Migrant disgust: Navigating sensory and emotional experience in Japanese food-processing factories

Abstract

This paper examines how Indonesian migrant workers in Japanese food-processing factories navigate disgust as part of everyday sensory labor. While disgust is often studied as a reaction to migrants or as a clinical emotion, this study analyzed disgust as felt and managed by migrants, embedded in sensory, moral, and affective negotiations. Drawing on sensory ethnography in Ōarai, Japan (2016–2018), the study explores how migrant workers endure tasks involving spoiled or decayed food and regulate emotional responses under employers’ supervision. Rather than treating disgust as either a biological reflex or a moral judgment, the study demonstrates how these dimensions intersect and blur. Workers navigate disgust through strategies such as boundary work, emotional compartmentalization, and ritual cleansing across domains. Disgust thus appears not only as a reaction to spoiled material but also as a moral and social practice shaped by multisensorial experience, labor hierarchies, and embodied sensibilities.