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Focusing on migrants' experiences of moving house in the country of settlement, the study explores the housing pathways of Russian-speaking migrants in Japan over their life courses. This paper emphasizes the need for the anthropology of migration to consider not only the housing events but also the housing pathways experienced by cross-border migrants in receiving countries. It is argued that the act of moving from one accommodation to another plays a crucial role in how migrants develop their biographies and perceptions of self. In addition to investigating house relocation, the study borrows from the Russian formalist school of narratology to examine how migrants narrativize their experiences in stories that intertwine housing pathways and movers' identities. The study reveals how the instances of moving—and not necessarily the physical qualities of housing—emerge as dynamic forces that initiate migrants into their desired statuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an alternative channel for elderly consumption response to housing value changes by focusing on the informal financial markets. This channel may be important, particularly in a society where the elderly are less mobile and have limited access to the formal financial markets. In such a society, elderly homeowners may leave their housing assets to their children, and in exchange receive cash to fund consumption. Japanese household-level data on the elderly are used to examine this possibility. The results indeed suggest that the consumption of the elderly responds to changes in their house values through the intrafamily finance channel alone. The marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth is only 0.01. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]