THINGS WERE SETTLING into that liminal part of an early spring day in Tokyo, when it was technically afternoon and not yet dark, but the signs of the evening’s onset were apparent in the dimming light. Commuters had still to pack up and start on their journeys home, though an intangible sense that the day’s work was winding down permeated the offices, greeted partly with elation, partly with panic. School kids were cramming noisily into local tuck shops. Housewives were getting last-minute plastic-wrapped groceries before they prepared dinner.
For me, the ritual of this would involve collecting my children from the nursery school down the road at five o’clock. They would always insist on playing in the small park nearby until six, when it was dark, and so we would decamp to the square of land that was effectively a playground with a tangle of bushes and trees at the other end. It was surrounded by the Lego blocks of new-built houses, squeezed in twos and even threes onto plots where originally stood an old family house with a garden. The houses were all a little too tall, slightly stretched like Giacometti sculptures rendered in featureless materials and IKEA colours.
My son started to run around, playing a game of chase with himself. His trousers and shoes were soon covered in dirt from the ground, and I knew I would have to put him straight in the bath as soon as we got home. My daughter, who was two years younger, tried to keep up and inevitably failed.
She fell, as she often did, but when you are four it’s always a big event. Hearing her start to cry, I put away my phone and the work emails that demanded my eyeballs, and went to check on her. She was fine, of course, but a silently accrued paternal autopilot switched on: I dusted down her clothes and picked her up. She snivelled into my neck.
‘Daddy, it hurts.’
I rubbed the section of her leg she was pointing to, still holding her with my other hand. Becoming a father had turned me into a weightlifter and contortionist of sorts.
My son had already migrated to the swings and, when he saw his sister was not joining him, ran over to the sandpit, where he began to play with another boy who was digging. He made new friends easily.
My daughter and I began to wander to the edge of the park. The motion of being conveyed like this soon calmed her down, as I knew it always did.
‘Look, Daddy,’ my daughter said, her voice brightening.
Across the side street that ran along the park, barely wide enough to allow a car to pass, a demolition was in progress.
There was nothing unusual about this. We lived in Setagaya, a leafy and residential part of western Tokyo. Houses would go up and come down. These missing ‘teeth’ in the blocks were the ebb and flow of a city always under construction. During the demolition, the workers would drape thick sheets from scaffolding around the site to keep in the dust and dull the sound. I always thought it was like a magic show where the conjurors would whip back the curtains to reveal the building that was now gone, to applause and amazement from the audience. Instead, no one in Setagaya seemed to pay any attention to these vanishing homes.
A century ago, before the Great Kanto Earthquake devastated the city and Tokyo’s population shifted from the lower land in the east to the safer, more elevated areas more inland in the west, Setagaya was still largely rural. Even the name of the ward means something like Valley of Bountiful Rice Paddies. These subdivided plots of houses are arbitrarily laid over erstwhile fields. The narrow, wending nature of many of the local roads is a direct inheritance from the irrigation and pathways that ran between farmland. For pedestrians, it’s charming; for motorists, an insurance claim constantly in the offing.
Nostalgia is all too easy, even if it’s nostalgia for something I never knew, a past that never was. Would I be actually willing, let alone able, to till and toil if Setagaya still had those fields?
The demolition had entered the quieter phase, and the ‘curtains’ only covered three sides of the site. We could see into it from the front, where half an outer wall and a portion of what had been the floor of the first storey were left. Three workmen were moving around the site, engaged in the final tasks of the shift. A truck sat in front, filled with rubble. A small yellow digger was parked on a mound of soil and concrete, as if marooned after running out of fuel and discarded. No doubt they used the excavator to scoop up detritus as they took the house apart, and then carry it to the truck. Perhaps the vehicle was even used to attack the roof and walls, and tear them down: a medieval siege engine, mechanized and miniaturized.
Then my eyes performed the ocular equivalent of pressing the satnav zoom button, and suddenly I could see another layer of detail. It was immediately apparent that the three men were not Japanese. I didn’t understand the language they spoke but could tell that they were Kurds. I might occasionally spot a foreign face among road crews, though men engaged in this kind of small-scale manual labour were invariably Kurdish.
