Bodies and Structures

Embodied mobilities

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 suffocatingly hot smell wafting up along the accommodation ladder from the large tatami-matted area below where the general passengers travel is really quite something," wrote the poet Kaneko Mitsuharu, who traveled third class in 1928. "This may be the genuine stench of that living thing called humanity." (This a far cry from the posh amenities for the more affluent passengers and the lifestyle they advertised, with luxury first-class compartments costing 180 to 230 yen). 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), 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”). 

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