Yorùbá Meets Japan: Tales of Teenaged Wanderlust Encountering Ancient Migration

Paper Abstract: ‘Yorùbá Meets Japan: Tales of Teenaged Wanderlust Encountering Ancient Migration’ examines intercontinental connections between Yorùbá (West Africa) and Japan (East Asia) through youthful exploration, uncovering new depths of global human entanglement and intercultural intelligence. As a diasporic Yorùbá-Nigerian studying in the UK, the Eurocentric British view of Japan as extremely different was pervasive. Curiosity about this ‘very foreign land’ led to me attaining a Japanese Government scholarship to complete secondary school there, only for my Afrocentric Yorùbá outlook to recognise unexpected intersections through pounded foodstuffs, rhythmic percussion, clothes & architecture designed for ventilation, strong community values, inter-religious harmony assisted through animist spirituality, double-barrelled wording…and even physical features(!). These different similarities in culture and language contradicted the quintessentially ‘foreign’ Japan projected in my UK ‘homeland’, evoking two questions: why the inter-continental disconnect; and how to reconnect whilst bypassing epistemological racism?

This presentation will argue that both Yorùbá and Japanese cultures share multiple surprising overlaps that displace white hegemonic knowledge as the common norm between the two. It then identifies methods to decolonise perspectives, including to further encourage the escalating re-championing of Yorùbá language education, facilitating immediate recognition of Japanese language overlaps to more readily delve into cultural and climate-based similarities. My area of focus for decolonisination is autoethnographic storytelling, tracing routes of ancient migration, and drawing on historians such as Ivan Van Sertima, Runoko Rashidi, and Midori Fujita. Combining scholarship with personal experience produces compelling narratives that elucidate aligned identities when Yorùbá Meets Japan.