African Labor, Identity and Inclusion in Japan: The Push and Pull of Democracy and a Separate Peace

Paper Abstract: My paper aims to capture vibrant ideational and agential processes at work that informs ideas of ‘belonging’, liberation, as well as the limits of political and economic incorporation for African migrants in Asia. My paper explores the role of African Diasporic communities in Japan to chronicle the social, economic, and political determinants of African migration to Japan, a country whose population crisis and aging demographic is paradoxically accompanied by restrictive immigration policies. This proposal is salient to global and transnational taxonomies of identities and geographies given the global centrality of political and economic inclusion in advanced and post-industrial states like Japan, that increasingly face the heightened push and pull of migration. This project interrogates how Africans negotiate racial imaginaries that shape cultural integration and dissonance in Asian economic spaces. This proposal is distinctive in capturing the agency of African foreign worker communities and non-profit organizations, such as the Adeyebaba Ethiopian Association. Amid evolving narratives about what it means to be black, or “Kokugen” in Japan and in some cases to be considered “kitsui, kitanai and kikken,” worthy only of demeaning labor, this study offers an opportunity to understand identity politics through the prism of racial attitudes, precarity, and evolving narratives that dictate perceptions about foreign labor and immigrants. My paper seeks to offer more expansive ways of thinking about race, African immigration, migration and diasporic communities through an Africa-Asia ‘axis of knowledge production and dissemination.