This article is a methodological examination situated within a larger multisited project on the formation and regulation of communities of sex workers in Yokohama, Japan, and Vancouver, Canada, in historical and social discourse. Tracing the fragmented and elliptical histories of these communities, we are attentive to the potential for walking, and specifically walking tours, as an ethnographic method, a mode of historical engagement, and a means to reflect on our unfolding and shifting space–body relationships as we move across spaces of inquiry with varying levels of ease/tension. We seek to understand walking tours as a means and method to critically engage the histories that we seek to uncover and the absences we face in our attempts to uncover them—not only the social relations that constitute and are constituted by the space but also our own relationship to current communities that exist in the space—and the ways our lifeworld entanglements interfere with and give shape to our research endeavors. We problematize academic tendecies to situate lifeworld entanglements as secondary or superfluous to the research process. By tactically spatializing our personal experiences in a series of endnoted digressions, we make strange academic writing conventions of appropriate form and content.
This article reflects on an experimental pedagogical approach I developed in a Japanese literature course that examines sex, gender, and sexuality in response to institutional and epistemic racism that exist in university in Canada and in the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic when the number of anti-Asian hate crimes rose at an enormous rate in the city where my university is situated. Building on the intellectual movements of “Asia as method” and “diaspora as method” my project attempts to move beyond the convention of studying Asian culture by referencing western theory, knowledge, and experience. More specifically, I developed an assignment called Peer- Engaged Embodied Reflection Journal where students discuss what they learned from Japanese literature by referencing their own, local experiences and engage in peer interactions in small groups. In this article, I discuss the effectiveness of my pedagogical approach based on the classroom study conducted in the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021, semi-structured interviews with teaching assistants (TAs), and my own teaching experience. Based on my qualitative analysis of student engagement with the assignment as well as TAs’ and my grading experiences, I conclude that recentring student experience and peer engagement produces meaningful sites for decolonial and antiracist pedagogy while teaching Japanese modern literature in a Canadian institutional context.
Over the last three decades, migration from Asia has been increasingly feminized as women find work abroad, primarily in highly gendered labour markets such as domestic services and health care services, where they are forced to live apart from their own families. This paper examines Nanay (Mother) (2009), a testimonial play, as an example of documentary theatre. The play was written by two geographers, Geraldine Pratt and Caleb Johnston. It explores Filipina domestic workers’ experiences of maternal loss and separation, which constitute what I refer to as their “diasporic motherhood.” I focus not only on the play’s narrative but also on its multimedial and polyphonic form, and discuss how the play invites members of the Canadian public to engage actively with the migrant workers’ life stories, ethically connect with the migrant subjects, and envision an alternative future to the current exploitative condition.
This article examines “Hello, War Brides,” a series of short, auto/biographical essays authored by two Japanese war brides from the state of Washington. I view this text as a product of collaborative “memory work.” Based on a textual analysis of its narratives and form, I argue that this work represents individual war brides' memories as counter-memories that provide a new understanding of the experiences of Japanese war brides. Such an understanding could be thought of as an alternative to the monolithic and stigmatized images of Japanese war brides, imposed primarily by the Japanese mainstream media against which these women have struggled for decades. The production of the text also worked to reconstruct and renew the women's own memories in a positive light and to create a new form of community of remembrance. This essay aims to shed light on both the literary and the social significance of “Hello, War Brides” as a way to re-evaluate the Japanese war brides' transnational movement that has taken place in the years after its publication.
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