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Bodies That Remember

In January 2005, a large-scale raid organized by Kanagawa Prefectural Police and the municipal government eradicated sex trade businesses in Koganecho, a marginalized district in the port city of Yokohama. The array of small brothels in the district was completely uprooted, and transnational migrant women who were working there disappeared. Although the migrant sex workers are no longer present in the district and the city landscape is shifting rapidly, their ghostly ‘traces’ persist in the city in the forms of rumors, people's memories and affective experiences, various cultural texts and the architectural remains of former brothels, which continue to constitute the materiality of Koganecho today. While Koganecho has traditionally been regarded simply as a place to engage in illicit and ‘abnormal’ activities – namely, prostitution – the ghostly traces of Koganecho suggest that it was a cultural space where migrant sex workers participated in the production of everyday culture, shared experiences, affects and identities. In this article, I present an alternative way of remembering Koganecho's brothel district by using the notion of ‘scene’. Based on my ethnographic research in Yokohama, I reconstruct a scene of Koganecho brothel district through these ghostly traces, primarily by presenting emotional moments of the scene remembered by local people and photographic images of the district that I produced during my fieldwork. The things people remembered were not the ‘primary’ activities of the scene (i.e. prostitution), but activities that took place outside the regular work hours when sex workers engaged in mundane social activities, including eating, singing karaoke, shopping and hanging out with friends. In these moments, the Koganecho scene transformed into a diasporic space where migrant women remembered and maintained relationships with family back home while building new relationships with the local Japanese.