Exploring Black Tokyo: African Placemaking in Urban Japan as Black Pacific Inquiry

Paper Abstract: Contemporary scholarship around Black geographies has emphasized how Black people have negotiated space and place in the context of forced and chosen displacement (Hawthorne, 2019). However, most of this geographic work has been Transatlantic (McKittrick, 2006), or Mediterranean (Hawthorne, 2019), and hence little geographic work has been conducted on African diasporic placemaking in East Asia. The concept of race in Japan is currently in notable flux: in the past, racial identity has been tied to processes of nation building and contingent on historical context (Leupp, 1995, Tajima, 2012), however, phenotypical difference today is but one out of several criteria used to establish difference between the ethnically Japanese majority and the nation's diverse Black community (Capobianco, 2015; Hankins, 2012). Such phenotypically different subjects claiming rights to Japanese nationhood troubles the idea of racial homogeneity, which is central to Japanese societal constructions (Morris-Suzuki,1997). While current studies highlight how Japanese subjects make sense of African migrants, few discuss how African migrants navigate, challenge, and expand definitions of “belonging”. This paper will look at the formation of an African diaspora in Japan through long-term Black residents’ practices of community-building in various spaces of sociality, such as churches, small businesses, and cultural festivals. By looking at personal identity formation processes and community building strategies among Ghanaian, Nigerian and Togolese communities in the city of Tokyo, my paper aims to expand and deconstruct not only notions of "Japaneseness", but of Africanness, so as to draw a picture of a global, fluid Black identity and community.