Doing Sensory Ethnography Among the Dead: Remembering Lives of Japanese Migrants in the Trans-Pacific Sex Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1908-1909 and in 1912, Vancouver-based Japanese journalist Shohei Osada published a column series entitled “Exploration of Devil Caves” in a local Japanese-language newspaper, detailing the lives of Japanese migrants involved in the sex trade in the interior of BC and further east. The series was part of the local Japanese community’s “clean-up” project, which attempted to normalize the community by disciplining members’ sexuality. Having a strong conviction that their “immorality” exacerbated racism against the Japanese in Canada, Osada’s writing condemns sex workers, pimps and brothel owners. Ironically, however, his writing remains one of the few archival documents available today that resists the historical erasure of the presence of these women in the past. While stories of sex workers are still repressed in the official Japanese Canadian history, I want to shed light on them. I followed Osada’s footsteps and travelled to Cranbrook and Nelson, which he identified as major sites for Japanese prostitution, with a hope to learn more about this history. In this paper I performatively re-enact the process of my embodied engagement with the elusive history—or what I call “unhappened lives”—of Japanese sex workers in Canada from the early twentieth century, which started with my encounter with Japanese headstones in cemeteries, and was followed by my archival research of official death records. This paper consists of photographic images, excerpts from my fieldwork journal, and an account of my encounter with Japanese graves in the cemeteries, all of which are juxtaposed with archival materials, including Osada’s reportage and Canadian official documents. While these documents are erroneous, negligent, and racist, they do provoke further imagination about the lives and deaths of migrant sex workers. Putting these materials together, I explore a way to remember, as I actively create a memory of the lives of women in the underground, trans-pacific world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".