Unsettling Memories of Japanese Migrant Sex Workers: Carceral Mobilities of the Transpacific Underground at the Turn of the 20thCentury

Abstract

Between 1908 and 1909 and in 1912, Vancouver-based journalist Shohei Osada published a two-part series entitled “Exploration of Devil Caves” in a local Japanese language newspaper, detailing the lives of Japanese migrants involved in the sex trade in Canada. The series showcases the presence of underground networks that extended across the continent and the Pacific, or what I call the “transpacific underground.” Many characters in Osada’s series are transient migrants, who did not settle in any one specific nation but continued moving on across multiple borders seeking new opportunities, or sometimes, last resort for survival. By reading Osada’s writing closely, this article develops the notion of the transpacific underground as method to engage the history of migrant sex workers and understand it from a carceral space of migration regulated by multiple imperial and colonial forces, gendered nationalist ideologies, and human trafficking, making migrant women’s movements forced but also transgressive and open-ended.