Lived Religion, Lived Translanguaging: Identity formation Research in Japan through A Critical Phenomenological Approach

Abstract

Since the late twentieth century, identity research in applied linguistics has emphasized fluid and plural identities, often focusing on multilingual and minoritized individuals. Intersectionality has further supported this work by examining how language is implicated in socially and politically constructed categories such as nationality, race, gender, religion, and class. However, contemporary transnational conditions—including intensified ideological and religious tensions and the disruptions foregrounded during the COVID-19 pandemic—raise questions about how people experience continuity and ethical orientation amid fluid identities and shifting social positions. Drawing on longitudinal, rapport-based qualitative research in Japan, this paper introduces a phenomenology-informed conceptualization of identity as a “constituting self” and advances a critical phenomenological methodology. The study examines the lived experiences of two Catholic women, one Japanese and one Filipino, within a shared analytical frame. Rather than treating categories, labels, and binaries as fixed explanatory units, the analysis approaches them as shifting reference points through which participants interpret their lives across church and everyday contexts. The analysis traces disheartening and healing trajectories through which participants articulate what matters to them. These trajectories are interpreted as “lived religion,” understood as a moral and affective orientation embedded in everyday practice, through phenomenologically narrated “lived translanguaging,” encompassing sensual, emotional, linguistic, and non-linguistic meaning-making. Although small-scale, the study shows how a critical phenomenological approach can illuminate identity formation as an ongoing ethical becoming within transforming relational constellations. It also outlines directions for future identity research that attends to more-than-human relationality and the material conditions through which lived experience is sustained.