Skin-to-skin with the house: senses and affect in the relationship of migrant Russian women in Japan with their homes

Abstract

This paper examines how certain perceived attributes of Japanese houses affect and shape the bodies of their inhabitants – namely, Russian women in Japan. In turn, this relationship affects the women’s modes of being in the host country. Drawing on fieldwork data, I explore how the coldness and wetness of houses mediate the effects on the inhabitants’ senses, creating an affective experience of being “absorbed” by the physicality of one’s home. The study reveals how bodily reactions to and affective engagements with their agentic homes in the host country underpin the migrants’ everyday sensory-affective spectrums. Such sensory experiences play a central role in the women’s perceptions and constructions of selfhood. This paper further shows how these sense-driven experiences are enmeshed in broader discursive flows. They are linked to familial, communal, and societal power relations embedded in the reality of being a migrant.

Keywords:

• Japanese houses
• Russian women in Japan
• materiality
• migration
• agentic homes

Acknowledgements

I express my gratitude to Emma Cook and Andrea De Antoni, the organizers and editors of this special issue, for their thorough editing and support throughout the process. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful recommendations. All remaining errors are my own. Finally, special thanks go to my informants for their generous participation in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Generally, “feeling” is referred to as “subjective phenomenological experience” (Wetherell, Smith, and Campbell 2018, 1).

2 Other narrated sensations had to do with the monotonously dull palette of walls, floors, and ceilings; lack of natural light; intrusion of outside noises; and the overall smallness of dwellings. Tall or broad-shouldered interviewees found the smallness constricting.

3 The term “ambient feature” is borrowed from the psychology of built environments (Graham, Gosling, and Travis 2015).

4 A careful approach is needed here; in some cases, precisely the rambling and repetitious accounts can be used evocatively.

5 In 2013, the home-ownership percentage in Japan was 61.7%. Rental houses in Japan were substantially smaller than those in continental Europe (Kobayashi 2016, 3–6).

6 In Japan, apartments are roughly classified by whether they are in wooden two-storied buildings (apāto) or reinforced concrete buildings (manshon). From the residents’ perspective, apāto are usually rented (and are thus smaller and cheaper), while manshon are both rented and owned. Danchi, initially conceived as public housing, refers to a complex of apartment buildings. Their construction type varies depending on the age of the given danchi. See Daniels (2010), Kobayashi (2016), Nishikawa (1996), and Sand (2003) for discussion about Japanese housing, both historically and today.

7 Robertson (2018, 57) called the kotatsu “a contemporized version of the hearth,” a place around which family members gathered in a traditional Japanese household. It draws people together; this helps to explain why the fully set-up kotatsu featured only during visits by the boyfriend.

8 This case is comparable to Cook’s (2017) description of risky situations being handled by people with allergies. Rather than abstaining from eating at a buffet, some choose to engage their senses to make a perceivably correct – although risky – decision (Cook 2017, 135). In the case of the interviewee from my sample, placing a carpet on tatami while failing to maintain the setup properly was the “risky” decision she made to retain warmth in the apartment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [grant number 18K12591].

Notes on contributors

Ksenia Golovina

Ksenia Golovina is a project associate professor at the University of Tokyo. She completed her BA in Japanese Studies in Russia and MA and PhD in Cultural Anthropology in Japan. Her research focuses on the community of Russians in Japan, in particular, its female population. Of late, she has been engaged in researching the material practices of Russian migrants, specifically the ways in which they organize, decorate, and experience their homes in Japan.