During fieldwork in rural Nagano, I regularly heard Filipina migrants assert that they loved their Japanese husbands. Most of these men had been customers the women met while working as “entertainers” at local Filipina hostess bars. Here I explore how, why, and to what ends these women emphasized their love for their husbands as they crafted lives and selves in both Japan and the Philippines. Taking a transnational perspective to feminist work on emotion, I explore how love is made meaningful through global processes and the roles it plays in migrants' efforts to craft new gendered and sexualized subjectivities.

Ethnographies of encounter are one response to calls to decolonize anthropology. These ethnographies explore how culture making occurs through unequal relationships involving two or more groups of people and things that appear to exist in culturally distinct worlds. The term encounter refers to everyday engagements across difference. Ethnographies of encounter focus on the cross-cultural and relational dynamics of these processes. They consider how such engagements bring discrepant stakes and histories together in ways that produce new cultural meanings, categories, objects, and identities. This article examines a transection of the discipline that shares this methodology. We focus on encounter approaches to (a) transnational capitalism, (b) space and place, and (c) human-nonhuman relations. Rather than taking capitalism, space and place, and humanness as contextual frameworks, these ethnographies demonstrate how encounter is the means by which these categories emerge.

A B S T R A C TExperiments in collaboration open new investigative possibilities for cultural anthropologists. In this report, we use our research on matsutake mushrooms to show the promise of collaborative experiments for ethnographers of scale making, global connection, and human-nonhuman relations. Anna Tsing introduces. Mogu Mogu (Timothy Choy and Shiho Satsuka) argue that the mushroomic figure of mycorrhizal life illuminates workings of capital and power, nature and culture. Lieba Faier examines contingency-through the effect of weather and bugs on matsutake production-as a form of self-positioning that emerges from local understandings of connection. Michael Hathaway uses postcolonial science studies to examine the transnational production, flow, and transformation of scientific knowledge about matsutake. Miyako Inoue discusses the anthropological subject that emerges through the kind of collaboration envisioned and practiced by the Matsutake Worlds Research Group.

During fieldwork among Filipina migrants married to Japanese men in rural Nagano, stories about Filipina women who had “run away” from Japanese husbands and families in the region regularly surfaced in casual conversations. This essay focuses on both running away and stories about it as interconnected means through which these women negotiated their dissatisfactions with their lives abroad. I suggest that through such practices, these women's dissatisfactions assumed a “runaway agency” that created unsettling and, sometimes, unexpected social effects. First, insofar as running away involved “underground micromovements,” it enabled Filipina women to craft spaces in Japan outside the domestic boundaries of both the home and the nation. These “extradomestic spaces” offered at once hopeful and dangerous possibilities for building alternative lives in Japan. Second, as Filipina women who remained in rural Nagano gossiped about those who had run away, they pressured some Filipina wives into staying while encouraging others to leave. Third, running away became an unexpected leveraging tool through which some Filipina women negotiated the conditions of their domestic situations to unpredictable effect.

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