African presentations and Japanese discourses: the construction and projection of difference

Abstract

This article examines the different ways Africans present themselves in Japan and considers what these differences explain about the function of ethno-racial categories and discourses in the Japanese context. Specifically, it highlights the importance of cultural factors in shaping the ways Japanese discourses conceptualize and engage categorical difference, as well as the limitations of examining difference in solely racial or ethnic terms. This article considers data from Africans who present themselves as being from places other than continental Africa and demonstrates how these presentations elucidate the dynamic cultural, geographic, socioeconomic, and contextual variables that inform how Japanese discourses construct cultural Otherness. In constructing such Otherness, Japanese discourses project domestic identity ideologies differently onto foreign populations, which simultaneously highlight the functionality of these ideologies. This article suggests that by constructing Otherness in such ways, Japanese discourses are able to reconceptualize notions of domestic Japanese identity in a renewed sense within a global framework.

Keywords:

• African diaspora
• Japan
• race
• ethnicity
• performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgements

This research was enabled in part by generous grants from the University of Iowa. I would also like to thank Paul Hansen for comments on an early version of this paper, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. The editors of this journal also deserve a very special thanks for their insightful feedback.

Notes

1 All references to people appearing in this article are pseudonyms unless they are public figures. To protect the anonymity of those involved, some information has been consciously omitted.

2 Data for this research was collected between 2013 and 2017. The ethnographic data comes largely from Tokyo, which is home to the largest concentration of Africans in Japan. Data was gathered in Shinjuku, Shibuya, Roppongi, and Okubo, among other neighborhoods. At the time of this data collection, Africans were most prevalent in Tokyo’s Kabukichō neighborhood, which is a popular red-light and nightlife district. In the past, Roppongi was also home to a very large African presence but due to gentrification and efforts to “clean up” the area, the African presence here is now discernably less pronounced (Cybriwsky 2011).

3 “Low-wage workers” here refers to workers who engage in work that is deemed kitsui (difficult), kitanai (dirty), and kiken (dangerous). Many scholars have written about foreigners undertaking such jobs, as these jobs have the greatest labor shortages in Japan. These typically involve manual labor, service positions, and other hourly-wage jobs (see Douglass and Roberts 2000).

4 Kawada Kaoru is perhaps the first author to observe the phenomenon of Africans saying they are American or Jamaican (see Kawada 2005).

5 Quotation previously used in Capobianco 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Capobianco

Paul Capobianco is a Lecturer at Lingnan University and a Research Associate at Nanzan Anthropological Institute. He completed his Ph.D. in anthropology in 2019, and his research has explored the ways Japan is changing as a result of migration and demographic changes. His work uses ethnography to explore the lived experiences of foreigners in Japan and how intercultural interactions facilitate new understandings of identity and human relations in contemporary Japan.