I marvelled at the mechanics of what they were doing. They could evidently drive a truck loaded with rubble, not to mention operate a digger. I had trouble riding a bicycle. They spent their days demolishing architectural structures. I spent mine at my desk at home writing emails and typing Word documents.
‘Cute girl,’ one of them said, and smiled.
He had spoken in Japanese and I relaxed a little. Using English would have imposed another layer over us. It would give me – a white, white-collar worker – power over him. The local tongue as lingua franca put us more on an equal footing.
I smiled back and, to cover my natural social awkwardness, spoke to my daughter in Japanese.
‘He said you are cute. What do you say?’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, a little shyly, half burying her face in my shoulder. She could turn her confidence on and off, I had learnt, and right now she was playing bashful.
I put the man somewhere in his mid-twenties – around the same age I had been when I came to Japan.
I did that smiling nod-bow I had mastered to extricate myself from small talk, and walked back with my daughter to where my son was still playing in the sandpit.
‘Alright, time to go home.’
We went back to the apartment I bought two years prior, but it is a home without connections to the land (quite literally – it’s elevated five floors above the ground). We like the area; it’s pleasant enough to live, but neither my wife nor I have roots here – I least of all – and yet for our two young children, this is their native soil. I don’t intend to die in Setagaya, a place you can certainly like but perhaps not quite love. For me, ownership of the land (or rather, the proportion of the building’s land corresponding to the value of the apartment) is temporary and transactional. A matter of property alone. Ironically, the Kurdish demolitionists were actually working that land and, in so doing, earning more of a spiritual right to possess it than me, even though their labour was merely part of a process of preparing the land for the next transaction.
THE NEXT DAY, my daughter saw the demolition site. ‘Daddy, let’s go again.’ ‘But they’re working,’ I protested.
‘Daddy, please, please!’ She knew I was helpless when confronted with her pleading.
She was in a bold mood today and immediately called out. ‘Konnichiwa.’
The same man smiled and waved, but continued with his task: tackling a tricky piece of rubble, perhaps a part of the outer wall that was now almost entirely gone.
I stood there in the clean if characterless clothes of a man on the cusp of forty, watching the Kurds work.
My son was running around the park with a friend from nursery. These were their final weeks together. Come April, he would start at elementary school, but a different one from his cohorts due to a quirk of how the school districts were demarcated.
‘She has lovely hair.’ The man had wandered across the lane to stand opposite us. He waved again at my daughter and pointed at his head. ‘Your hair,’ he said. ‘So cute.’
She smiled back, proud. My daughter could pass for Japanese except for the chestnut hue of her hair and its slight waviness. I wondered how long it would be before she became self-conscious about how it made her look different to her friends.
‘Not like your dad’s,’ the man said.
She burst out laughing. ‘Daddy’s head is smooth as an egg.’
The statement was not wholly true, but I was almost bald. I smiled back; it was a family joke.
‘I wish I had yours,’ I said, pointing at his thick, dark hair.
From then, as if that shared laughter had given us permission, we paid regular visits to the demolition site over the next week or so. It became an end-of- day ritual: to go over and say hello.
‘Do you live near here?’ I asked, knowing he didn’t. The Kurds famously all live in Kawaguchi or Warabi in Saitama, just north of Tokyo, earning the area the dubious soubriquet ‘Warabistan’.
He shook his head. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Gaziantep.’
I had guessed it would be Turkey, but dared not say the name of the country. I had seen the news about Turks and Kurds brawling while queuing at the Turkish embassy to cast their postal vote in elections. The Kurds have no nation-state of their own and speak disparate dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible. The soil of Kurdistan is scattered across the arbitrary boundaries of other nations that emerged from the wreckage of Ottoman and European imperialism in the Middle East. Its exact bounds disputed, Kurdistan is a cartographic non-land, relegated to the aspirations of inhabitants long ignored and the wistful thoughts of distant exiles.
THE DIGGER MACHINE had vanished one day, as had the scaffolding and curtains.
‘What happened to the digger?’ I asked.
