LETTER FROM THE ASSISTANT HEAD EDITOR Our time together as your 2019-2020 CONNECT team is ending, and as it happens, so is the world as we know it. As much as I’d like to meditate on the past year, I have to speak to the present moment, specifically to the long overdue global outcry that the lives of Black and indigenous people matter. To compare my experiences as a white foreigner here in Japan to experiences of anti-Blackness around the world feels, in many ways, impossible. But I think it is fair to say that for many white Americans, living in Japan is the first taste of anything like racism. As the one of a few non-Japanese staff members in my school, I get a taste of the alienation and pain felt by BIPOC* who are part of predominantly white institutions: the stares, the chilliness, the exclusion, the feeling of being talked down to, the stereotypes, the invasive questions, the exhaustion of being repeatedly asked to represent a huge, heterogenous group of people. It’s just a taste of discriminatory treatment—I don’t, for example, feel that my health or safety is threatened on account of my race and nationality—but it’s a taste that stays in your mouth. White foreigners, especially white Americans, are a privileged “other.” As I hope you know by now, people of color living in Japan, and especially Black people living in Japan, have it far worse. Anti-Black racism is rampant. On many occasions, just a single mention of my home state, New York, elicits some comment about how New York is full of scary black people who commit crimes. Just a few weeks ago, in an attempt to explain the social unrest in America to Japanese children, NHK aired a horrifyingly racist and, frankly, inaccurate cartoon which bordered on minstrelsy. Google it. I’ll spare you the details here. You probably know this. And white readers, you probably know that you are being called to reckon with your privilege and to step up to the plate. White foreigners should grapple with our privilege as part of an antiracist practice, AND we should use our experiences with discrimination here in Japan as an opportunity to develop empathy, understanding, and a shared (if different) sense of struggle. If we are able to engage with both our pain and our privilege, we will be able to more sustainably invest ourselves in this fight. We must show up not only when it’s trending, but every day, all the time, again and again and again. At the end of this letter, I’ve listed some resources and some concrete ways that you can support BIPOC with your money, time, and skills. Okay, preamble over. TLDR: I’ve chosen to highlight three articles which showcase Black experiences in Japan. The first piece I’ve chosen is “Finding Community Against the Odds” penned by CONNECT’s own Web Editor, Rhema Baquero, originally published in the November 2019 issue. Rhema builds up a picture of what daily anti-Blackness looks like in Japan, from being pushed out of a train to people touching her hair without permission. But the piece also points to opportunities for genuine cross-cultural understanding and exchange. Rhema describes her practice of featuring pictures of black and brown kids in her lessons and calling out her students’ and colleague’ offensive comments—something that all of us working in Japanese schools can commit to doing. Next up is “Slaying the Cosplay Game” by Amadara Oguara, published in October 2019 as part of Art Section Editor Valerie Osborne’s “Creating Through Cosplay” piece. Amadara discusses how she became interested in cosplay, and how it eventually became a huge source of joy and even a form of therapy for her. She also talks discrimination in the cosplay world. “As someone who has been called ‘inaccurate,’ ‘the black version,’ or even racial slurs while cosplaying,” Amadara writes, “it was meaningful to know that in essence, the color of my skin SHOULDN’T and DOESN’T dictate what characters I can and can’t be. I AM Sailor Venus […].”
12 Photo: Clay Banks on Unsplash.com
