Mr Atsushi Yamagata2
2University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
As of the end of 2018, there were 25.9 million documented refugees across the globe, and most of them were hosted by developing countries. Despite expectations that developed countries should accept more refugees, Japan has been reluctant. In 2018, only 42 people were recognised as refugees in Japan out of 10,493 asylum applications. To explore the rationales behind Japan’s attitude toward refugees, in this paper I focus on perceptions of refugees and their communities of origin in Japan. In the 1970s, Japan decided to accept Indochinese refugees in the aftermath of the Indochina War and more than 10,000 Indochinese refugees were accepted between 1978 and 2005. Except for these Indochinese refugees, though, Japan has almost closed its borders to refugees. In this paper I look at discourses about refugees and their communities in various publications from the 1970s and discuss how refugees and their communities have been perceived in Japan. By contrasting media representations of Indochinese refugees accepted in the 1970s with more recent media representations of asylum seekers and their communities of origin, I will consider how the perceptions of refugees and their communities have been formed, and their implications for Japan’s future relationship with refugees and asylum seekers.
Biography