As a Caucasian, European young woman of middle-class background, my personal profile plays an important role in my research. I grew up and experienced first-hand encounters with Singapore and Tokyo similarly to my interlocutors. During my first personal encounters with Asia – especially Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo – as a tourist, undergraduate student and trainee in a private company between 2008 and 2012, I noticed the presence of young Europeans who live and work in these Asian cities. Expatriate research sets the career and life stage of candidates for overseas assignments at a higher one than those of the people I met in the streets of Tokyo or Singapore, and so I assumed that they had forged their journey to Asia via different routes. This gap between scholarship and media representation on the one side and my own local observations on the other side aroused my interest and led to my venturing into a graduate research project at Waseda University in Tokyo in 2013. The data collection lasted over my entire time as a graduate student and postdoctoral research fellow at Waseda up to 2020 and continued remotely thereafter by use of digital ethnography and online follow-up interviews.

My approach to this research thus means that I entered the field in a way similar to that of my interlocutors. Contrary to the young Europeans I observed and interviewed, I did not experience job search and full-time employment in the private labour market. However, my university in Tokyo and my two host institutions in Singapore constituted settings in which I was surrounded by people like those featured in my research. I underwent this crucial life stage of transition from education to employment, and from late youth to adulthood and financial independence, as a European in Asia like my interlocutors did. On the basis of interlocutors’ assumed mutual understanding of the conditions that shaped our shared context, conversations often evolved naturally.

On the other hand, the similar background and (assumed) understanding might have impacted the subjectivity of the study, as my identity as perceived by the interlocutors could have triggered certain topics to be raised at all.