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• 1 2020-04-30T18:05:11-04:00 "Chen Wusong" arrives in Shanghai 16 Consular report on Ogura Nobu's arrival in and repatriation from Shanghai, 1929-09-16. plain 2021-10-12T10:31:48-04:00 31.2463, 121.49736 Shanghai 1929 David R. Ambaras Ogura Nobu Chen Zhaopin

  We begin with a discovery:

  Asia Bureau

  Classified, no. 1060

  September 16, 1929

  From: Shanghai Consul General Shigemitsu Mamoru

  To: Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijūrō

  Regarding a Japanese woman rescued from abduction by a Chinese:

  We have already reported to you about this matter in [messages dated June 5, 1929, June 11, 1929, August 8, 1929, and August 9, 1929. For these documents, see Diplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (DAMFAJ), K.3.4.2.3.] Since then, we have been having consular police officers board all Japanese ships from the metropole, to check passengers carefully. On September 12, 1929, they found on the Nagasaki-maru ferry a woman dressed as a Chinese, claiming to be Chen Wusong, in the company of a Chinese man, Chen Zhaopin. But her behavior was suspicious, and on questioning it turned out she was Ogura Nobu, 28, of Chiba-ken Sanbu-gun Toyoumi-mura Makame-aza, granddaughter of household head Matsuzō. Last September, she became acquainted with Chen, who came to her village as a clothes peddler. This year in April, through the intermediation of villager Shinozaki Kitarō, they got married with her parents' permission, on the condition that they would not go to China. They resided in the village, but early last month, they received a letter from Chen's parents in Fuqing County, Gaoshan Town, asking them to come to introduce the new wife. They planned to go for a three-month visit, and departed Kobe on the Nagasaki-maru on the 10th. She told [us] that she was questioned at Nagasaki and told harbor police there that she had her parents’ and brothers’ permission and was thus permitted to continue; she then pleaded [with the consular police] not to prevent her from continuing to travel with Chen. But they told her in detail about the conditions of the women in Fuqing  and made her stop her trip. We kept her at the consulate and arranged for her to return to Japan on Maya-maru on the 14th, and to be sent, with the assistance of the Kobe harbor police, back to her place of legal domicile.

  Copies of this report are sent to the Fuzhou Consul General and to the Governors of Nagasaki, Hyōgo, and Chiba Prefectures.

  {Document reviewed and stamped by Asia Bureau Section 2 [Chief] Miura [Takemi]}

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  On legal regulations concerning travel between Japan and China at this time, see “Border (in)security.”

  Click here for a company history of the NYK's Shanghai route published in 1932 (in Japanese).

• 1 2020-04-30T18:05:33-04:00 Embodied Mobilities 6 How to think about the materiality of movement? The Nihon Yūsen Kaisha's Shanghai ferry as example. plain 2021-10-12T10:44:54-04:00 1928 David R. Ambaras Ogura Nobu Chen Zhaopin

  We can say more: The story of Ogura Nobu (and Chen Zhaopin, though he is even more silent/silenced than she), highlights the need to explore the material and discursive experiences of border crossing and mobility, and the contextualized histories of the bodies that move. For example, part of a deep map of this subject would have to extend to the materiality of the route, including the third-class passage on the ferry that carried Ogura Nobu and Chen Zhaopin from Kobe to Shanghai for roughly 23 yen each. The poet Kaneko Mitsuharu, who traveled third class in 1928, depicted the journey as one of extreme discomfort:

  The suffocatingly hot smell wafting up the companionway from the large tatami-matted area below where the general passengers travel is really quite something. This may be the genuine stench of that living thing called humanity. In addition to the odor of men's and women's sweat and other secretions, the smell of vomit in metal tubs, and the smell of dried paint all mixed together.…Because it was Shiwasu [the twelfth month of the old calendar], the cold would cling to one's face so it was impossible to go out on deck. But in the cabin, bodies were crammed so close together that no one could move, and as there were no ventilation systems or fans, everyone was lying around in a state of asphyxia from breathing each other's respiration. The food they had brought with them was already going bad before even half a night on board. Once at sea, the rolling and pitching was tremendous… (Kaneko 1976, 149-50).

  This was a far cry from the posh amenities for the more affluent passengers and the lifestyle they advertised, with the most luxurious first-class compartments costing 180 to 230 yen (Kawata 2001, 98; see also Okabayashi 2006).

  This history would also extend to the network of Chinese lodging houses, coastal steamers, and overland transport that conveyed migrants between Shanghai and Fuqing. It would also have to capture the careful preparation of stories, the altering of appearances (Ogura Nobu was hardly the only woman to try to pass as a Chinese for the journey), the tension and apprehension accompanying checkpoint interviews (comparable to that experienced by colonial subjects—Yom 2010), and so on. Mobilities research must attend to factors such as ethnicity, gender, class, age, place of origin, household structure, and prior experiences and future expectations—not mention the contingent political conditions—under which such movement was undertaken. Moving bodies took shape as products of social processes, what Leslie Adelson calls embodiment, the “making and doing the work of bodies” and “becoming a body in social space” (quoted in Canning 1999, 505).