Abstract
In Japan, the number of women entertainers from the Philippines has been increased remarkably vis-à-vis other Asian newcomers entering the country since 1980s. They are an ethnic group permitted to enter and work legally in spite of Japan's strict immigration policy against foreign migrant workers.
In this paper, I explore the politics of situating entertainers as “others” at microscale, under the systematized immigration today in Japan. I selected a Philippine Pub in Nagoya City for a case study. I focused on the relationships between entertainers and pub owners, and between them and pub customers. Particularly I paid attention to performances of entertainers. What types of performances expected of entertainers by both pub owners and customers are described, here? So, I manifested three points below.
First, pub owners expected entertainers to perform as hostesses rather than as legitimate performing artists defined by immigration law. Pub owners also manage them spatially not only at the workplace but also in their residence to derive the maximum benefits from hostess performance.
Second, the expectations of pub customers were the gaze that entertainers have gender, ethnicity, and social economic differences. It was mutually constitutive, with sexual imaginative geographies working against the Philippines at both representational and material level.
Third, politics of management by pub owners and of the gaze of pub customers not only operated at microscale of a Philippine Pub, but also had a close connection in the national/international scale as the institutional and legal context of systematized one-way migration from the Philippines to Japan today. Politics at such multiscale operate upon entertainers at the same time and fix them as “others”. That's why Philippine Pubs is the microscale space which multi-scale politics operate upon. So, I conclude that Philippine Pubs in Japan play an important role in fixing entertainers as “others”.
