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The array of small brothels in the district was completely uprooted, and transnational migrant women who were working there disappeared.

In January 2005, a large-scale raid organized by Kanagawa Prefectural Police and the municipal government eradicated sex trade businesses in Koganecho, a marginalized district in the port city of Yokohama. This essay aims to shed light on both the literary and the social significance of “Hello, War Brides” as a way to re-evaluate the Japanese war brides’ transnational movement that has taken place in the years after its publication. The production of the text also worked to reconstruct and renew the women’s own memories in a positive light and to create a new form of community of remembrance. Such an understanding could be thought of as an alternative to the monolithic and stigmatized images of Japanese war brides, imposed primarily by the Japanese mainstream media against which these women have struggled for decades. I view this text as a product of collaborative “memory work.” Based on a textual analysis of its narratives and form, I argue that this work represents individual war brides’ memories as counter-memories that provide a new understanding of the experiences of Japanese war brides. This article examines “Hello, War Brides,” a series of short, auto/biographical essays authored by two Japanese war brides from the state of Washington. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of sociohistorical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira’s senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes.

Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language.

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira’s senryu poetry.

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