Ayaka Yoshimizu – författare

Doing Ethnography in the Wake of the Displacement of Transnational Sex Workers in Yokohama reflects on the politics, poetics, and ethics of remembering the lives of transnational migrant sex workers in postcolonial Japan. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the port city of Yokohama, the book focuses on the “water trade” in the Koganecho neighbourhood where exploitative and stigmatised labour took place, involving sexual services performed by migrant women. In recent years the city has sought to rebrand Koganecho, evicting transnational migrant sex workers who had been integral to postindustrial development and erasing their past presence. The author explores Yokohama’s memoryscapes in the aftermath of displacement through embodied knowledge, engaging her senses and ethics as a colonizer-researcher as she navigates the elusive past through traces that remain in the present. She examines the city’s built environment, official historical narratives, films, and photographic works. With few brothels and workers remaining, Yoshimizu fills the gap with her own interactions, encounters, and imaginings. Yoshimizu also writes through the imagery of water in ways that are informed by the local usage and imaginations—the ocean, flowing rivers, swamps, humidity, alcohol, the fluidity of relationships, and transient lives. The water also offers a way to sense the “ghost”, or the displaced lives and the effects of displacement, that, like humid air, stick to those who occupy or inhabit the site of displacement today. This interdisciplinary work makes a valuable contribution to sensory studies, memory studies, migration studies, and Asian studies.

Doing Ethnography in the Wake of the Displacement of Transnational Sex Workers in Yokohama reflects on the politics, poetics, and ethics of remembering the lives of transnational migrant sex workers in postcolonial Japan. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the port city of Yokohama, the book focuses on the “water trade” in the Koganecho neighbourhood where exploitative and stigmatised labour took place, involving sexual services performed by migrant women. In recent years the city has sought to rebrand Koganecho, evicting transnational migrant sex workers who had been integral to postindustrial development and erasing their past presence. The author explores Yokohama’s memoryscapes in the aftermath of displacement through embodied knowledge, engaging her senses and ethics as a colonizer-researcher as she navigates the elusive past through traces that remain in the present. She examines the city’s built environment, official historical narratives, films, and photographic works. With few brothels and workers remaining, Yoshimizu fills the gap with her own interactions, encounters, and imaginings. Yoshimizu also writes through the imagery of water in ways that are informed by the local usage and imaginations—the ocean, flowing rivers, swamps, humidity, alcohol, the fluidity of relationships, and transient lives. The water also offers a way to sense the “ghost”, or the displaced lives and the effects of displacement, that, like humid air, stick to those who occupy or inhabit the site of displacement today. This interdisciplinary work makes a valuable contribution to sensory studies, memory studies, migration studies, and Asian studies.

This volume examines the politics of fieldwork and the challenges of researching migrants constructed as outsiders both nationally and transnationally. Based on research with undocumented migrants, temporary workers, refugees, international students, and those who, having received citizenship status find their lives to be discursively and legally restricted, it shows how interdisciplinary fieldwork-based approaches can provide detailed accounts of migrants’ voices and their conditions of existence, offering insights into the ways in which they understand and take part in producing their transnational worlds. Applying critical, self-reflexive methodological approaches that challenge assumptions about who has the authority to produce knowledge and what types of knowledge have the authority of truth, Migration and the Politics of Methodology will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, and communication and cultural studies with interests in research methods and migration.