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Introduction
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Introduction
DOI link for Introduction
Introduction book
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ABSTRACT
Sensuous Rememberings begins with an account of an evening at the counter of a Thai hostess club where I am first mistakenly perceived as a new hire and then served by the son of a Thai migrant woman, who has been working in the sexual services industry in Yokohama since the 1990s and currently runs her own club. I use this moment to offer a glimpse of a migrant community that survived the police raid of 2005, which involved a removal of thousands of migrant sex workers working in independent brothels in the city. I show that the crackdowns did not eradicate migrant sex workers but rather forced them to find alternative methods of survival within the precarious nighttime economy, given the limited occupational options available to them. This chapter grounds my analysis in my embodied experience of ethnographic encounters, an approach of sensory ethnography that enabled deep scholarly engagement with memories of the displaced community. This chapter also historicizes the eviction of migrant sex workers by situating it in a longer history of the city shaped by processes of migration and displacement.