‘Finished with it. On to the next job,’ the man remarked, flicking his finger off to indicate the mass of houses all around.
I caught a glimpse of his teeth, somewhat browned perhaps from smoking, and found myself wondering about his wherewithal to pay dental bills.
‘Is it hard to use?’ I was genuinely interested now.
‘A little,’ he told me. ‘But carrying the rubble is harder.’ His accent was a bit thick; sometimes I couldn’t quite catch his words. But my own Japanese is also accented and I still fail to enunciate properly, after nearly two decades in the country. I would often wonder how long I had before my kids start to mock my poor pronunciation in the language they spoke natively.
I introduced my son as well, who promptly ran off to play with a friend on the swing.
‘Do you have children?’
The man told me that he lived with his family: his parents, his brother, his sister and her husband, and their baby.
‘Big family!’
His smile was a little wry. I regretted my words. He probably slept in the same room as his brother, perhaps with his parents as well.
Standing on opposite sides of the park fence, we exchanged a bit of small talk each time, though most things were left unsaid.
He had come to Japan several years ago. Like many Kurds, his family was persecuted for alleged connections to the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Kurds started to come to Japan in the 1990s as clashes between the PKK and Turkish authorities increased.
They entered Japan on tourist visas. If caught after overstaying or for working, they would be detained by the immigration bureau. To avoid deportation, they could apply for asylum and be granted ‘provisional release’ while the decision is pending, which might take months. Some can remain on provisional release for years while their application is processed. If their application is rejected, they apply again.
During this time, they are not legally permitted to work or even leave their prefecture. They receive no handouts, with the government expecting relatives and NGOs to support them. Not having an official residency status, they can’t rent homes, open bank accounts, register for national health insurance, or even sign up for a phone contract. Some circumvent these issues by using relatives’ names, but they are effectively inhabitants of a legal twilight zone.
On the other hand, I have my gradually accruing national pension, my government-bestowed health insurance. I have some savings and a credit card. Sure, I am also a foreigner and a freelancer to boot, but I’m the ‘good’ kind of foreigner – the kind who easily gets a Netflix subscription and Amazon account, the kind with a visa.
The other kind, like the Kurdish asylum seekers, are still useful to the Japanese government and private sector – and blind eyes are turned when it suits them.
The massive construction projects initiated for the 2020 Olympics were built, in part, by Kurds. Sewers. Tower blocks. Roads. Kurds help to build them all, and the construction industry that is facing a chronic labour shortage is grateful for them, though they are paid in cash and in secret.
In Tokyo, the soil never stops moving. Forget the threat of earthquakes, of the long-promised Big One, it’s the construction industry that shifts the ground beneath our feet. This compulsion to build is driven by consumer trends that prefer new homes to old ones. Most homes are thirty years old. The land is valuable; the structures that stand on them are cheaply made wooden frames clad in ceramic or some other material to lend them a faux-Western suburban look. The unseen and unacknowledged teams of workers who build or demolish these homes include Kurds.
Whenever such Kurds pop up in residential areas, they form a temporary heterotopia – a presence that others the everyday, that contradicts ordinary social structures. It is neither good nor bad, but it is disjunctive. Estranged from their own soil, they are transposed to these dirty, telluric labours among homes they will likely never own themselves. People, including me, opt to turn away, believing it is impolite to stare at this false stitch in the warp and weft of the city.
It wasn’t always like this. Japan once had a relatively positive history of accepting the dispossessed and desperate. Sugihara Chiune, known as the Japanese Oskar Schindler, helped thousands of Jews escape the Holocaust in Eastern Europe by giving them visas to Japanese territory, from where they settled in Palestine and other countries. In the late Seventies, Japan welcomed refugees from Vietnam.
There are ‘good’ kinds of refugee and unwanted kinds, and it depends on your place of origin and the colour of your skin. When the Ukrainian conflict began, Japan followed its Western allies in welcoming over two thousand Ukrainians fleeing the war, far exceeding its quota of refugees, which is usually barely double digits. The Ukrainians were allowed to enter as ‘evacuees’ since their situation didn’t fit the government definition of refugee. No matter that the Kurds and others had fled similar circumstances.
