruments of migration control and overall governance of intimacy.