Paper short abstract:

The paper examines how asylum seekers in Japan, whose applications have been denied, cope with severely restricted mobility by depicting their tactics against the state’s attempts to prohibit their domestic mobility for self-sufficiency and to encourage their global mobility for self-repatriation.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines how asylum seekers in Japan, whose applications for refugee recognition have been denied or are pending, cope with restricted mobility. It portrays the acute challenges faced by those asylum seekers who are “provisionally released” from the migrant detention centers and are prohibited from moving across the prefectural boundaries outside of their residence. With the ever-present threat of detention and deportation, indefinitely temporary legal status, and severely restricted spatial and socioeconomic mobilities, many of these asylum seekers are stuck in the “continuum of carcerality” and “confinement in motion” (Balaguera, 2018). Based on my ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017, 2021-22, and 2023 in Japan, the paper portrays how those provisionally released asylum seekers manage to comply, subvert, and index the loss of control over their own mobility through deception, relationship-building, and advocacy. Their various tactics to survive the ambiguous conditions that prohibit their domestic mobility for self-sufficiency and encourage their international mobility for self-repatriation suggest that anthropologists must pay closer attention to the irregular migrants’ both desire and fear of mobility and their struggles to gain and maintain the control over their movements.