A.J. KOIKOI

Hometown: Baltimore, Maryland

PiA fellowship position: Seishin Notre Dame, Okayama, Japan (2016-2017)

University: BA at Franklin and Marshall University; MA at Hiroshima University

Current city: Hiroshima, Japan

A.J. Koikoi doesn’t remember exactly why he began studying Japanese in sixth grade. Yet the 27-year-old has continued to study the language up until today. And for the past five years, A.J., a former football player and son of Liberian immigrants, has called Japan his home. These days, A.J. lives in Hiroshima and works at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, where he develops training materials for post-conflict countries. He recently completed a Masters in Peacebuilding Studies at Hiroshima University. In his free time, he likes to skateboard near the city’s port areas and chat with workers coming back from the docks.

But back in 2011, when A.J. was 11 years old and beginning the year at an all-boys school in Maryland, Japan was a distant dream. He had never left the country. As one of a few Black students at a mostly white school, A.J. says he “never fit in” anywhere. But he always found Japanese classes as a way of immersing himself in something new. “It was an escape,” he recalls of his coursework in Japanese language. “It was the one thing that I had that was just purely me.”

After graduating, A.J. began his PiA fellowship at Seishin Notre Dame, a Catholic all-girls high school in Okayama where he taught for two years. Towards the end of his fellowship, A.J. began looking for a football team. He says jokingly that there was “a piece of me missing.” He ended up joining a Japanese football team in Okayama. One of the first games he played with them was against a university in Takahashi, Japan. He remembers the other team’s quarterback, a college student who asked him for advice on the sport. “I loved how much they loved the sport. I loved their passion going into a sport that was not native to them,” A.J. says. “They decided to shirk going into judo, that kind of stuff, and decided to go with a sport they felt was better for them.”

It was that moment that would sow the seeds for A.J.’s project, Danketsu, which means “unity” in Japanese, an organization which works to forge virtual cross-cultural connections between student athletes in Japan and sports teams in the U.S. In 2017, A.J. was awarded a Carriebright Fellowship, Princeton in Asia’s post-fellowship grant for service projects, to grow this project. As a Carriebright Fellow, A.J. mentored students across Japan and those on exchange programs in the U.S. and helped Japanese sports teams obtain proper athletic gear. A.J.’s service work has extended far beyond the realm of sports. Last year when protests in the U.S. erupted in response to police brutality, A.J. was busy organizing Hiroshima’s own Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstration, which saw nearly 370 people turn up in support. Though A.J. and his co-founders experienced some backlash in a conservative culture, the experience was key to introducing him to a small but growing Black Japanese community, as well as other ethnically mixed Japanese folks.

At Franklin & Marshall College, A.J. studied Psychology, International Studies and Japanese language, and was an enforcer on the football field. During his final semester, A.J. took his first flight ever to Milwaukee as a part of a research grant to study global sports culture. It was there that he began to meld his interests in sports and international diplomacy, interviewing basketball players from around the world. “I saw that despite the fact that these players were all from different countries, they were working together, of course, to win the game,” says A.J.

A.J. now works alongside his BLM Hiroshima co-founder, a Japanese woman with Black-Japanese children. “I work with mixed communities and want to give them somewhere comfortable to be without worrying about someone making fun of their hair or skin color,” A.J. says. After last year’s protests, A.J. has evolved Danketsu’s mission for cross-cultural exchange beyond the playing field. Recently A.J. raised $6,000 for a house in Hiroshima where he hosts barbecues, sports events and discussion groups on cross-cultural identity. A.J. hopes to build sports facilities on the property to promote cultural exchange through sports.