Ed Talk: Memories of Japanese Migrant Sex Workers in Transpacific Kootenays

Join the Cranbrook History Centre on June 23rd, 2021, to welcome Professor Ayaka Yoshimizu as our monthly Ed Talk speaker. She will give a presentation on the research that she conducted on the transpacific underground in Cranbrook and the East and Central Kootenays in 2018.

Please note: This presentation will contain discussions of sex work and may not be suitable for young audiences.

In her talk, Ayaka Yoshimizu will share part of her research on memories of Japanese women who were involved in the transnational sex trade in Japan and North American between 1850-1941. Her research identifies available traces of this elusive and repressed history and examines the ways in which the lives of those who survived the underground economy and their losses have been memorialized in art, literature, material objects and memorial places. This talk specifically highlights findings from her archival and fieldwork research in East and Central Kootenays and explores an ethical way to engage with this history.

More About Our Presenter:

Ayaka Yoshimizu is Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include transpacific migration and cultures, memories and senses, and performative methodology. Her recent publications include “Unsettling memories of Japanese migrant sex workers: Carceral mobilities of the Transpacific Underground at the turn of the 20^th century” (Topia, forthcoming) and “Doing Performance Ethnography among the Dead, Remembering Lives of Japanese Migrants in Transpacific Sex Trade” (Performance Matters, 2018). She is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled, Doing Ethnography in the Wake of the Displacement of Transnational Sex Workers in Yokohama: Sensuous Remembering.