IJS Lecture: Taku Suzuki, "Art of Waiting: Acts of Citizenship among the Asylum Seekers in Japan"

The Institute for Japanese Studies presents:

"Art of Waiting: Acts of Citizenship among the Asylum Seekers in Japan"

Taku Suzuki
Denison University

with discussant 

Jeffrey Cohen, Department of Anthropology, The Ohio State University

Abstract: This lecture provides an overview of Japan’s asylum policies, and their dire consequences for asylum seekers. In so doing, it highlights the temporary dimension of those asylum seekers with a contingent legal status. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork among the asylum seekers who are “provisionally released” from detention by the Japanese government, I argue that the central struggle of those asylum seekers and their citizen allies is the utter absence of temporal certainty in their lives. The struggle forces them to create a meaningful living in the "here and now," as their lives are indefinitely suspended by the state. These efforts, such as securing housing, employment, and child care, and improving Japanese language proficiency, then, can be understood not only as what Engin Isin calls daily “acts of citizenship” that produce them as legitimate members of the host society, but also as defiant acts of taking control of their own temporality. 

Download the PDF flyer here.

Taku Suzuki is Professor of International Studies, East Asian Studies, and Global Health at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Trained in cultural anthropology, he has conducted ethnographic research on such topics as ethnic and national identity formations among the Okinawan migrants in Bolivia and Okinawan-Bolivian migrants in Japan, anti-military peace activism and educational tourism in Okinawa, and the politics of memory and memorialization among the post-WWII Okinawan repatriates from the former Japanese colonies in the western Pacific. Currently, he is part of a collaborative research team that includes the Ohio State University faculty members and a National Institute of Health fellow on digital divide in Central Ohio’s Bhutanese refugee community, and writing a monograph based on his field research on the struggles, survival tactics, and insurgent citizenship among the migrants and asylum seekers in Japan with contingent and limited legal status and the Japanese civil society that supports their struggles.