between immigrants and their relatively privileged
hosts in Japan have been shaped by a history of
imperialism and colonialism and the features of
the contemporary political economy of East
Asia’. The enforced military prostitution of the
Second World War and the colonial period
(which resurfaced as the ‘comfort women’ issue
in the 1990s) foreshadowed a time in the 1970s
when the Japanese nation-state could still
assume that embodied encounters with ‘differ-
ence’ in the form of South East Asian women
could be safely displaced offshore (as played out
in sex tourism and other sexualized practices of
‘gazing’ on the rest of Asia). In more recent
decades, however, the state has had to confront
the presence of these ‘others’ within its own
boundaries. Filipino women who enter Japan
through labour or marriage migration, for exam-
ple, are often marked by sexualized images
(Mackie, 1998; Suzuki, 2000), a construction in
which Japanese immigration policy is complicit
in producing, for immigrant female workers are
barred from being employed as domestic workers
and are limited to entering the country under the
legal category of ‘entertainer’, which is often a
mask for the provision of sexualized activities
from singing and dancing, waitressing and
hostessing, to prostitution. It is interesting to
note that the sexualized body – the most ‘irre-
ducible locus for the determination of all values,
meanings, and significations’ and ‘the measure
of all things’ (Harvey, 2000: 97–8; see also Law,
2000) – continues to bear the marks of coloniality
even when geopolitical forms of colonization
have been dismantled. Diasporic spaces ‘of the
other’ are hence (re-)emerging from within the
social body of the nation; these can no longer be
externalized. As Iwabuchi (1998) puts it, the
‘[once-colonized] subject is already within Japan
and not just “out there” ’. The politics which
inhabit these spaces are double edged: while it
would appear that the ‘notion of discrete territory
of the nation’ and ‘the transgressive fact of
migration’ are counterpoints to each other, van
der Veer notes that ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘transgres-
sors’ and ‘the established’, are also ‘structurally
interdependent’ and that ‘nationalism (which has
its basis in the control of space or territory) needs
this story of migration, the diaspora of others to
establish the rootedness of the nation’ (1995: 2, 6).
What is also important here is that encounters
between ‘nation’ and ‘diaspora’ are understood
in and against a postcolonial context ‘created
through the histories which connect people in
different nations’ (Mackie, 2002).
These connections between colonial and post-
colonial encounters are often multifarious and
ramifying. As Lisa Law (2002) notes in herdiscussion of transnational activism among
female migrant worker advocacy groups in
Hong Kong and the Philippines and the emer-
gence of a ‘post-national, diasporic public sphere’ –
transnational labour migration today propelling
millions to ‘transgress national borders in search
of greener pastures’ – is more provisional, and
‘less decipherable in terms of clear colonial or
imperial histories’. The colonial imprint is
however present if not always distinct. As Keiko
Yamanaka (2000) shows, while the presence of a
small Nepalese transnational community within
the borders of Japan creating a ‘space of differ-
ence’ may be more immediately explained by the
relative prosperity of East Asian economies and
chronic labour shortages in Japan’s manufactur-
ing and construction industries, it also has its
roots in a distinctive ‘culture of emigration’ and
‘remittance economy’ forged out of the long-
standing British colonial tradition of designating
‘martial races’ to serve as Gurkha soldiers in the
British and Indian armies. ‘Global warriors’ who
used to service the needs of one historic empire
have reinvented themselves as ‘global workers’
responding to the rising labour demands in
another domain – Japan and other ‘tiger’ econo-
mies in Asia, including the former British colony
of Hong Kong (2000: 70). While there is no need
to argue that these ‘warriors’ and ‘workers’ are
umbilically tied to the same or singular logic, it
is useful to note that colonial and postcolonial
‘migrancies’ are indissolubly if complexly inter-
meshed, sometimes with unexpected outcomes.
Others such as Michael Samers (1997) trace a
much more clearly delineated line connecting the
‘production of diaspora’ to colonialism and
neocolonialism; the emergence of what Samers
calls an ‘automobile diaspora’ centred around
a Renault factory in France and comprising
Algerian migrant workers is explained in terms
of the erosion of pre-capitalist modes of produc-
tion in Algeria by French colonialism and the
subsequent expansion of the French economy in
the post-war period.
As in Japan, coming to terms with ‘foreigners
in our midst’ has recently become a major preoc-
cupation in Singapore (one in every four persons
within Singapore’s borders is a non-citizen),
even as the city-state aspires to join the global
league as a ‘cosmopolitan city’ and a crucial
‘brains service node’ for business and informa-
tion industries in the new ‘knowledge-based
economy’. A globalizing city does not only
entail the presence of multinational corporate
headquarters, transnational elites of the profes-
sional and managerial class (referred to in
Singapore as ‘foreign talent’), and hi-tech, cultural
and tourism industries, but has to be sustained byPOSTCOLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF PLACE AND MIGRATION 3753029-ch19.qxd 03-10-02 10:58 AM Page 375