ABSTRACT
If you were Japanese and wanted to go to a Thai baccarat place you must have been accompanied by a Thai person. Their security was very strict. Once you were in you could stay there overnight, however long you wished. Food was free, cigarettes were free, everything was free. They were open 24 hours. At a busy time there were almost 30 people in a little apartment. The most popular game was baccarat. Everything went super fast. The dealer, who always had to be female, distributed cards, two cards per person. One game lasted only for a minute. Then they counted bills quickly. There would have been five or six Thai mafia guys checking from behind to see if anyone was cheating. Those who won pay 10% of their earning to the banker. There used to be five or six gambling venues in some apartment buildings. They constantly changed the venues to avoid crackdowns. (Takizawa, Thai restaurant owner, personal communication, 16 March, 2012)
Boundaries of the Koganecho scene, therefore, were indeed ‘elastic’ and ‘flexible’ (Straw 2001, p. 248). Migrants tactically reshaped the boundaries of the scene, according to their immediate needs; they left and abandoned the spaces they occupied and created new venues for their activities through their ‘spatial practices’ (De Certeau 1984) in order to avoid crackdowns. At the same time, the boundaries were fixed and fixing, extremely difficult to transgress, precarious and always under threat due to the strategies deployed by authorities to control immigration flow, crimes and sex trade businesses. For example, the scenes of crackdown were often recollected by locals as part of the larger Koganecho scene.