In 2023, the Japanese government passed a controversial new law that enables repeated asylum applicants to be deported. Two strikes and you’re out. For many Kurds, it sets the clock ticking on their precarious livelihoods here.
‘LOOK, DADDY, he’s gone.’
My daughter was right. During the day, they had evidently finished up the work and cleared the site. It was now an empty rectangle of land; smoothed-out soil ready for the real estate agent’s signage, the next cookie-cutter prefab.
I never knew his name. It was never the right time to ask. And if I had asked, what would I have done with that information? This abrupt ending offered no pat lessons taught by sentimental bonds woven across a social divide. There was no character arc to admire.
My daughter’s disappointment dissipated the moment she started playing in the sandpit, digging holes with a plastic shovel for no reason other than she could. My regret lingered a little longer, kept afloat more by a tinge of guilt than a desire to continue the awkward interactions.
We were just two foreigners temporarily thrown together by the city’s Venn diagram of happenstance. Other than the fact that we were both non-Japanese in Japan, we had almost nothing in common, hence we were reduced to small talk and silly jokes about hair. Did I even try to know the man and his colleagues? Could I? In the day-to-day hurly-burly of work deadlines, school runs, chores, and household squabbles, did I have time to think beyond my very local orbit?
I found myself admiring, even envying, his freedom; a statelessness that might take him anywhere. Today, Setagaya; tomorrow, another part of Tokyo – or perhaps even out of Japan altogether. On to the next country, the next adventure. Meanwhile, here was I, entering middle age and tied down by a young family, feeling more trapped in Japan than ever before.
But then I stopped, caught red-handed in a morass of unwitting condescension and privileged daydreaming. By way of mea culpa, I went to my computer to write these words.
Did any of this really happen? Could it have? It is, let’s be honest, unlikely. This is documentary fiction, its attempts at elegy laid on a little thick. The result is clumsy, half-baked. The gestures towards insight and empathy are ordered too neatly, like a glazer working around the transoms and mullions of his straightforward life. For I have that privilege. Because I am the ‘good’ kind of foreigner with licence to indulge in such things, and the demolitionist part of a deracinated underclass tasked with expediting the cycle of scrap and build. And so of course he is the one who disappeared into the ether, driving a truckload of rubble from a house already forgotten, and leaving behind nothing but another foreigner searching for vestiges of meaning.
My son started to run around, playing a game of chase with himself. His trousers and shoes were soon covered in dirt from the ground, and I knew I would have to put him straight in the bath as soon as we got home. My daughter, who was two years younger, tried to keep up and inevitably failed.
She fell, as she often did, but when you are four it’s always a big event. Hearing her start to cry, I put away my phone and the work emails that demanded my eyeballs, and went to check on her. She was fine, of course, but a silently accrued paternal autopilot switched on: I dusted down her clothes and picked her up. She snivelled into my neck.
‘Daddy, it hurts.’
I rubbed the section of her leg she was pointing to, still holding her with my other hand. Becoming a father had turned me into a weightlifter and contortionist of sorts.
My son had already migrated to the swings and, when he saw his sister was not joining him, ran over to the sandpit, where he began to play with another boy who was digging. He made new friends easily.
My daughter and I began to wander to the edge of the park. The motion of being conveyed like this soon calmed her down, as I knew it always did.
‘Look, Daddy,’ my daughter said, her voice brightening.
Across the side street that ran along the park, barely wide enough to allow a car to pass, a demolition was in progress.
There was nothing unusual about this. We lived in Setagaya, a leafy and residential part of western Tokyo. Houses would go up and come down. These missing ‘teeth’ in the blocks were the ebb and flow of a city always under construction. During the demolition, the workers would drape thick sheets from scaffolding around the site to keep in the dust and dull the sound. I always thought it was like a magic show where the conjurors would whip back the curtains to reveal the building that was now gone, to applause and amazement from the audience. Instead, no one in Setagaya seemed to pay any attention to these vanishing homes.
