Skin-to-skin with the house: senses and affect in the relationship of migrant Russian women in Japan with their homes

Abstract

This paper examines how certain perceived attributes of Japanese houses affect and shape the bodies of their inhabitants – namely, Russian women in Japan. In turn, this relationship affects the women’s modes of being in the host country. Drawing on fieldwork data, I explore how the coldness and wetness of houses mediate the effects on the inhabitants’ senses, creating an affective experience of being “absorbed” by the physicality of one’s home. The study reveals how bodily reactions to and affective engagements with their agentic homes in the host country underpin the migrants’ everyday sensory-affective spectrums. Such sensory experiences play a central role in the women’s perceptions and constructions of selfhood. This paper further shows how these sense-driven experiences are enmeshed in broader discursive flows. They are linked to familial, communal, and societal power relations embedded in the reality of being a migrant.