Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of Japan’s asylum policies, and sheds light on some of the most acute challenges that asylum seekers face while living in Japan. It also examines how those asylum seekers whose applications for refugee recognition have been denied or are pending manage to survive as “provisionally released” subjects with severely restricted rights. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork among provisionally released asylum seekers and those who are currently detained by Japan’s Immigration Service Agency (ISA), and the interviews I conducted with non-governmental organization members and individual activists who help them, it suggests that the asylum seekers’ very survival while being denied to the “right to have rights” (Hannah Arendt) is an act of resistance against the Japanese state, which insists on an extremely strict interpretation of the “refugee” status eligibility. The provisionally released asylum seekers are confronted with “deportability” (Nicholas De Genova), a condition which constantly threatens individuals with the possibility of deportation, and “liminal legality” (Cecilia Menjívar), a gray area between authorized and unauthorized migrant status. By ethnographically portraying the opportunistic, collaborative, and networked tactics that deportable and liminally legal asylum seekers and their allies use to survive in Japan, the chapter proposes that their daily struggles and efforts to overcome them challenge the Japanese state’s continuing refusal to recognize their clear and present existence in Japanese society.