A century ago, before the Great Kanto Earthquake devastated the city and Tokyo’s population shifted from the lower land in the east to the safer, more elevated areas more inland in the west, Setagaya was still largely rural. Even the name of the ward means something like Valley of Bountiful Rice Paddies. These subdivided plots of houses are arbitrarily laid over erstwhile fields. The narrow, wending nature of many of the local roads is a direct inheritance from the irrigation and pathways that ran between farmland. For pedestrians, it’s charming; for motorists, an insurance claim constantly in the offing.
Nostalgia is all too easy, even if it’s nostalgia for something I never knew, a past that never was. Would I be actually willing, let alone able, to till and toil if Setagaya still had those fields?
The demolition had entered the quieter phase, and the ‘curtains’ only covered three sides of the site. We could see into it from the front, where half an outer wall and a portion of what had been the floor of the first storey were left. Three workmen were moving around the site, engaged in the final tasks of the shift. A truck sat in front, filled with rubble. A small yellow digger was parked on a mound of soil and concrete, as if marooned after running out of fuel and discarded. No doubt they used the excavator to scoop up detritus as they took the house apart, and then carry it to the truck. Perhaps the vehicle was even used to attack the roof and walls, and tear them down: a medieval siege engine, mechanized and miniaturized.
Then my eyes performed the ocular equivalent of pressing the satnav zoom button, and suddenly I could see another layer of detail. It was immediately apparent that the three men were not Japanese. I didn’t understand the language they spoke but could tell that they were Kurds. I might occasionally spot a foreign face among road crews, though men engaged in this kind of small-scale manual labour were invariably Kurdish.
I marvelled at the mechanics of what they were doing. They could evidently drive a truck loaded with rubble, not to mention operate a digger. I had trouble riding a bicycle. They spent their days demolishing architectural structures. I spent mine at my desk at home writing emails and typing Word documents.
‘Cute girl,’ one of them said, and smiled.
He had spoken in Japanese and I relaxed a little. Using English would have imposed another layer over us. It would give me – a white, white-collar worker – power over him. The local tongue as lingua franca put us more on an equal footing.
I smiled back and, to cover my natural social awkwardness, spoke to my daughter in Japanese.
‘He said you are cute. What do you say?’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, a little shyly, half burying her face in my shoulder. She could turn her confidence on and off, I had learnt, and right now she was playing bashful.
I put the man somewhere in his mid-twenties – around the same age I had been when I came to Japan.
I did that smiling nod-bow I had mastered to extricate myself from small talk, and walked back with my daughter to where my son was still playing in the sandpit.
‘Alright, time to go home.’
We went back to the apartment I bought two years prior, but it is a home without connections to the land (quite literally – it’s elevated five floors above the ground). We like the area; it’s pleasant enough to live, but neither my wife nor I have roots here – I least of all – and yet for our two young children, this is their native soil. I don’t intend to die in Setagaya, a place you can certainly like but perhaps not quite love. For me, ownership of the land (or rather, the proportion of the building’s land corresponding to the value of the apartment) is temporary and transactional. A matter of property alone. Ironically, the Kurdish demolitionists were actually working that land and, in so doing, earning more of a spiritual right to possess it than me, even though their labour was merely part of a process of preparing the land for the next transaction.
THE NEXT DAY, my daughter saw the demolition site. ‘Daddy, let’s go again.’ ‘But they’re working,’ I protested.
‘Daddy, please, please!’ She knew I was helpless when confronted with her pleading.
She was in a bold mood today and immediately called out. ‘Konnichiwa.’
The same man smiled and waved, but continued with his task: tackling a tricky piece of rubble, perhaps a part of the outer wall that was now almost entirely gone.
I stood there in the clean if characterless clothes of a man on the cusp of forty, watching the Kurds work.
My son was running around the park with a friend from nursery. These were their final weeks together. Come April, he would start at elementary school, but a different one from his cohorts due to a quirk of how the school districts were demarcated.
‘She has lovely hair.’ The man had wandered across the lane to stand opposite us. He waved again at my daughter and pointed at his head. ‘Your hair,’ he said. ‘So cute.’
