By Kazue Takamura and Theresa Decius-Timothee | Issue 26
Ushiku (2020) tells the story of Japan’s carceral violence against refugees in immigration detention. This is a powerful and rare documentary that opens the black box of global immigration detention regimes by focusing on Japan, a country not often in the spotlight. The title Ushiku refers to the municipality in Ibaraki prefecture, located about one hour north of Tokyo, where a notorious, but relatively hidden, detention facility, the East Japan Immigration Centre, is located. Due to the detention facility’s relative proximity to Tokyo’s Narita Airport, the Ushiku detention centre serves as a key territorial machine to contain and punish those who, upon immediate arrival, would seek to claim asylum in Japan.
Director Thomas Ash uncovers the “truth” of human rights violations that are concealed from the public within the detention facility. Through a hidden camera, Ash brings to light the unspeakable stories of nine detained refugees who were held indefinitely in the detention facility. These detainees were kept in the dark as to when they would be released or whether they would be forcibly removed from the country. The director’s style is to quietly invite the audience to the highly securitised tiny visitation room where he, or any visitor, can speak to the detainee through a glass partition. In this small room, Ash has hidden a camera that records the visit, as well as the anxieties, hopes, and ideals of the detainees.
The East Japan Immigration centre (Ushiku) is one of Japan’s seventeen immigration detention facilities that are managed by the country’s Immigration Services Agency. The rules concerning immigration detention are codified under the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act. Contrary to its administrative function on paper, the condition of the Ushiku detention resembles a prison under criminal law. While the duration of detention under a “detention order” is limited to 60 days, under a “deportation order,” one can be held indefinitely without an upper limit of detention duration. Given the diminished refugee acceptance in the country, Japan-based refugees lack the ability to defend their basic rights, especially the right to contest arbitrary and indefinite detention.
When the director Thomas Ash began filming detained asylum-seekers during the summer of 2019, the Ushiku detention centre held more than 300 detainees at any time of the year. This was an important year for Japan as it was preparing to host the Tokyo Olympics. Local migrant advocacy groups and individual supporters, who visited the facility regularly, were seriously concerned about the disproportionate presence of long-term detainees. According to the Tokyo Bar Association’s report, nearly one-third of the detainees (393 out of 1253) were held for more than 18 months in Japan’s detention facilities, including Ushiku. Indefinite detention of unwanted migrants and refugees was seen as a necessity for public safety which was essential for the success of the Tokyo Olympics.
Responding to this violence of the Olympic-induced indefinite detention, nearly 200 detainees, held in Japan’s facilities, joined mass hunger strikes in the summer of 2019. The Ushiku detention was an important site of this mass resistance. In the documentary, Christian, one of the detainees who joined the hunger strikes, claims: ‘I want my statement for people to know what is really happening in this country…The Olympic Committee does not care about human rights’. Christian’s claim reflects the deep hypocrisy of the Japanese government’s promotion of public safety and hospitality during the preparation of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
The documentary Ushiku exposes both overt and covert forms of everyday violence and harms detainees experience in the detention machine. Physical coercion is often used to assert total dominance over the body of the detainee. The story of Deniz, a Kurdish asylum-seeker who is legally married to a Japanese spouse, exemplifies this. Viewers see the tragic brutality experienced by Deniz at the hands of the anonymous guards identified only by numbers. Deniz is struck, pinched, and violently held down by guards who repeatedly claim that he is “resisting”. This long and unsettling scene is based on actual video documentation released by the Immigration Services Agency in response to official complaints submitted by Deniz and his lawyers. The scene of the violence inflicted against Deniz, who desperately screams at the guards to stop harming him, can leave viewers extremely disturbed and with a sense of utter powerlessness.
Detention guards’ daily surveillance is a powerful and abusive machine for muting the voices of detainees and for rendering them insecure and powerless. Everyday acts of surveillance are not formally codified under law but are central to the management of immigration detention in practice. Claudio, a long-term resident and an asylum-seeker, refers to the invisible presence of guards and the fear of being constantly watched. When the director meets him in the visitation room, he claims ‘they are listening’. Taken out of context, ‘they are listening’ would appear to be the thoughts of a paranoid man. In the context of the detention centre’s surveillance machine, this is an unspeakable fact.
Detainees also experience dehumanising acts of isolation, abuse, and coercion. Peter, another asylum-seeker, describes the moment when he was taken to the airport without consent and forced to board a flight back home. Peter was only held back from this expulsion because the airline refused to take on board a non-consensual passenger. The drive to enact violence on Deniz and Peter and several other detainees appears to stem from the arbitrary conceptualisation of refugees as a “threat” to territorial security.
In 2020, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention responded to the excessive physical violence against Deniz, one of the detained refugees in the Ushiku detention centre. The UN Working Group claimed that Japan's indefinite detention is an arbitrary form of detention which is prohibited under international law. Deniz finally broke his silence to both domestic and international audiences. The documentary Ushiku transformed powerless detainees, including Deniz, into a public defender of refugees. Throughout the documentary, Director Thomas Ash insists on his mission for breaking silence and seeks transformative policy change for refugee protection.
Kazue Takamura
Kazue is Senior Faculty Lecturer at the Institute for the Study of International Development, McGill University. Her research focuses on Asian migration, gendered labour vulnerability, immigration detention, and international migrant rights law. Trained as an ethnographer, Takamura has studied the lived experiences of low-skilled migrant women and of detained refugees and migrants in Asia. Her research in Japan has led to extensive collaboration with civil society organisations defending the rights of refugees and migrants.
Theresa Decius-Timothee
Theresa is a final-year student at McGill University, completing an Honors B.A. in Political Science and a Major in International Development Studies. She focuses on migration and comparative politics in the Global South and is currently writing a thesis on Haiti’s security crisis.
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