Procuring, crafting, and sensing: affect and material practices of Russian women in Japan

As far as my cyberethnographic observations permit me to conclude, these auctions (unlike direct donations similarly facilitated through “Our People”) are not particularly active, perhaps generating only a few thousand yen per calling for the person in trouble. However, handmade products are often posted in these fundraisers. The latest examples included handmade candles with dried flowers inside, jewelry, and textile decorations. Handmade products are also purchased more willingly. When an auction to support Ariana from central Japan was launched in spring, a group member from the southwest of Japan posted a photograph of three handmade brooches, hydrangeas (the flowers of the season) made from Japanese traditional wrinkled crepe (chirimen) in green, blue, and white. The auction works in a way that the user suggests a price higher than the starting price offered by the maker in a thread below the photo of the offering. The process continues with new offers appearing in the thread until interest diminishes and the group administrator announces the “winner”. The auction then stops being transparent and is built on goodwill. The purchaser is supposed to send the money to the account of the person in need and is not required to present any confirmation to the administrator of the group. Meanwhile, the maker sends the product directly to the purchaser. Because the monetary recipients in these transactions are usually overwhelmed by the immigration office procedures and the precariousness of their situations, they do not give feedback regarding the receipt of the money.

Out of anthropological interest, I wanted to acquire one of these brooches. I participated in the auction and became the winner, after which I took part in the financial transaction. The brooch I received was a piece of fine work. When I asked the maker about her work, she replied, “I do not make items for sale as I do not see any meaning in it. Being a creative person, I usually make some for friends.” Her Facebook page indeed hosts photographs of many beautiful handmade items, from bags to clothes and quilts. About the auction, she replied that it was her first time participating. She decided to do so because she “felt positive about Ariana”, although the two have never met.

The trajectory undergone by affect in this situation is notable: the group's administrators were affected by Ariana's situation (through the woman's posts in the group and personal contact) and moved to affect the other members of the group by first sharing her story with the audience and then by initiating the auction. The brooch's maker was affected by Ariana's story, which was shared by the administrators (with several comments by Ariana herself in the thread), and chose to contribute a newly-crafted item, which she had made with friends in mind to the auction, thus, sharing her affect to Ariana, if not as a friend but as a person she “feels positive about”, infused in the object. While the object, perhaps the most concentrated container of the emotions described, does not end up with Ariana, it affects the buyer in a way that he or she has made a decision to make a monetary contribution to Ariana's cause. While the buyer might have been affected by Ariana's situation (similarly to the maker), it is the product's nature that functions as triggering the transaction. Its handmadeness positions it as infused with humane emotions, which are enhanced by the cause of the transaction: helping a struggling fellow-compatriot in a foreign land. Along the way, new connections (between sellers and buyers) are built. Finally, the affect reaches Ariana in the form of a monetary contribution, the only possible contribution that can effectively help her in her situation. As trauma is central to identity construction Athanasiou A., Hantzaroula P., Yannakopoulos K. Towards a New... P. 10., it may have been the trigger to launch the flow of affective forces in this collective imagining of displaced selves There are situations when online migrant groups become spaces where negative affects are generat-ed, some corresponding with the ways larger online spaces give forth to phenomena such as shaming. In the case discussed in this chapter and other similar cases gathered as part of this research, I often observed how the group's administrators diligently performed the role of conciliators when harsh comments doubting the legitimacy of the plight of the charity-seeking members were posted. Since the administrators took a strong stand to protect the women, they were organizing the auctions for, they managed to achieve a favorable resolution to these situations in the majority of cases. When the administrators themselves were blamed for trying to achieve personal publicity through auctions and similar events, they actively responded by providing careful accounts of the situations and defending themselves..

Miller has suggested that Facebook, where the described transactions took place, possesses “perceived and actual ability to reconstruct relationships, especially within families and with absent friends, that had been gradually fading away due to the attrition of other aspects of modern life, such as increasing mobility” Miller D. Tales from Facebook. Cambridge, 2011. P. 217.. He further argues that Facebook helps one “return to the kind of involvement in social networks [in an anthropological sense -- K. G.] that we believe we have lost” Ibid.. The case above shows how Facebook also enables affect to be shared and sustained among people and material objects in the most immediate and sensorial form, despite communications occurring in a so-called “virtual” space.

When I started my fieldwork in 2008, online social networks were almost never mentioned by my informants. Many complained of not being able to find Russian friends, lacking a chance to converse in Russian, and feeling lonely and isolated. At the time, people had just started using Skype to call home, largely because it was at around that time that their Russian relatives gained the opportunity to access technologies in a freer manner. Many still used old-fashioned and expensive telephone cards to connect to their loved ones in Russia. The informants' feelings of loneliness were real, and the fast growth and activeness of the online groups described above confirm that people had indeed been longing for sociality. The charity auction represents how the possible forms of sociality exceed merely the opportunity to converse in Russian, instead taking complex multilayered forms of affective interactions. They enable people to form and sustain relationships and objects to travel spatially as the carriers of people's affective dispositions that serve the greater purpose of enacting a community.

Concluding remarks

This paper combines discussions focusing on three cases involving material practices by Russians in Japan: second-hand shopping, costume-making for theatrical performances, and online transactions involving handmade items. Extended descriptions of each of the occurrences were added in order to provide a larger socio-cultural context and, following the objectives of an “evocative ethnography”, to relay to readers the affective underpinnings of the recorded material practices. The three cases, selected from many similar ones gathered in the course of my fieldwork, are illustrative in terms of their ability to show how the objects involved in various material practices by the migrants help capture the otherwise undetectable affective forces that circulate between people. The objects (a used outfit with ethnic motives from a second-hand shop, an elaborate DIY costume for a stage performance, and a handmade flower brooch traded at a philanthropic auction) act as containers and mediums of affect. Their physicality, the stiches and staples craft- work requires, function to not only sew together pieces of cloth and ornaments, but to enfold the unseen motives behind the actions migrants undertake individually and as a community. Making such objects the focus of attention reveals some of the nature of the identity dilemmas and longing for community belonging and relationships experienced by many migrants, both in the present and in the realm of the pre-migratory past, where it relates to one's memories of ancestral roots. At times, these affective longings are directed at the future, as when one's participation in an auction surrounding trauma functions as an attempt to ease one's own pain, to establish a vision of a migrant experience free of uncertainty. Flowing through bodies spatially and temporally, affect “settles” when nested in material embodiments that further serve to create a transplanted social reality for migrants in a foreign land.

Acknowledgements

I thank Japan Society of Lifology for their funding of the online survey I undertook in 2016 about the homes and objects of the Russian-speaking migrants in Japan. An earlier draft of this paper was presented as part of the “Sensory Ethnographies in Spaces of Co-Production: The Quest for Alternative Immersive Experiences” panel at European Association for Japanese Studies 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal. I thank the organizers of the Anthropology and Sociology section, Andrea de Antoni and Emma Cook of Japan Anthropology Workshop, for setting “affect” as an overarching topic of the section and thus enabling the presenters to explore their findings from this new perspective. My gratitude also goes to Beata Switek, the discussant at our panel, for her valuable insights. I thank Ksenia Kurochkina and Varvara Mukhina for their comments on the earlier draft of this paper. Finally, I express my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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