She smiled back, proud. My daughter could pass for Japanese except for the chestnut hue of her hair and its slight waviness. I wondered how long it would be before she became self-conscious about how it made her look different to her friends.
‘Not like your dad’s,’ the man said.
She burst out laughing. ‘Daddy’s head is smooth as an egg.’
The statement was not wholly true, but I was almost bald. I smiled back; it was a family joke.
‘I wish I had yours,’ I said, pointing at his thick, dark hair.
From then, as if that shared laughter had given us permission, we paid regular visits to the demolition site over the next week or so. It became an end-of- day ritual: to go over and say hello.
‘Do you live near here?’ I asked, knowing he didn’t. The Kurds famously all live in Kawaguchi or Warabi in Saitama, just north of Tokyo, earning the area the dubious soubriquet ‘Warabistan’.
He shook his head. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Gaziantep.’
I had guessed it would be Turkey, but dared not say the name of the country. I had seen the news about Turks and Kurds brawling while queuing at the Turkish embassy to cast their postal vote in elections. The Kurds have no nation-state of their own and speak disparate dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible. The soil of Kurdistan is scattered across the arbitrary boundaries of other nations that emerged from the wreckage of Ottoman and European imperialism in the Middle East. Its exact bounds disputed, Kurdistan is a cartographic non-land, relegated to the aspirations of inhabitants long ignored and the wistful thoughts of distant exiles.
THE DIGGER MACHINE had vanished one day, as had the scaffolding and curtains.
‘What happened to the digger?’ I asked.
‘Finished with it. On to the next job,’ the man remarked, flicking his finger off to indicate the mass of houses all around.
I caught a glimpse of his teeth, somewhat browned perhaps from smoking, and found myself wondering about his wherewithal to pay dental bills.
‘Is it hard to use?’ I was genuinely interested now.
‘A little,’ he told me. ‘But carrying the rubble is harder.’ His accent was a bit thick; sometimes I couldn’t quite catch his words. But my own Japanese is also accented and I still fail to enunciate properly, after nearly two decades in the country. I would often wonder how long I had before my kids start to mock my poor pronunciation in the language they spoke natively.
I introduced my son as well, who promptly ran off to play with a friend on the swing.
‘Do you have children?’
The man told me that he lived with his family: his parents, his brother, his sister and her husband, and their baby.
‘Big family!’
His smile was a little wry. I regretted my words. He probably slept in the same room as his brother, perhaps with his parents as well.
Standing on opposite sides of the park fence, we exchanged a bit of small talk each time, though most things were left unsaid.
He had come to Japan several years ago. Like many Kurds, his family was persecuted for alleged connections to the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Kurds started to come to Japan in the 1990s as clashes between the PKK and Turkish authorities increased.
They entered Japan on tourist visas. If caught after overstaying or for working, they would be detained by the immigration bureau. To avoid deportation, they could apply for asylum and be granted ‘provisional release’ while the decision is pending, which might take months. Some can remain on provisional release for years while their application is processed. If their application is rejected, they apply again.
During this time, they are not legally permitted to work or even leave their prefecture. They receive no handouts, with the government expecting relatives and NGOs to support them. Not having an official residency status, they can’t rent homes, open bank accounts, register for national health insurance, or even sign up for a phone contract. Some circumvent these issues by using relatives’ names, but they are effectively inhabitants of a legal twilight zone.
On the other hand, I have my gradually accruing national pension, my government-bestowed health insurance. I have some savings and a credit card. Sure, I am also a foreigner and a freelancer to boot, but I’m the ‘good’ kind of foreigner – the kind who easily gets a Netflix subscription and Amazon account, the kind with a visa.
The other kind, like the Kurdish asylum seekers, are still useful to the Japanese government and private sector – and blind eyes are turned when it suits them.
The massive construction projects initiated for the 2020 Olympics were built, in part, by Kurds. Sewers. Tower blocks. Roads. Kurds help to build them all, and the construction industry that is facing a chronic labour shortage is grateful for them, though they are paid in cash and in secret.
