Student Spotlight features videos produced by graduate students based on their archival research on intimate and sexual labour in the transpacific world. While the rest of the website is centred on Japanese language sources, student-produced videos examine primary sources produced in various Asian languages. Students introduce and discuss these sources in English.
“From Margins to Memory: Karayuki-san’s Lives and Afterlives in Singapore” by Yuri Yamaguchi
This lecture traces the history and afterlife of the karayuki-san, Japanese women trafficked into the sex trade across Asia, with a focus on Singapore and the Japanese Cemetery Park. It examines their role as pioneers of Singapore’s early Japanese community, their links to Japan’s economic and imperial expansion, and their later displacement by more affluent migrants. The lecture then follows the cemetery’s transformation from burial ground to heritage park, analyzing how the karayuki-san are remembered, aestheticized, and incorporated into narratives of Japanese diasporic heritage after their deaths.
「周縁から記憶へ：シンガポールにおけるからゆきさんの生と死後」（講師：ユリ・ヤマグチ）
この講演では、人身売買を通じてアジア各地に渡り性産業に従事した日本人女性たち、いわゆる「からゆきさん」の歴史とその死後の記憶の継承を、シンガポールと同地の日本人墓地公園を中心にたどりる。「からゆきさん」がシンガポール初期の日本人コミュニティの開拓者として果たした役割や、それが日本の経済的・帝国的拡大とどう関連していたかを議論し、その後、より裕福な日系移民の到来によって周縁化されていった過程を検討する。続いて、日本人墓地が埋葬の場から歴史遺産公園へと変容していく過程を追いながら、「からゆきさん」が死後どのように記憶され、美化され、日系ディアスポラの歴史の物語に組み込まれているのかを考察する。
“Mui Tsai (妹仔) and Transpacific Child Labour Trafficking” by Aydin Quach 郭汶進
This video by doctoral student Aydin Quach offers an overview of the mui tsai system and how young girls from southern China were moved as part of indentured labour across the transpacific with usage of sources found in The Chinese Times, a Vancouver-based publication that ran from 1914-1992. The illustration of mui tsai in Vancouver and Canada then is used as an examination of age and generation as a category of analysis to understand the condition of early Chinese women in North America, the development of child protection laws, and the socio-cultural significance of age and generation.