In Tokyo, the soil never stops moving. Forget the threat of earthquakes, of the long-promised Big One, it’s the construction industry that shifts the ground beneath our feet. This compulsion to build is driven by consumer trends that prefer new homes to old ones. Most homes are thirty years old. The land is valuable; the structures that stand on them are cheaply made wooden frames clad in ceramic or some other material to lend them a faux-Western suburban look. The unseen and unacknowledged teams of workers who build or demolish these homes include Kurds.
Whenever such Kurds pop up in residential areas, they form a temporary heterotopia – a presence that others the everyday, that contradicts ordinary social structures. It is neither good nor bad, but it is disjunctive. Estranged from their own soil, they are transposed to these dirty, telluric labours among homes they will likely never own themselves. People, including me, opt to turn away, believing it is impolite to stare at this false stitch in the warp and weft of the city.
It wasn’t always like this. Japan once had a relatively positive history of accepting the dispossessed and desperate. Sugihara Chiune, known as the Japanese Oskar Schindler, helped thousands of Jews escape the Holocaust in Eastern Europe by giving them visas to Japanese territory, from where they settled in Palestine and other countries. In the late Seventies, Japan welcomed refugees from Vietnam.
There are ‘good’ kinds of refugee and unwanted kinds, and it depends on your place of origin and the colour of your skin. When the Ukrainian conflict began, Japan followed its Western allies in welcoming over two thousand Ukrainians fleeing the war, far exceeding its quota of refugees, which is usually barely double digits. The Ukrainians were allowed to enter as ‘evacuees’ since their situation didn’t fit the government definition of refugee. No matter that the Kurds and others had fled similar circumstances.
In 2023, the Japanese government passed a controversial new law that enables repeated asylum applicants to be deported. Two strikes and you’re out. For many Kurds, it sets the clock ticking on their precarious livelihoods here.
‘LOOK, DADDY, he’s gone.’
My daughter was right. During the day, they had evidently finished up the work and cleared the site. It was now an empty rectangle of land; smoothed-out soil ready for the real estate agent’s signage, the next cookie-cutter prefab.
I never knew his name. It was never the right time to ask. And if I had asked, what would I have done with that information? This abrupt ending offered no pat lessons taught by sentimental bonds woven across a social divide. There was no character arc to admire.
My daughter’s disappointment dissipated the moment she started playing in the sandpit, digging holes with a plastic shovel for no reason other than she could. My regret lingered a little longer, kept afloat more by a tinge of guilt than a desire to continue the awkward interactions.
We were just two foreigners temporarily thrown together by the city’s Venn diagram of happenstance. Other than the fact that we were both non-Japanese in Japan, we had almost nothing in common, hence we were reduced to small talk and silly jokes about hair. Did I even try to know the man and his colleagues? Could I? In the day-to-day hurly-burly of work deadlines, school runs, chores, and household squabbles, did I have time to think beyond my very local orbit?
I found myself admiring, even envying, his freedom; a statelessness that might take him anywhere. Today, Setagaya; tomorrow, another part of Tokyo – or perhaps even out of Japan altogether. On to the next country, the next adventure. Meanwhile, here was I, entering middle age and tied down by a young family, feeling more trapped in Japan than ever before.
But then I stopped, caught red-handed in a morass of unwitting condescension and privileged daydreaming. By way of mea culpa, I went to my computer to write these words.
Did any of this really happen? Could it have? It is, let’s be honest, unlikely. This is documentary fiction, its attempts at elegy laid on a little thick. The result is clumsy, half-baked. The gestures towards insight and empathy are ordered too neatly, like a glazer working around the transoms and mullions of his straightforward life. For I have that privilege. Because I am the ‘good’ kind of foreigner with licence to indulge in such things, and the demolitionist part of a deracinated underclass tasked with expediting the cycle of scrap and build. And so of course he is the one who disappeared into the ether, driving a truckload of rubble from a house already forgotten, and leaving behind nothing but another foreigner searching for vestiges of meaning.
William Andrews is a Tokyo-based writer and translator from the UK. He writes and researches about sociocultural history, with particular interests in social move- ments and countercultures, urban space and gentrification, and the performing and visual arts. He is currently pursuing a PhD on the early films of Adachi Masao.
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